8. SIENNA
SIENNA
The waiting room smells like antiseptic and bad coffee.
The coffee is Sergeant Walsh's fault. He handed me a cup forty-five minutes ago with a gruff "you look like you need this," and I did. I've been gripping it ever since even though it's gone cold and the cardboard is going soft at the seam where my thumb keeps pressing.
I've tried sitting. The plastic chairs are hard and my body is too wired to stay in one.
So I pace instead. Twelve feet of linoleum, turn, twelve feet back.
It doesn't help but it's better than stopping, because stopping means the thinking catches up, and the thinking right now is mainly about William.
I look at my hands. Steady on the cup now. They weren't steady on the phone when I called him.
Part of the shaking was because of Charlie. I can still hear the surgeon's reassurance, the word straightforward said twice, but even with that, the image of her in that corridor, the word surgery , does something to my chest I can't push through by reasoning.
But it wasn't only Charlie. The way my voice went flat and careful when he picked up. The three seconds I needed before I could say a single word.
"She's tough." Sergeant Walsh says it from across the room, looking at me and then at Officer Alvarez, Charlie's partner, who leans against the far wall with her hands clasped and her thumb working the small cross at her neck. "She'll be alright."
He's saying it for all of us, including himself. Something beeps somewhere down the corridor. The overhead light hums. I make an attempt at a reassuring smile and nod.
My thoughts drift back while I pace.
I was just a child when I first noticed William Martin.
I remember being in the garden and him laughing at something his father said.
He was twenty feet away and didn't pay me any attention.
I thought: oh. That was the whole of it.
Just that. The garden, the sound of him laughing, the certainty that something in my chest had just changed in a way I wasn't going to be able to change back.
By the time I reconnected with Charlie and we were fifteen, it had grown into the full embarrassing inconvenient weight of it. I used to time my visits hoping to see him. I rehearsed things to say to him. I never got to say them.
That ended.
One night, one sequence of events, and it was done with no room for anything else.
What's left is William’s contempt for me. My father made sure of that, and the accident finished the job. I have known it since I was sixteen and I have never expected anything different.
I switch hands on the cup. The cardboard is fully soft now.
I turn to make another pass toward the window. "She's always been brave, she's—"
The outer doors open.
I stop pacing.
It isn't just a sound. It's a pressure shift, the air changing before anything else has registered. Three men come through the entrance and the room reorganizes itself around them without asking permission.
William is in the center.
He is bigger than I remember. Taller. More muscle. He walks like he hasn't been stopped at a door in years. His eyes moving before he's all the way through the entrance, taking the room in one practiced sweep.
He has no reason to recognize me. I was sixteen the last time he saw me. It was dark, and those kinds of circumstances don't leave faces intact in memory.
On his left, Adrian Kade. Paula's lawyer, who sat across a conference table from me with a careful professional face. On his right, Carter Hill. The new client from this morning.
All three of them carrying the same tight, controlled worry.
No polite stranger-spacing between them.
These men know each other.
I'm too stunned to process in full what is happening.
William scans the waiting room and immediately crosses to Sergeant Walsh without pausing. "What happened to my sister?" A demand disguised as a question.
Sergeant Walsh doesn't seem fazed. "Sergeant Walsh.
Charlotte is one of mine." He extends his hand and William shakes it, not taking his eyes off him.
"Charlie and Officer Alvarez responded to a domestic violence complaint in Silver Lake around ten p.m. The situation escalated. The subject had a firearm."
He keeps his voice measured, the specific delivery of a man who has learned how much information to give at once. "Charlie took a round to the shoulder. She went into surgery about an hour ago."
William stands very still absorbing the information.
Then he pushes one hand back through his hair. One single unguarded motion. In it I can see the shape of how afraid he's been for the last however many minutes it took him to get here.
He drops his hand.
His eyes sweep the room again.
Walsh. The chairs. Alvarez. Me. The windows.
He doesn't stop on me. I'm part of the room. Half a second passes.
He looks back.
His expression stays flat. His eyes narrow a fraction, look away, and then back. The second look holds.
The question in his face shifts from neutral to realization. His head tilts. One degree, maybe less. The nervousness he was carrying, the barely-visible tightness of a man who didn’t know what to expect when arriving at the hospital, disappears.
What replaces it is cold.
He takes one step toward me.
"Sienna." Hardly disguised contempt escaping.
My throat closes. I dry-swallow around it. I pull a breath in and let it settle on my shoulders before I open my mouth.
"William."
Four feet of linoleum between us. He has to look down to hold my gaze and I tilt my chin up and hold it back.
He is bigger up close than he was from across the room.
The lines of his face are sharper than I remembered, every feature more defined by whatever the last ten years involved.
There are lines at the corners of his eyes.
He is still devastatingly handsome.
The contempt is not new. It's just heavier now.
"Thank you for calling me." I can tell that he is being truthful and that he simultaneously resents having to say these words.
He pauses. Looks me straight in the eyes. "Why are you Charlotte's emergency contact?"
"She asked me to be. When she joined the academy." I keep my voice even. "She told me that if there ever was a circumstance where bad news had to be delivered to you, she wanted it to come from a friend of hers."
Something moves through his face at that. Hurt, I think, controlled fast enough that I can't be certain.
