Chapter 8 Julian
The Vipers are up two goals in the first period and the owner’s box is loud with the energy of VIPs who enjoy winning more than they enjoy hockey.
I stand at the half wall that splits the main suite from the balcony seats, my drink untouched on the rail beside me.
Grizz sets up in the offensive zone, focus and confidence radiating from his frame.
He’s different out there on the ice, like his personal force of nature brand has settled, and in that, he’s more powerful.
I call that the “Daisy effect” and I expect he’d give her the credit too.
Behind me, the room is filled with the same who’s who, the names and faces who get invites to these games.
Sponsors, front office execs, a handful of league contacts I invited for the optics.
City officials, other billionaires who run in my circles.
It’s the same crowd every night and I have to wonder what it would be like with a bunch of non-jaded, hockey-obsessed kids instead.
Obviously, Harper’s idea on how to hype up this city to host an All-Star Game has me thinking.
Glasses clink and someone laughs too loudly at a joke that probably wasn’t that funny, but I’m walled off from it, my attention on what’s really important… the game. I know I should be circulating but I stay at the glass.
Grizz takes a pass off the boards, pivots cleanly and sends it cross-ice to Coen Highsmith—a prized trade from the Pittsburgh Titans last year—who one-times it past the goalie before the man even shifts his weight. The goal horn erupts and the suite behind me surges with noise.
Three nothing.
I allow myself a private moment of satisfaction and take a sip of my drink.
The game is good. The team is cohesive in a way that felt theoretical three months ago and is now simply fact. Everything from an organizational standpoint is moving in the right direction.
The All-Star proposal is with my creative team who are adding texture and specificity to the community campaign framework, which Harper came up with in a four-minute conversation on her first day of work with me as my driver.
And that thought, predictably, leads to additional ruminations about my newest employee. It’s a conundrum why she keeps inserting herself into my thoughts. Therefore, I’m forced to examine it—what is it about her specifically?
The obvious answer is the one I discount first, not because it isn’t true but because it’s insufficient.
Yes, she’s beautiful, objectively and undeniably so.
But I’ve been in the company of beautiful women my entire adult life and none have taken up residence in my thoughts with this annoying level of stubbornness.
So it isn’t that. Or it isn’t only that.
My hypothesis, then, is that it’s the mind behind the face.
The ticketing crisis, for example. I’d only just met her, and she offered a solution my entire operations staff had circled for hours.
She delivered it from the front seat of a Town Car and did so from a position of vulnerability.
I didn’t know it then, but I later learned she had lost her primary job less than twenty-four hours before and yet that didn’t stop her from going out on a limb with me.
And then the All-Star idea. The community campaign, the children from the Bronx, the organic groundswell that reframes the entire bid narrative.
She built it at a lunch table while eating an eighty-dollar steak with the awkward restraint of someone pretending it wasn’t the best thing they’d ever tasted.
Then there’s the phone call I shamelessly eavesdropped on.
I only heard her side of it, but what I did hear was magnificent.
She listened attentively, giving nothing away in her expression or body language.
She didn’t lose her temper but calmly identified the weakness in the principal’s position, applied exactly the right pressure, and extracted the outcome she wanted while offering enough concession to let the man believe he’d participated in the decision.
That was all street smarts, instinct and grit most likely shaped by years of only relying on herself to get things done. At least, that’s the image I’ve built in my head, but I’d love to know more about why she is the way she is.
Which brings me to what I don’t know.
I know she grew up on the Lower East Side and that she’s a hustler and a survivor. I know she has a younger brother she clearly adores and would go to war for without hesitation. I know she tried college, found it not to her liking, and walked away without apparent regret.
It could be considered way too much information for an employer to know about their new employee, and yet it isn’t enough.
For the past two days, every time I’ve tried to find out more, she has closed the distance with the polite, practiced efficiency of someone who has decided exactly how much of herself is appropriate to offer an employer.
I get short answers in a professional manner. While I still insist on sitting in the front seat of the Range Rover, she doesn’t look at me at all. It’s eyes forward, hands on the wheel, attention focused on the road.
