Chapter 8 — Home Opener

Sienna told no one about the text.

Not Tessa, Marty, or the four security guards who now seemed to appear wherever she parked her car without her having asked for them.

She tucked the message away somewhere deep and quiet and went to the home opener anyway, because staying home, hiding, letting one anonymous coward decide her schedule was worse than anything a blurry photograph could do to her.

The arena was full an hour before puck drop. Eighteen thousand seats, every one of them lit gold under the new banners, and from the owner’s box above center ice she could see all of it at once — the noise, the color, the enormous hum of a building waiting to be given a reason to cheer.

They gave her a reason almost immediately.

Her name came over the speakers during introductions, please welcome team owner Sienna Bennett — and the boos came down out of the upper bowl like weather. Not everyone. But loud enough that she felt it land in her chest like a flat hand.

She kept her chin up. Sienna had practiced that particular trick recently.

Then the lights dropped.

A hush moved through the crowd, the kind that only comes before a tribute, and the giant screen above center ice came alive with grainy footage — an old man in a fedora, decades younger, cutting a ribbon on a brand-new arena. The same man, gray now, fists in the air after some long-ago championship. The same man, ancient and stooped, walking onto the ice one final time last season to wave at a crowd that hadn’t known it was a goodbye.

Henry Whitlock. Founder. 1953–2026.

The arena went completely silent. And then it began to clap — slow, building, eighteen thousand people finding the same rhythm without being told to — and somewhere in that swelling sound Sienna realized she was crying, hand pressed flat over her heart in the dark of the box where she thought no camera could find her.

A camera found her anyway.

Sienna didn’t know it in the moment. She only knew the tears, and the old man’s face on the screen, and the strange impossible fact that she was grieving a grandfather she had met for the first time in a folder of letters.

The puck dropped four minutes later.

Dean scored with nine minutes left in the first period — a quick give-and-go off the wall that ended with the puck in the top corner before the goalie had fully turned — and the building came apart with noise. He skated to the glass, raised his stick, and pointed it.

Straight up.

Straight at her box.

Eighteen thousand people read it as a tribute to the man on the screen ten minutes earlier. A nod to the founder, on opening night.

Sienna read it differently.

She had been on the ice with him at midnight three days ago, hand in his, a shutter clicking somewhere in the dark. She knew exactly which version of thank you that stick was pointing at, and it had nothing to do with a man who’d been dead for two weeks.

She didn’t wave back. She couldn’t, not with eighteen thousand people watching for exactly that kind of evidence. But Sienna smiled — small and private, just for herself — and pressed her hand flat against the cold glass of the box like she could send the gesture back through it.

“Quite a moment.”

The voice came from behind her, and every good feeling in her chest turned to ice before she’d even fully turned around.

Grant stood in the doorway of her box, one of Hank’s good crystal glasses in his hand, the bottle of scotch from the sideboard already a third gone. He’d let himself in. Of course he had — he still had a staff badge, still had three years of muscle memory walking these halls like he owned them, because for three years, in every way that mattered to him, he thought he had.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” Sienna said.

“I’m the general manager. I go where the team goes.” He swirled the scotch, unbothered, and looked at her over the rim of the glass with an expression she remembered from the worst arguments of their marriage — calm on the surface, calculating underneath. “Nice tribute. Very moving. You really sold the tears.”

“They weren’t sold.”

“No,” he agreed slowly. “I don’t think they were. Which is interesting, actually. Because I’ve been asking myself something all week, and watching you up here just now answered it.” He took a step closer. “We need to talk, Sienna. About who you really are.”

She didn’t move. “I told you who I am in the boardroom.”

“I don’t mean the Whitlock part.” His voice dropped, soft and almost gentle, the way a blade is gentle right up until it isn’t. “I mean the part where you walked out of our anniversary party in tears and ended up somewhere you shouldn’t have been, with someone you definitely shouldn’t have been with.”

The arena noise went distant and underwater in her ears.

“I know what you did the night you left, Mrs. Sinclair,” he said. “I just haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do about it.”