35. Light the Flame
Chapter thirty-five
Light the Flame
Luke
Five Weeks Later, April
T he bow tie is trying to kill me.
Not metaphorically. The strip of black silk that Sienna selected (after rejecting four alternatives and three fabric swatches) is physically attempting to strangle me while I stand in front of a floor-length mirror in the groomsmen’s suite of the Duval Estate, which is not technically an estate but a restored manor house in Greenwich that Catherine Brooks booked fourteen months ago because, quote, “it’s the only venue that respects both the ceremony and the canapés. ”
I’ve been fighting this tie for six minutes. In that time, Zane has consumed three crostini, texted two people, and offered zero assistance.
“You know,” Zane comments from the leather chaise he’s claimed like a man who pays property tax on it, “for a guy who can diagram a neutral zone breakout on a moving bus, you’d think you could handle a bow tie.”
“It’s a different skill set.”
“It’s a knot, Luke. Children tie knots. ”
“Children tie shoes. This is a torture device designed by the fashion industry to punish men for attending formal events.”
“Bold words from a man who irons his practice plans.”
“I do not iron practice plans.”
“You might as well. Lord knows you don’t accept creases.”
The door swings open and Grayson enters carrying three glasses of something amber.
He’s already dressed in his charcoal suit, ivory pocket square, and his hair is actually cooperating for what might be the first time in his adult life.
He looks like the cover of a magazine about men who have their lives together, which, wedding-day nerves aside, he mostly does.
“Whiskey,” he announces, setting two glasses down and keeping the third. “Courtesy of Ethan Brooks, who just told me I’m ‘a fine young man’ and shook my hand for so long I thought we were arm wrestling.”
“He likes you,” I tell him. “That’s his version of enthusiasm.”
“His version of enthusiasm looks like his version of a hostile takeover. The man has one face.”
“You’re marrying into it.”
“I’m marrying Sienna. Ethan is a package deal I’ve accepted, like how you accept that your truck makes that sound when you turn left.”
“My truck doesn’t make a—”
“It makes a sound. We’ve all heard it. It’s concerning.”
Zane stands, whiskey already clutched in his palm. “To be fair, Grayson, the man gave you courtside seats to the Knicks last month. I’d let him shake my hand as long as he wanted.”
“The Knicks are terrible.”
“The seats were twenty thousand dollars.”
“They were courtside to a terrible team.”
“Can we focus?” I abandon the bow tie, accepting my fate as a man who will attend his best friend’s wedding looking like he dressed in the dark. “The photographer wants us in fifteen minutes and I still look like I’m being held hostage.”
Grayson sets his glass down. Crosses the room. And before I can protest or deflect or deploy any of the defense mechanisms I’ve spent twenty-six years perfecting, his hands are on my collar.
“Hold still,” he says. “You’ve got it twisted in the back.”
He works the tie like a man who’s been wearing formal attire to NHL events for three years and has a fiancée—wife, in approximately sixty minutes—who refuses to let him leave the house with crooked accessories.
I hold still. Let him fix it. Feel the weight of his hands adjusting the silk, his fingers near my throat in a gesture that is simultaneously mundane and loaded with every unspoken thing that’s passed between us since that morning in his kitchen before my birthday.
It’s been eight weeks of reconstruction.
Phone calls that started short and grew longer.
Texts that graduated from logistical to personal to something approaching the ease we used to have.
The bachelor party in Montauk where Zane rented a house with too many rooms and too much tequila was where it changed.
Grayson cornered me on the deck at 1 AM to say the thing he’d been building toward for weeks.
“ I was never mad about her loving you. I was mad you didn’t trust me enough to tell me .”
I’d said: “ I know. And I’m sorry. For every day I didn’t .”
He’d been quiet for a long time. Then he’d pulled me into a hug that smelled like salt air and agave and seven years of brotherhood being stress-tested and surviving.
We’re not all the way back. Some scars don’t heal in two months. But the foundation held. And right now, standing in a groomsmen’s suite with his hands on my tie, the man I lied to for months is getting me dressed for his wedding with a tenderness that he’ll deny until his dying breath.
“There.” He steps back. Examines his work. “You look almost presentable.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t push it.” But there’s something at the corner of his mouth. A loosening. Not the full Grayson grin, not yet, but the architecture of one starting to build.
