Brashear, 37, is known as a loner. He lives in a sparsely furnished, two-bedroom apartment in Penn Quarter. No pictures of his two boys or his friends hang on the bare walls, no awards. Nothing. He broke off an engagement to a woman he adored last month because "we want different things. It's just too hard for me to be in a relationship."
"Brash don't trust anybody," said Frederic Cyr, whom Brashear met when Cyr tended bar at Montreal's L'Action almost 20 years ago. "What he has in life is his friends and teammates, and when he leaves hockey he will miss all that."
Except for a half-brother, he does not speak to his family. For almost 30 years, he has largely cut himself off from the rest of the world because of what happened to him as a child.
