Chapter 29
Samantha
Monday morning, I knew something was wrong before Sandra said my name.
It was not her face. Sandra’s face was professionally competent. You could tell her the arena roof had collapsed, and she would still look like she had a spreadsheet for it somewhere.
She was standing in the media room doorway, clutching her tablet too tightly. Usually, people hold iPads like that only when they’re trying not to throw them or avoid handing them to someone who warrants even worse treatment.
“Hey,” I said, because apparently I was still attached to false optimism as a lifestyle. “If this is about the sponsor crops, I fixed the logo spacing.”
Sandra did not move.
“It’s not about the sponsor crops.”
The sentence dropped into the room with the exact weight of something about to become somebody’s problem.
I straightened in my chair. The monitor in front of me still held half a dozen near-identical practice frames I had been sorting for web use: Brick at the dot, Mack at the bench, Finn mid-turn. The normal, clean, forgettable machinery of team content.
Sandra walked in and shut the door behind her.
Well. Great. Love a closed-door meeting before noon. Historically excellent for women in creative professions.
“What happened?”
She looked at me for one second longer than usual, which was Sandra’s version of panic.
“Walsh saw the McKinney frame.”
My stomach dropped so hard it was insulting.
There were at least nine McKinney frames in the current working folder. Forty if you counted alternates. Twenty-seven if you counted the community selects.
I knew exactly which one she meant.
I still asked anyway.
“Which frame?”
Sandra’s expression did not change, but something in her expression stopped trying to protect me from the answer.
“The bench shot.”
Of course.
Frame 187.
Held. Hidden. Not submitted. Not exported. Not delivered. Still retained without consent, which was the breach.
I had spent three years swearing I would never be Case Whitfield, and yet here I had been, sitting on a frame the subject had not given me, telling myself the rules did not apply because my reasons were better.
The image that had sat in the private little quarantine folder on my desktop like a live wire I kept promising myself I would deal with later, as if delay could turn a consent problem into a professional one.
I pushed back from the desk slowly enough that my chair wheels barely complained.
“How?”
“One of the interns was pulling alternates for the sponsor deck. Your folders synced to the shared review queue when they mirrored the drive last night.”
That hit me half a beat late.
A workflow.
Routine, plausible, and somehow worse than theft because there was no clean villain in it. Just one bad choice meeting one ordinary system.
I rubbed a hand over my mouth.
“Did he say anything?”
Sandra gave a small breath through her nose. “Walsh doesn’t really say things in the ordinary sense.”
That was true. David Walsh communicated mostly through temperatures in rooms and decisions that got made elsewhere but somehow always seemed to be his.
“He wants to use it,” she said.
The words should have surprised me.
Of course he did.
Because the image was good. Good enough to survive people who had no business touching it.
“No.”
Sandra’s eyes flicked to mine. “That was my first response, too.”
I stood fully now, which helped absolutely nothing except the illusion that I was still in possession of my own spine.
“He didn’t ask for a first response,” Sandra said. “He asked whether the rights are clean and whether it can anchor the fall campaign.”
I laughed once.
Nothing was funny. Sometimes, if you did not laugh, you had to set something on fire, and this building frowned on that unless it was metaphorical.
“Anchor the fall campaign,” I repeated. “Sure. Why not. While we’re at it, let’s skin him alive and call it community engagement.”
Sandra’s mouth twitched despite herself.
“I told him it wasn’t intended for the campaign,” she said. “He asked why it was in the review environment if it wasn’t intended for review.”
I looked at my monitor.
The question, really, was why it had been there at all.
Because I kept it.
Because I named the folder Hold instead of Delete, and some weak, hungry part of me wanted more time.
“This cannot run,” I said.
Sandra crossed the room and set the tablet on the desk between us.
Walsh had already marked up a mock campaign sheet.
The image sat on the left side of the page under a line of concept copy some marketing person had written about resilience and leadership and the authentic face of commitment.
His face.
Evan’s face.
Open in that one accidental second. Tired and human and totally, catastrophically unsuited to being turned into a slogan.
The breath left my body so fast it hurt.
There he was.
Not on my monitor in the privacy of bad judgment and blue light.
Packaged.
Placed.
Ready to become public property.
The exact thing I had feared the instant I saw the frame.