“Boys,” Zane says, because Zane has the emotional timing of a golden retriever and the self-awareness of a cat, “we’ve got a wedding to attend. Can we save the Hallmark moment for the reception?”
“There’s no Hallmark moment,” Grayson says, straightening my pocket square with one final, unnecessary adjustment. “I’m just making sure my best man doesn’t embarrass me in front of two hundred people.”
“Your best man is a Division I coach with a nationally ranked program and an MBA. I think I can handle standing.”
“You say that, but you also can’t tie a bow tie.”
“It was twisted in the—”
“It was a knot, Luke.”
Zane’s laughter fills the room. Grayson catches my eye and the loosening becomes something fuller. Warmer.
“Ready?” he asks, and the question is about more than the ceremony.
“Yeah, Gray.” I hold his gaze. Let him see what I mean. “I’m ready.”
I was right. Ninety percent of the job as best man is standing.
Standing at the altar with Grayson. Standing while the string quartet Catherine personally auditioned plays something elegant that I’m sure Sienna selected.
Standing while hundreds of people—former teammates, NHL players, Ethan’s top VP’s at Brooks Sports Management, all file in to take their seats.
Standing while the bridal party walks in.
Cici Grant comes first. Sienna’s best friend from Silver Pine, blonde and bubbly and nothing like what you’d expect for a first year surgeon resident. She takes her position with a smile that’s warm and definitely directed at our former defenseman, Jack Foster, who apparently wears glasses now.
Then Emma.
I forget what standing is.
She’s in the bridesmaid dress Sienna chose—deep blue, which is either a coincidence or Sienna Brooks being quietly, devastatingly strategic, because blue is Silver Pine’s color.
Our color. The color of the hair tie Grayson wraps around his wrist and the jersey Emma wore when she scored the first goal in program history.
The polo I was wearing the day I realized I’d spend the rest of my life trying to deserve this woman.
Her hair is up. Loose pieces framing her face the way they do after practice, except instead of sweat-damp and tucked under a helmet, they’re curled and deliberate and catching the late-afternoon light in ways that are making it very difficult to remember I’m standing in front of two hundred people with a job to do.
She takes her position across from me. Those dark eyes find mine.
Hi, they say.
Hi, mine answer. You look incredible .
You don’t look so bad yourself, Coach.
She doesn’t say coach, but I can see it written in her expression, the dare that’s always there when we aren’t allowed to touch. Yet.
The processional music shifts. Everyone stands.
And Sienna appears at the end of the aisle on her father’s arm.
The room collectively inhales because Sienna in a wedding dress is the kind of visual event that makes you understand why humans invented ceremony.
To give moments like this a frame worthy of holding them.
But I’m watching Grayson.
His face when he sees her. The way everything, every layer of NHL swagger and protective-brother armor and the controlled intensity that makes him the leader he is, just dissolves. Replaced by something unguarded and luminous and so purely, devastatingly happy that it makes my throat close.
This is what love looks like when it stops being afraid.
I’ve been studying it my whole life. In Jeanette’s kitchen and Emma’s voice and the space between two people on a couch watching Christmas movies.
In the fact that a woman named her pain after ink and a man rebuilt a career from wreckage and both of them keep showing up because the alternative is unthinkable.
I’ve been studying it, and I finally understand: love isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the decision to stop letting fear make the choices.
Grayson reaches for Sienna’s hand when Ethan places it in his. And the smile on his face, the uncomplicated, radiant, full-body smile that I teased him about at the tuxedo fitting, the one he claimed was “unsettling” when he saw it on my face…?
It’s the same smile.
The officiant speaks. Vows are exchanged. Words I’ll remember in fragments because my brain is splitting its attention between the ceremony, the toast I’m about to give, and Emma standing four feet away looking like everything I’ve ever wanted wrapped in blue silk.
When they kiss, the room erupts. Grayson dips Sienna in a move that’s either rehearsed or pure instinct, and Emma catches my eye over the applause and mouths: show-off .
Genetics , I mouth back.
She grins. The light catches her face, and I’m twenty years old again, hearing her voice for the first time through a phone pressed to my ear at 2 AM, wondering how someone could sound so much like home.
They say to know your audience, not to let the crowd noise get in your head, but I probably only know a handful of people in this room and the majority are at the head table with me.
