Iced Out

Chapter 14: Sienna Asks Questions

NOVA

Sienna Park had the instincts of a bloodhound and the patience of a woman who had once waited fourteen hours outside a courthouse in January for a source who never showed.

She was also my best friend. Which meant that when she called me at 9:47 PM on a Tuesday, I couldn’t screen it. I’d been screening calls from everyone else for three days. Diane. Toby. Two producers from a morning show I’d never heard of who somehow already had my personal number. But not Sienna. Never Sienna.

I picked up on the second ring, tucking the phone between my shoulder and my ear while I poured a glass of wine I absolutely deserved.

“You have exactly thirty seconds to explain yourself before I show up at your apartment with a bottle of Malbec and a list of questions,” Sienna said by way of greeting.

“Hello to you too, Si.”

“Fourteen. That’s how many text messages you haven’t answered. I counted. I’m a journalist. I count things.”

I carried my wine to the couch and sank into the cushions, pulling a throw blanket over my legs. The apartment was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made the noise inside my head feel louder.

“I’ve been busy,” I said. “New job. New city. Adjusting.”

“New boyfriend, apparently.”

I closed my eyes. *There it was.*

“Sienna.”

“Nova Renee Calloway. I have been your best friend since sophomore year at Portland State, when you helped me cheat on a statistics exam and then immediately reported yourself to the honor board because your conscience couldn’t handle it. I know you. I know every version of you. And the version of you in that paparazzi photo outside the coffee shop? The one looking up at Cole Harrington like he hung the moon and personally lit every star around it?” Sienna paused for devastating effect. “That is not a woman adjusting to a new city.”

I took a very long sip of wine.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“It’s never complicated with you. That’s the thing. You are the least complicated person I know when it comes to men. You don’t date them. You evaluate them, find them emotionally insufficient within forty-eight hours, and move on. So either Cole Harrington is the first man in recorded history to pass your clinical screening, or something else is going on.”

I stared at the ceiling. The wine tasted like regret and tannins.

“He’s a client, Si. It’s a professional relationship that the media is blowing out of proportion.”

“Don’t do that.” Sienna’s voice dropped out of its teasing register into something quieter and more serious. “Don’t give me the press line. I’m not a press conference. I’m your person.”

The ache in my chest tightened. She was right. Sienna had always been right, about everything, since the day she sat next to me in that statistics lecture and whispered, “You look like you haven’t slept in three days and you’re still the smartest person in this room. I’m going to be your friend now. You don’t get a say in it.”

I hadn’t gotten a say in it. And it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

“I can’t tell you everything,” I said carefully. “Not yet. There are things happening with the team that are sensitive, and I’m bound by confidentiality agreements that would make your head spin.”

“I’m a sports beat reporter. My head spins professionally.”

“Sienna.”

A long pause. I could hear the faint hum of her apartment in the background. The clatter of her keyboard. Sienna was always writing. Even when she was on the phone, even when she was sleeping, some part of her brain was composing a lede.

“Fine,” she said at last. “I won’t push. Tonight. But I need to say something, and I need you to actually hear it instead of filing it away in that steel-trap brain of yours for later analysis.”

“I’m listening.”

“You look at him like you already know him.”

The words landed in the center of my chest like a stone dropped into still water. I felt the ripple spread outward, slow and cold, touching every carefully compartmentalized thing I was holding.

“What are you talking about?” I managed. My voice came out steady. A miracle.

“The photos, Nova. Not just the paparazzi shot. The ones from the charity gala that hit social media this morning. Someone got a candid of you two at the dinner table, and the way you’re looking at him is not the way a woman looks at a new boyfriend. It’s not even the way a woman looks at a man she’s attracted to. It’s deeper than that. It’s the way you look at something you’ve been thinking about for a very long time.”

I set my wine glass down on the coffee table because my hand was no longer steady enough to hold it.

Sienna was the best journalist I knew. Not because she was aggressive or ruthless, though she could be both when the story demanded it. She was the best because she saw things. Patterns. Connections. The invisible threads between what people said and what they meant. It was the same skill set I used in clinical practice, just aimed in a different direction.

And right now, it was aimed directly at me.

“You’re reading into a photograph,” I said. “Photographs are static. They capture a fraction of a second and strip it of all context. You know that better than anyone.”

“I do,” Sienna agreed. “Which is why I also know that sometimes a fraction of a second is all you need to see the truth.”

I pulled the blanket tighter around my legs. The apartment felt colder than it should have. Or maybe it was just me.

“He’s my client,” I said again, and the word tasted like cardboard in my mouth. “That’s all he is.”

“Okay.” Sienna didn’t sound convinced. She sounded like a woman writing a mental note and underlining it twice. “Then answer me one question, and I’ll drop it for tonight.”

“One question.”

“Why Chicago?”

I went very still.

“You had offers from three NBA teams, a Premier League club, and an Olympic training center in Colorado Springs,” Sienna continued, and I could hear her ticking through the facts the way she ticked through a story outline. “All of them paid more. All of them had better facilities. All of them were in cities where you already had connections. Instead, you chose a mid-tier NHL franchise in a city where you don’t know a single person, working for an owner with a questionable reputation, treating a player whose dead brother used to play for the same team.”

The silence between us stretched until it hummed.

“That’s not a question, Si,” I whispered.

“Sure it is. Why Chicago, Nova?”

I stared at the dark window across the room. The city lights blurred and sharpened as my eyes lost focus. Five years of carefully constructed distance. Five years of telling myself I’d moved on, that the anonymous tip I’d filed was a closed chapter, that Marcus Harrington’s death had nothing to do with me. And my best friend, from a thousand miles away, had just put her finger on the fault line in three sentences.

“Because I needed a fresh start,” I said. The lie was smooth and practiced and I hated every syllable of it.

Sienna was quiet for a long moment. I could picture her exactly. Cross-legged on her bed in her Portland apartment, laptop open, hair piled on top of her head, chewing the cap of a pen. Deciding whether to push.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Fresh start. I’ll buy that. For now.”

“Thank you.”

“But Nova?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever this is. Whatever you’re doing in that city and whoever Cole Harrington is to you, be careful. Because the way you look at that man in those photos is the way people look right before they stop being careful.”

I laughed. It came out thin and unconvincing and Sienna didn’t laugh with me.

We talked for another twenty minutes about nothing. Her latest assignment. A terrible date she’d been on with a copy editor who’d spent the entire dinner correcting her grammar. I let her voice fill my apartment like warmth from a radiator, and I pretended that I was fine, that everything was under control, that I wasn’t sitting in the dark holding secrets that could destroy the man I’d spent the evening performing for.

After we hung up, I sat on the couch for a long time without moving.

*You look at him like you already know him.*

Sienna was wrong. I didn’t know Cole Harrington.

But I knew his brother. I knew the shape of the secret his brother had carried. I knew what it looked like as data on a laptop screen in a cramped graduate assistant’s office. And I knew, with a certainty that sat like iron in my stomach, that the closer I got to Cole, the harder it would become to keep those two truths from colliding.

I picked up my phone and opened our text thread. The last message was still there from the night of the announcement. His name glowed on the screen.

*Cole: Get some sleep, Doctor. Tomorrow we have the charity gala. Wear green.*

I stared at it until the screen dimmed. Then I locked the phone, set it face down on the table, and finished my wine in the dark.

Sienna was right about one thing.

*I was running out of time to be careful.*