It’s not unfriendly but it’s deliberate. She’s intentionally putting up a wall between us and I wonder why. It could be simple professionalism—a boundary she’s drawn and intends to hold because that’s really the way of the business world. You don’t fraternize with your superior or your subordinate.
That I can respect. I drew similar lines myself for years, between what I offer and what I withhold from others, between the public version of myself and the real version only a select few see.
But could it be something else that has her maintaining a professional distance? Is she keeping the distance because proximity is dangerous to her in some way?
The thought arrives without warning, and I sit with it, turning it over.
Does she feel it too? That sensation of intrigue into the other person that seems to defy common sense? I know I’m obviously feeling it.
On the ice below, the referee whistles and play stops. The face-off moves to the neutral zone and I set my drink down.
I had given Harper the afternoon off today since I wanted her to drive me to the game tonight. Right now, she’s currently sitting in the Range Rover in the VIP lot, and it bothers me more than it should.
Behind me, one of the sponsors says something that prompts a round of laughter. I half turn, smile appropriately, and look back to the ice.
The puck drops and we win the face-off cleanly.
I watch the play develop for approximately five seconds before turning away from the glass wall.
“Excuse me,” I say as I weave through the room, accepting handshakes and handing out promises to reconnect later.
But then I’m out the suite door with Marcus, my head of security, right behind me. “Mr. Langley, do you need—”
“I’ve got this,” I say without breaking stride, holding up a hand. “You can wait here.”
I don’t look back, knowing he will position himself against the wall and wait for me to return.
In the corridor outside the suite, one of the arena’s senior staff members spots me and straightens. “Mr. Langley, is there anything I can—”
“No, thank you.”
Two more offers of assistance between the suite level and the elevator, both declined. I take the elevator to the ground floor, cross the main concourse—quieter now that the period is underway, the crowd inside and settled—and push through the heavy exterior doors into the night air.
The VIP lot is tucked along the south side of the building, gated, well lit. The Range Rover sits in the first reserved space, exactly where I instructed Harper to park after she dropped me off at the main entrance.
Through the driver’s window I can see her—head slightly angled, the faint glow of her phone screen reflected on her face, earbuds in. She’s in the new uniform still but tonight she wore her hair loose. I wonder what type of music she listens to.
I approach the vehicle, completely regretful for what I’m about to do, because she’s so absorbed in her phone she doesn’t see me coming.
I rap my knuckles twice on the driver’s-side glass and she startles so completely that her phone launches from her hand and falls down onto the passenger seat floorboard.
Her head whips my way, mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes as round as saucers. I hold up a hand in apology through the window.
Harper stares at me for several long seconds, chest heaving from the fright, expression caught somewhere between alarm and disbelief. She cracks the window a few inches. “You just took ten years off my life.”
“I apologize for that,” I say, hands still up. “Couldn’t be helped.”
To my relief, she chuckles. “I normally love the thrill of a good scare. Is everything okay? Do you need to go somewhere?”
I tilt my head, tucking my hands into my pockets. “Like, what kind of a good scare? Surely not people approaching you in a dark parking lot at night?”
Another laugh, soft and tinkling as she shakes her head. “No, that’s the kind of scare I’d like to avoid, but you know… horror movies and stuff. The suspenseful ones when you know someone’s in the closet and you investigate, but then they pop up behind you.”
That’s adorably… weird and I have a sudden and intense desire to watch her watch a horror movie to see the delight she’d get over such a fright.
I shake that thought away. “How about you come inside to watch the game?”
Harper frowns only briefly, as if confused by the request, then her face smooths out into that distant politeness she’s been giving me. “Sir, I mean… Julian. I’m fine out here.”
“It’s forty degrees,” I observe.
“I have a heated car.”
“You have a heated car and no hockey game,” I counter, hoping I’m wearing my most charming smile. “Come to the suite. The Vipers are up 3–0 in the first period and you said you wanted to understand the sport.”
“I said I didn’t understand the sport,” she corrects. “That’s different from saying I wanted to.”
“Semantics.”
“Accuracy,” she quips, eyes locked on mine, and I see the defiance even though her words are softly unassuming.
“Are you genuinely content sitting alone in a parking lot?”
“I have my phone.”
“Everyone has their phone. That’s not an answer.”