"I didn't know you had gotten in touch with each other again." Each word placed with deliberate, disgusted weight.
I take one step forward.
We are almost chest to chest now. I have to angle my chin up further to keep his eyes. This close the tension in his jaw is visible, the muscle below his ear pulled sharp.
"We never stopped."
The muscle in his jaw locks.
He told Charlie to end our friendship. He forbade her. And Charlie disobeyed. I am standing in this room because his sister chose specifically me, as the person she trusted with this, and if he thinks I'm going to apologize for that he is about to find out how wrong he is.
A hand closes gently on my arm. Grounding. Intentional.
I turn and look into Carter's steady eyes.
"I think we all need a fresh cup." He says it mostly aimed at me, with a brief glance at the soft, cold thing still in my hand. "It's going to be a long night. Come with me to the cafeteria?"
I know exactly what he's doing. And I understand why. This is not the time or the place.
I look to William's eyes one more second.
Then I toss the old cup in the trash and follow Carter out.
The corridor is colder than the waiting room and it smells like floor wax and recycled air. Our footsteps land flat on the linoleum. Carter doesn't fill the silence and I don't either, and we've walked most of the hallway before I speak.
"So you know Charlie." I watch his profile as I say it.
A beat. "Through William."
"You and William are… friends?"
"Yes." Another pause. "More than friends. Business partners."
I stop. No decision involved. My feet just do it, mid-corridor, no warning.
Carter stops too. He turns, faces me, doesn't crowd the space. Waits.
"Partners?" The idea too absurd to comprehend.
"Where do you think the M in MH Group comes from?" He watches me steadily. "Didn't Charlotte ever mention her brother's work?"
"She told me he was in the food and entertainment business," I say, registering now that she never once said the company name. "Nightclubs, restaurants—"
"And hotels. The MH Group is in hospitality too."
"I realize that now," I mutter, between my teeth.
I start walking again.
The thought forms, steady and merciless.
I'm working for William Martin's company.There is nothing I can do about that right now. But for sure, this is going to impact my business. There is no way he knew that Veridian was mine. Otherwise he wouldn’t have allowed me to be hired for the Vale Hotel project.
The cafeteria is too bright, mostly empty, and the coffee smells burnt from the doorway. We buy six cups and carry three each back down the corridor and the entire walk back, I have the same thought in loop. Does this mean I’m going to lose the Vale Hotel job?
The cups are warm against my fingers. I hold onto that.
Sergeant Walsh and Officer Alvarez are where we left them when we get back. William stands near the corridor door with Adrian beside him. I hand out cups without making eye contact with William and take a sip of my own.
I immediately grimace. It is bad in a specific, determined way. Stale and over-extracted with something metallic finishing at the back of the throat. I take another sip anyway because it's warm and I need the caffeine to do its thing.
I'm mid-sip when the door opens.
A doctor in surgical scrubs walks into the waiting room. I recognize him. He spoke to me before they took Charlie in, calm and direct, telling me exactly what they were going to do and what he expected to find.
"William." I step toward him before I've thought about whether I should. "This is Dr. Chen. He performed Charlotte's surgery."
William shakes the doctor's hand. The six of us arrange ourselves in a loose half-circle. Dr. Chen looks around the group. Takes a breath in.
My breath stalls somewhere in the middle of my chest, halfway in and not finishing.
"Officer Martin came through surgery well," he says.
"Clean wound. No major vessel involvement.
No permanent damage to the shoulder joint or surrounding tissue.
" He looks at William. "She's going to make a full recovery.
Two to three days here for observation and pain management, and then she goes home. "
The room exhales. All at once. One collective release.
Sergeant Walsh dips his chin once. The economic gesture of a man who has been in rooms like this before and not always with a good outcome. Officer Alvarez closes her eyes and presses her thumb hard against the cross at her neck, her lips moving slightly.
Adrian looks like he is about to be sick. He slams his hand on William's back, twice, hard. "Good," he says, rough and low. "Good, good." He says it mostly to the floor.
Carter pulls William into a brief, one-armed thing, the kind of contact men use when they don't have words. William allows it for three seconds, and in those three seconds the full shape of his relief is visible before he pulls it back in.
Sergeant Walsh clears his throat. "We're going to head out. Give you some family time." He looks at William. "She's one of the best officers I have. You should know that." He holds out his hand.
William shakes it. "Thank you for being here."
Walsh nods. Alvarez crosses to me. Her arms come around me, firm and brief, the hug of someone who means it.
"She talks about you all the time," Alvarez says, close to my ear. "Really glad you were here tonight."
I can’t reply because I have a huge stone lodged in my throat. I squeeze her arm once and she lets go.
They leave.
The room settles into the four of us.
William looks at me.
Then at the door.
"Yeah," he says. Quiet. Cold. "Right now it should just be family."
He wants me to leave too.
I know who Charlie is to me. I know what years of being each other's person means, every difficult thing we've carried together that William has no knowledge of and no right to measure. I know what she would say right now if she could say anything.
I look him straight in the eyes. And then I sit down.
The edge catches my lower back in the same wrong place it has for the past few hours. The seat is cold. None of that matters, because Charlie is in this hospital and I am not leaving.