I touched the edge of the tablet with one finger, like maybe if I grounded myself physically, my mind would stop trying to leave my body and hide in the ceiling tiles.
“What’s the timeline?”
“Walsh wants a yes by the end of the day.” Sandra hesitated. “Silas is trying to slow him down.”
That helped.
Marginally.
Silas was trying to slow something down, which meant the brakes existed, even if they were already smoking.
“And Evan?”
Sandra was quiet for half a beat too long.
“He hasn’t seen it yet.”
That was worse.
Not the campaign logic or the legal language. Just the simple fact that he had let me see him, and now that seeing had become convertible.
Case flickered at the edges of it. Not literally, but in the way private truth could flatten fast once other hands got on it.
I stepped back from the tablet.
“I need to fix it.”
Sandra’s expression changed then. Not dramatically. Just enough for me to see the person under the job title.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I came to you before I went back upstairs.”
I looked at her.
“You did?”
She folded her arms. “Sam. I work in communications, not necromancy. I know a haunted image when I see one.”
Despite myself, I barked out a laugh.
“That may be the least comforting sentence anyone has ever said to me.”
“It wasn’t meant to be comforting.” She glanced at the tablet. “It was meant to be useful.”
Right.
Useful.
I forced myself to think in sequence.
Walsh wanted the frame.
Silas was slowing him.
Sandra had brought it to me first.
Evan had not seen it yet.
That meant I still had a window.
Not to erase what had happened. That was gone.
But maybe I could decide what happened next before the machine did it for me.
“What do you need from me?” Sandra asked.
What I needed was simple and impossible: the frame off every deck in the building, Walsh out of it, and enough time to tell Evan myself.
“Time.”
Sandra nodded once. “You’ve got an hour before Walsh expects an answer.”
“One hour,” I repeated.
“Use it well.”
She picked up the tablet and paused at the door.
Then, without turning, she said, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you did this because you’re careless.”
The door clicked shut behind her.
I stood in the middle of the media room with the hum of the computers around me and the terrible stillness that follows a sentence like that.
Because she was right.
It was not carelessness.
It was want, and want had gotten expensive.
I turned back to the monitor and opened the Hold folder.
Frame 187 filled the screen.
Evan looked back at me from the bench, unguarded and unaware, the exact second of him I had no right to keep and had kept anyway.
“Okay,” I said softly to no one. “Great. Fantastic. Let’s go ruin my life responsibly.”
I found him before Walsh did.
That was the only real victory available to me, and it was small, but I took it.
The practice rink was dark except for the strip of light spilling out from the video room. The building had that after-hours hush I was beginning to think of as its truest state: the hum of vents, the far-off rattle of equipment, the faint chemical cold of resurfaced ice settling into the concrete.
I followed the light.
Of course, he was there.
Evan sat alone in the video room with his elbows on his knees and the remote in one hand, paused frame on the screen in front of him: a defensive-zone sequence frozen mid-read, three bodies in motion, and his own highlighted in a clean digital circle.
Hockey reduced to geometry. Angles and decisions.
A world where the answer was always somewhere in the tape if you were disciplined enough to keep looking for it.
He heard me in the doorway and turned.
The second his eyes landed on my face, something in him changed.
Not fully open.
Something worse.
Recognition. The kind that said he already knew, on instinct, that whatever had brought me here was not going to leave either of us cleaner than it found us.
“You okay?” he asked.
There were very few moments in life when the right answer was so clearly no that saying anything else became an insult to language.
“No.”
He set the remote down.
I stayed in the doorway for one extra second, which was cowardly, and I knew it, and apparently still did it anyway.
“Sam.”
Just my name. Low. Careful. Not impatient yet.
I made myself walk into the room.
The door clicked softly shut behind me, and that sound hit harder than it should have. Small room. One couch. One screen. Too much air between us and somehow not enough.
“There’s a frame,” I said.
He did not move.
Not even a little.
Because he was Evan, and because words meant something different in his hands than they did in most people’s, that stillness did more than panic would have.
“What frame?”
“The bench shot from practice.”
His face stayed unreadable for one beat too long.
Then: “The one from the other day.”
Not a question.
He knew which one. Of course he did. He knew exactly when and where he had been most visible, just as I did. Men like him tracked exposure the way other people tracked weather.
“Yes.”
Silence.