I glance at Jeanette who’s already crying into a napkin. At Sienna’s father, Ethan Brooks, who is either moved or evaluating my public speaking skills for potential business applications.
Then I do what I always do. Reach for control. Find my center.
It's three seats from me, where Emma’s eyes are already on mine.
I lift my glass.
“For those of you who don’t know me—and given the guest list tonight, that might be most of you—I’m Luke Anderson. Best man. Which, if you know Grayson, you’d understand is less a title and more a survival assignment.”
Laughter. Good. I’ve got the room.
“Grayson and I met my freshman year at Silver Pine when we were randomly assigned as roommates, then later that year, linemates. He was the loudest person in every room, had opinions about everything from power play formations to the proper temperature for a steak—”
“Medium rare!” Grayson calls out. Sienna puts her hand on his arm. He subsides.
“—and had absolutely no concept of personal space, boundaries, or the idea that some people process emotions quietly. He hugged me the first day we met. I didn’t grow up in a household that hugged, and I had no idea what do with it.”
I pause. Let that land where it needs to. Feel the shift in the room from amusement to attention.
“But that’s Gray. He doesn’t wait for you to ask.
Doesn’t wait for permission. He just decides you’re his, and then you are.
And I don’t mean that in the dramatic, movie-speech way.
I mean it in the Tuesday-night way. The ‘I made extra pasta, come eat’ way.
The driving eight hours to watch someone’s playoff game way.
The ‘my mom’s making Thanksgiving dinner and you’re coming, it’s not a question’ way. ”
Jeanette nods. Mouths that’s right while gripping her napkin like an emotional shield .
“Grayson Cole taught me what family looks like when it’s built on purpose instead of obligation. His mother taught me that love is a verb, not a feeling. That it’s showing up, feeding people, and making sure nobody believes their truly alone. And his sister—”
The room gets very quiet.
“His sister taught me that the bravest thing you can do is want something out loud. Even when it’s terrifying. Even when the timing is wrong. Even when the world is not particularly interested in making it easy.”
Emma’s eyes are glassy. She blinks. Once. Hard.
“But tonight isn’t about me. Tonight is about Grayson and Sienna. And what I want to say about them is this.”
I turn to face them directly. Grayson’s arm is around Sienna’s shoulders. She’s leaning into him the way Emma leans into me, with the full-body trust of someone who’s found the person they can stop performing for.
“I’ve watched a lot of great partnerships.
On the ice, off the ice. The ones that work aren’t the ones where both people are the same.
They’re the ones where each person makes the other one braver.
Where one leads and the other steadies. Where the thing you build together is bigger than anything either of you could build alone. ”
I look at Sienna. “You made my best friend a better man. Not by changing him. By seeing him clearly and loving what you saw. And then, very patiently, very strategically, making sure he saw it too.”
Sienna smiles.
“And Gray.” I look at the man who took me in when my own family couldn’t figure out how. “You taught me that love isn’t about being ready. It’s about being brave enough to start before you are. To keep showing up even when it gets messy. Especially when it gets messy.”
The line lands differently. Heavier. Because the people who know us, the people who’ve watched the last six months unfold, hear the double meaning. Hear me talking about more than a wedding.
Grayson’s jaw works. Not the frustrated kind. Something else.
“To Grayson and Sienna.” I raise my glass. “May you always be brave enough to start. And stubborn enough to stay.”
The room drinks. I drink. And as I lower my glass, Grayson stands.
He doesn’t say anything. Just crosses the three feet between us and pulls me into a hug that’s tighter than the tuxedo shop. Tighter than the bachelor party deck at 1 AM .
“Good thing I’m not the only stubborn one,” he says roughly, close to my ear.
I hold on for one more second. Then let go. “Maybe we’re closer to brothers than we thought.”
He laughs. “That’d actually make this worse, Luke.”
“But I got you to laugh.”
He smiles, glances back at his now-wife and mine drifts to Emma. To the woman looking at me like I just did something that deserves a reward I’ll be collecting later.
After a few more speeches, Grayson pulls Sienna onto the dance floor for their first dance. I watch them move together—imperfect, laughing, stepping on each other’s feet—and think about how the best things in life are never the ones you plan.
They’re the ones that find you when you finally stop running.