But she stayed. She sat beside Elise Moreno in the medical room and listened to the muffled sounds of celebration filtering through the concrete walls. Cheering. Music. The thump of sticks on the locker room floor. The Valkyries had won, and somewhere down the corridor, twenty-odd women were hugging each other and spraying water and living the best version of their lives.
In the medical room, the quiet held. Sienna could hear Elise breathing. Could hear the faint tick of the clock on the wall. Could feel the heat of Elise's body beside her even though there was a full foot of space between their chairs.
Neither of them said a word.
Neither of them moved to break it.
After a while, Elise spoke. Her voice was low and flat, scraped clean of emotion. "We should go to the hospital. Before it gets any later."
"Yes." Sienna stood and began gathering what she'd need for the hospital visit. "I'll drive. My car's in the staff lot."
Elise didn't argue. She just sat on the edge of the treatment bed with her injured arm cradled against her body and her eyes on the floor, and Sienna packed her bag and tried not to think about the woman she was leaving to treat and the distance she was supposed to keep and how badly she wanted to close it.
4
ELISE
The MRI machine hummed around her like a living thing.
Elise lay flat on her back on the narrow sliding table, her injured shoulder immobilised with foam wedges and straps, staring up at the white curve of the scanner bore. The machine was loud in a way she hadn't expected: a rhythmic knocking, like someone banging on a pipe, punctuated by longer whirring sounds that vibrated through the table and into her teeth. They'd given her earplugs, but the noise still pushed through, relentless and mechanical.
She was supposed to stay still. She was supposed to relax. She was supposed to not think about the fact that somewhere inside this machine, radio waves were mapping the damage in her shoulder and the results would determine the next few months of her life.
She couldn't relax.
The fluorescent light visible beyond the bore of the machine was flat and impersonal. The room smelled of sanitiser and the faintly metallic tang of electronics. She'd been playing well tonight. She'd been winning faceoffs and controlling the neutral zone and doing everything right, and then Kowalski had comefrom behind and her shoulder had buckled and now she was lying inside a tube while a machine decided her future.
Six weeks. Sienna had mentioned that as a possibility. Maybe more. Six weeks of watching from the stands while Lex played her position, scored her goals, won the approval that Elise had spent five years earning.
The machine knocked again, louder this time, and Elise closed her eyes. Her shoulder throbbed dully beneath the foam wedges. The pain had become constant, a deep ache that flared whenever she shifted, and beneath it the instability was worse. The wrongness was there in the joint, how it shifted when she breathed too deeply. Tissue in there was torn. She didn't need an MRI to know that. She'd been around sports medicine long enough to recognise the difference between a strain and structural damage.
Sienna was right. There was damage beyond the dislocation. Elise had known it on the ice, in the seconds after the impact, when the shoulder had made that grinding pop that she'd never heard before. She'd known it and she'd argued anyway, because admitting it meant facing what came next.
She lay in the machine and stared at the featureless white interior and tried not to think about what she would be if she couldn't play hockey. The answer, when it pressed in, was nothing. Or nothing she recognised. Hockey was the structure she'd built everything else around. It was how she'd escaped the small, quiet house in Southern California where nobody talked about feelings and everyone worked too hard. It was the reason she'd moved to Phoenix Ridge, the reason she had friends, the reason she got up in the morning with purpose.
Without it, she was just a thirty-year-old woman alone in an apartment that used to have a roommate.
The machine knocked and whirred and knocked again.
The scan took forty minutes. When the table finally slid out of the bore, the technician was gentle and efficient, helping Elise sit up and offering her a cup of water. The hospital gown rustled around her. The sling went back on, its weight pressing into her good shoulder, a constant reminder.
The corridor outside the MRI suite was hushed and nearly empty at this hour. Phoenix Ridge Hospital at nine o'clock on a weeknight was a different world from the arena: hushed, smelling of floor polish and hand sanitiser. Elise walked slowly, her skate guards swapped for the hospital-issued slippers she'd been given, and rounded the corner to the waiting area.
Sienna was there.
She was sitting in one of the moulded plastic chairs with her ankles crossed and her posture straight, reading on her phone. She'd changed out of her game-day clothes and was wearing the smart trousers and navy silk blouse she kept in her office for post-game. Her glasses caught the overhead light. Her dark hair was pulled back in its usual ponytail, but a few strands had come loose around her face, softening the sharp, professional lines of her.
She looked up when Elise appeared, and her expression shifted. Concern first, then a quick scan of Elise's face that was both clinical and personal, and then a softening. "Hey. How was it?"
The "hey" was new. That wasn't how Sienna usually greeted her.
"Loud." Elise sat down in the chair beside her. The plastic was cold and uncomfortable and she sank into it anyway. "And boring. And my shoulder hurts."
"We'll get you some proper pain relief once we've spoken to Dr. Mars." Sienna stood, tucking her phone away.
She held the corridor door open and Elise ducked through. "She's ready for us."
Elise followed her down the corridor. Walking beside Sienna, she could smell her perfume, subtle and clean, a scent that cut through the hospital antiseptic. Their arms were close enough that they almost brushed, and Elise's mind went back to the medical room, to Sienna's hand on her chest, to the moment Sienna had touched her and then pulled away as if she'd been burned.