Dale came back twenty minutes later to find her still sitting there, and from his face, she gathered this wasn't normal.
"He say you're hired?" Dale asked.
"He said that, yes."
"Then you're hired." Dale scratched at his jaw like he wanted to say more and thought better of it. "HR'll walk you through paperwork. Sign the NDA carefully. It's longer than the ones I've seen at other franchises."
"How long is longer?"
"Forty pages." He handed her a folder, thick, the Iron Wolves crest embossed on the front. "Welcome to the team, Ms. Cole."
The HR office was small and beige and staffed by a woman named Priya who moved through the paperwork with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd done this a hundred times. Sienna signed where she was told, initialed clauses about confidentiality and "team culture" and something called a "residency requirement during postseason" that she made a mental note to ask about later, and near the bottom of the stack, Priya pulled a single sheet free and frowned at it.
"That's odd," Priya said. "This shouldn't be in your intake packet."
"What is it?"
Priya turned the sheet around. It was a photocopy, old, the edges soft with handling, a black-and-white photograph of a family standing in front of a farmhouse: a man, a woman, two young girls. The taller girl looked maybe eight, dark-haired, solemn. The younger one, maybe four, had her hand raised to the camera like she was waving, and on her raised wrist, faint but visible even in the grainy copy, was a mark.
A crescent inside a circle. The exact same mark that had been on Sienna's own wrist since birth, the one doctors had always called a birthmark and never had a better explanation for.
"Can I keep this?" Sienna's voice came out strange to her own ears.
"It's not supposed to be in there. I'll have to pull it and log it as misfiled." Priya was already reaching for it.
Sienna's hand closed over the photo before she'd decided to move. "Please. I think it might be family. I don't have any pictures of my birth family. If I could just get a copy-"
Priya hesitated, glanced toward the door, then back at Sienna's face, and something there must have looked desperate enough to matter, because she sighed. "I'll copy it for you. But the original goes back in whatever file it came from, and I need you to not mention where you got it. This building has opinions about paperwork getting where it isn't supposed to go."
"I won't say a word."
While Priya ran the copy, Sienna turned the photo over. On the back, in faded pencil, someone had written a single word: Ashgrove, and beneath it, a date, fourteen years old almost to the month.
She didn't know the word. She'd never heard it in her life. But looking at that little girl's raised wrist, at the mark that matched her own down to the angle of the crescent, she felt something she hadn't let herself feel in a long time, not since she was small enough to still ask questions about her parents before she learned that asking only made the silence worse.
Hope, and underneath it, something colder. Fear that she was finally about to get an answer, and that the answer might be worse than not knowing at all.
Priya handed back a fresh copy and took the original, sliding it into a different folder that she then tucked, pointedly, out of sight. "Good luck with the team, Ms. Cole. Killian doesn't sit in on interviews. Whatever you did in there, you must have made an impression."
"I really don't know what I did."
"Well." Priya's smile had an edge Sienna couldn't place. "Watch yourself anyway. Whatever it was."
Sienna found the residential wing that evening, a converted set of apartments attached to the practice facility, the "residency requirement" apparently meaning she'd be living on-site during any home stretch of games, which explained the eye-watering salary a little better. Her new apartment was small but clean, one bedroom, a window that looked out over the parking structure instead of the rink, and she sat on the edge of the unfamiliar bed with the photocopy in her hands, staring at the word on the back until it stopped looking like a word at all.
Ashgrove.
Her phone buzzed. Milo, a text: how'd it go?? did u get it??
She typed back: Got it. Don't worry about the surgery money anymore. I've got it handled.
ur the best sis alive, he wrote, and then, because he was sixteen and constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, did u see any hot hockey players
One, she typed, before she could stop herself, and then deleted it and wrote instead: Focus on your PT exercises. I'll call you tomorrow.
She set the phone down and looked at the photo again. The little girl's raised hand. The crescent mark. The farmhouse behind them, burned into the photo's grain like something already half a ghost.
A knock came at her door, sharp, and she nearly dropped her phone.
"Who is it?"
"Killian Frost." A pause. "I said I'd find you."
She stood, smoothed her shirt down out of habit, and told herself the sudden pulse in her throat was about the day's stress and not about the fact that his voice alone had done something to the air in the room.
She opened the door, and there he was, out of whatever meeting had pulled him away, tie loosened, looking like a man who'd spent the last three hours holding something together with his bare hands.
"You wanted to talk to me about something," she said. "Earlier. Before you got called away."
"I did." He glanced past her into the apartment, then back at her face, and something in his jaw tightened like he was fighting himself over a decision. "Can I come in?"
"That depends what you're planning to say."
"Ms. Cole." His eyes, in the hallway light, looked almost gold. "I'm going to ask you something, and I need you to actually consider it before you decide I'm insane."
Her heart was pounding now, loud enough she was sure he could hear it, which was a strange thought to have, except a small, buried part of her had been having strange thoughts like that all day.
"Ask," she said.
"Have you ever, even once in your life," he said slowly, "felt like you weren't entirely human?"
The photocopy was still in her hand. She didn't answer. She didn't have to. His eyes dropped to it, to the edge of the image visible between her fingers, to the little girl's raised wrist, and whatever color remained in his face drained out of it completely.
"Where," he said, very quietly, "did you get that photograph?"
