Page 113 of Her Rival

I'd braced for a lot of things. The LLCs, in detail. Brynn. The article. The deal we'd cut on the rug. Her mother, who she'd called from Brynn's on Wednesday night and still hadn't told me a single word about. I had a whole list ready and a face ready to go with it. The dance was not on the list.

I set my coffee on the nightstand.

"Okay," I said.

"Not because I want to apologize to you again. I have apologized to you. You have accepted the apology. I'm not going to relitigate the apology. I want to talk about it because I haven't yet asked you any of the questions about it I want to ask you, and I've figured out, sometime in the last twelve hours, that I've been not asking the questions in the same way you've been not telling me about the money. The not-asking is, possibly, the part of myself I've been continuing to be uncertain about, and I'd like to stop being uncertain about it."

I sat with that.

"Okay," I said again.

She turned to face me. She set her own coffee on the nightstand on her side of the bed. She pulled her knees up under the duvet.

"What did you do," she said. "After you walked home from the gym."

"Specifically."

"Specifically. That night."

I thought about it.

"I came in through the back door because my parents were in the front room watching television and I didn't want them to see the suit. I went up to my room. Took the suit off. Hung it up. Sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. I think I was there until two or three. Then I got up and made myself a peanut butter sandwich in the kitchen and went back up and ate the sandwich and went to bed."

"You did not cry."

"No."

"Why."

"Because I didn't yet know I was allowed to cry about it. The version of me that was allowed to cry about it was a version I hadn't yet figured out how to be. The kid in the suit cried about other things. He did not cry about that."

"What did the kid in the suit cry about."

"Hartley."

"You don't have to answer."

"I'm going to answer. I'm thinking about it." I picked the coffee back up. I drank some of it. "He cried about my mother. He cried about my father. He cried about being yelled at for trivial things on Sunday mornings. He cried about being told he was going to hell at a tent revival when he was eleven. He cried about a dog we had to put down when he was fourteen because nobody had been brushing her teeth and her infection had gone septic. He cried about being lonely. He did not cry about you. He hadn't yet figured out, at seventeen, that what you did to him was a thing happening to him, instead of a thing that was true about him. So he didn't cry about it the way you cry about things that happen to you. He absorbed it the way you absorb things that are true."

She closed her eyes. She did not move otherwise.

"When did you figure out it was a thing that had happened to you and not a thing that was true about you," she said.

"About three years ago."

"That's recent."

"Yeah."

"What happened three years ago."

"Therapy."

"Therapy."

"Not the first round. The second. I went again at twenty-three. A different woman in San Diego. Three weeks of sessions in the off-season. She asked me about my hometown. I told her about the dance. She told me, in week two, that the thing I'd been carrying for nine years was a thing that did not belong to me, and that the kid in the suit had been a kid who was the victim of a specific cruelty in a year of his life when he had no other resources to fight it with, and that the cruelty had been a thing that was about you and the situation you were in, not a thing that was about him. I didn't believe her for the entire third week. I was on the plane back to Vegas before I believed her. By the time I got back to my house up here I'd figured out she was probably right, and that the kid in the suit hadn't deserved any of it, and that the woman who did it to him had probably not deserved to do it either, although I didn't yet know what I was going to do with the second part of that and decided to ignore it."

"You decided to ignore the second part."