Page 18 of Her Rival

"Okay," she said again, in the first version. The dangerous one.

I ate the rest of the grilled cheese.

After dinner she sat with me on the couch and put on a baking show, and I watched without watching, and the whole valley out past the glass turned pink and then purple and then deep desert blue. I thought about the next session. Thursday. Less than seventy-two hours away. He was going to walk in. I was going to walk in. Brynn was probably going to be in the room again, because Brynn was running point on the whole piece, and now Brynn was watching, which made everything worse and also somehow better. Because Brynn watching meant Brynn loved me, and Brynn loving me was the only stable thing I had left that wasn't an envelope in a shoebox.

Sometime around eleven I went to the guest room, sat on the bed, and opened my laptop.

The interview tape was on it. I'd transferred it before I left the arena, a habit, never trust a single device with a recording. I put in my headphones and played it back.

His voice came through. The polished version. The forty-five minutes of nothing.

I listened to all of it. Every dodge, every joke, every shut door. I listened to the way I'd kept asking and asking, and the way he'd kept giving me weather instead of climate, the careful curated version of a man designed never to crack. I took notes the way I would on any interview. Professional. Neutral. Marking the moments where I'd lost the thread and the moments where he'd handed me an opening I hadn't taken.

When I was done I had four pages of notes and exactly one usable quote, and the usable quote was about a teammate and not about him.

I closed the laptop.

I lay back in the dark and thought, I have to find a way to make him talk to me.

And right behind that thought, before I could stop it, came the one I shouldn't have let in.

I have to find a way to be in a room with him without him hating me.

I rolled over and shoved my face into the pillow and told myself it was the same thought. The same job. Two angles on the same problem. Just craft. Just work.

It wasn't, and I knew it wasn't, and not knowing what to do with that fact was somehow the hardest thing about the entire worst day of my adult life.

I fell asleep without meaning to, still in my clothes, the laptop closed beside me, forty-eight envelopes' worth of my father in a shoebox three thousand miles away, and a man who'd had every reason to ruin me today and hadn't. Somewhere on the other side of this city he was going to bed too. And we were going to do this all again on Thursday.

8

JETT

I carried it alone for two days, which was about a day and a half longer than I had any business carrying anything alone. The second night I gave up.

Monday night had been bad. I went home from the arena and sat in the front hall with my back against the door for a stretch I didn't track, because I didn't look at any clocks. Eventually I got up, made a sandwich I didn't eat, and went to bed at nine like a child. I slept for about an hour. Lay awake the rest of it, running the conference room back on a loop. The door. Her face turning toward me. Brynn saying her name. The three-second drop. The choice. I worked through every version of it. What would've happened if I'd told Brynn right there. What her face would've done. The exact second she'd have understood, and the exact second after that, when she'd have started loving me harder than I could survive being loved by her.

I couldn't make the loop stop running.

Tuesday I went to practice. I did practice. Chirped Moose about his beard. Gave Coach a thumbs-up when he asked if I was good. Scored on Langley three times in scrimmage, and the second one I went out of my way to celebrate, the long stupid arms-out glide I did for the cameras even when there weren't any cameras, because if I did the bit hard enough I could almost believe I was the man doing the bit.

I was not the man doing the bit. I was a man inside a man doing the bit, watching from somewhere behind my own eyes. And I could feel Stone clocking it from across the ice the whole practice. He didn't say anything. Stone never said anything. He just watched, the way he watched everything, with that flat dark gaze that meant he'd already taken in more than you wanted him to.

After practice he stripped down at his stall the way he always did. No rush. Deliberate. As I walked past with my towel he said, quiet, not looking at me, "You free tonight."

"Why."

"Just am I free or am I not."

"You're free."

"Come by, then. Seven."

He didn't say if you want. Didn't say we should talk. Didn't say you've been off, didn't say I'm worried about you. He just said the thing and let me decide what to do with it. The Rhett special. Which was why Rhett worked. Which was why I went home, showered, put on a clean shirt, and got in the car at six forty-five.

Rhett's place sat up in the hills not far from mine, but it was a different kind of place. Mine was a museum. His was a house. Lower-slung, warmer, lights on in the kitchen because Victoria was probably in there cooking something he'd pretend not to enjoy. The big stone fireplace going on the far side of the living room, because Victoria liked a fire and Rhett liked Victoria. That was about the size of his domestic life now. Eighteen months in.

I parked. Sat in the car a minute. Watched the house do its warm-house thing through the windshield.