Chapter 21
Evan
Icame back too early and she came back too late, and the hallway caught us both.
I had been sitting in the empty-weight room for twenty minutes, pretending to stretch and actually doing nothing except staring at the rack of kettlebells and running Brick’s words through my head on a loop.
Moments like that don’t disappear. You were tested, and you didn’t show up.
The building was quiet in that after-hours way: most of the staff gone, the HVAC humming at a lower register. Sandra’s door was closed. Somewhere deeper in the building, an equipment cart rattled and went still.
I gave up on the pretense of stretching and headed toward the exit.
Then I heard footsteps.
Unhurried. Familiar. The rhythm I had cataloged without meaning to, the gait of someone who walked with purpose and did not apologize for taking up space.
I rounded the corner and stopped.
Samantha was fifteen feet away, camera bag over her shoulder, coming from the media room.
She must have been downloading footage or editing the kind of work she did after hours, when the building was quiet enough to think, and no one from the front office could hover over her shoulder pretending not to monitor the results.
She stopped too.
We stood in the corridor, separated by concrete, fluorescent light, and everything that had happened but had not been said.
She was wearing the same jacket she had worn to Paramour. I did not know why I noticed that. I noticed everything about her, which had always been the problem, which was the reason I was standing in a hallway at seven in the evening trying to find words I had never been good at finding.
She started to speak.
So did I.
We both stopped.
The silence stretched for three seconds that felt longer than they were.
She exhaled first. A small release of breath I felt in my own chest.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” she said.
“I came back.” My voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. Everything about me was rougher than I wanted it to be. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this.”
The sentence was not enough, but it was a start.
I was a man who communicated in puck placement and the geometry of defensive zones. Words were not my surface. They never had been.
But she was standing there, tired, guarded, her eyes carrying the same weight mine did, and silence was not going to fix what silence had broken.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said to you,” I said. “Not there. Not like that.”
Her face did not change much. A slight tightening around her mouth. A blink that came half a second late.
“No,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”
The sentence was clean because it was true.
I nodded once.
“I know.”
She shifted the strap of her camera bag higher on her shoulder.
“I had to leave,” she said.
Not an apology. Not a defense. Just a fact.
“I know that too.”
We stood there, the building humming around us. Neither of us moved toward the exit, and neither of us moved toward each other.
“I was having a bad day,” I said. “That’s not an excuse. It’s just what happened.”
“Brick told me.”
Of course he had. Brick, who saw everything and could not help trying to keep people from bleeding out in separate corners.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
The question hit me somewhere I did not have armor.
She asked me if I was okay. Not are you sorry. Not what the hell were you thinking. Are you okay? Like my well-being still mattered to her despite what I had done to hers.
I had a dozen acceptable answers. Better. Working. Nothing useful.
“I’m working on it,” I said.
The most honest thing I had said in days.
Then I made myself add the part that mattered.
“You don’t have to ask me that.”
Her gaze held mine.
“I know.”
The words sat between us. Small. Careful. Not forgiveness. Not repair. But not nothing.
“I don’t want to make this about my guilt,” I said.
Her expression shifted, barely. Interest, maybe. Or caution.
“Good,” she said.
The corner of my mouth moved. She had earned that much.
“I owe you more than this,” I said. “I know that.”
“Yes,” she said. “You do.”
The truth held steady between us. No cruelty. No softness.
My chest tightened, but I did not look away.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she said.
Not warm. Not cold. Careful in a way that cost her something to offer.
“Yeah,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
She adjusted the strap on her camera bag again, a practical gesture from a woman preparing to walk away, and moved past me toward the exit.
Close.
Close enough that the air between us carried her shampoo, something citrus and clean, and the warmth of her shoulder registered against the cold of the corridor.
I did not turn around until I heard the lobby door open and close.
Then I stood in the empty hallway, alone with the hum of the building and the weight of everything that had been said and everything that had not, and felt the next breath come easier than the last.
Not fixed.
Still breathing. Still in the same building. Willing to say tomorrow like it meant something.
I picked up my bag and walked toward the exit. The parking lot was dark. The sky was doing that San Antonio thing where it could not decide between stars and clouds and offered both.
My truck sat where I had left it, uncomplicated, the one object in my life that never required an emotional response.
I got in and sat there.
My phone was in the cupholder. Her name was in it.
I could text her. Something simple. Something that acknowledged the hallway and the fact that she had asked if I was okay when she had every reason not to.
I picked up the phone.
Set it down.
Some conversations were not meant for screens. They were meant for the next time you stood in front of someone and tried, imperfectly, to show them you were worth another chance.
Tomorrow.
I could work with tomorrow.