Page 43 of Her Rival

I left her office. Rode the elevator down forty-four floors. Walked four blocks back to the SUV in the heels that weren't made for it, and I sat in the driver's seat for ten minutes before I started the engine, because the small hard thing in my chest had moved and rearranged itself and was now sitting somewhere just below my throat, and I needed it to settle before I drove anywhere.

When it had settled, I drove back to Brynn's. I didn't tell Brynn any of it. I didn't call Jett. I sat at the kitchen island and ate a sandwich and worked on the article the rest of the afternoon. The actual article. The hockey one. The one that was still due, and that I now knew was going to become something else in my hands, and that I could now bring to Victoria when I was ready.

The afternoon went by. The evening came down on the valley. Brynn was at the bar.

The phone rang at nine forty-six. I was on the couch with the laptop in my lap. The number on the screen was a Tennessee number I didn't recognize, but it wasn't the post office box. It was a cell.

He had a cell phone.

I hadn't, until that moment, considered the fact that my father had probably had a cell phone for at least the last decade. The mailing had been a choice. The choice had been to use the slow heavy permanent method, paper through the system, the postmark, the patience. The cell phone was a different shape of choice entirely.

I let it ring three times. Four. I almost let it go to voicemail. I almost did. The last thing my body wanted to do in the world was answer.

I answered.

I didn't say hello. I didn't say anything. I held the phone to my ear and listened to the silence on the other end, and after a moment I heard a man breathe in, and then I heard the voice I hadn't heard in eight years.

"Ashley."

I closed my eyes.

It was the same voice. Maybe a little thinner. Maybe a little hoarser. The vocal cords of a man who'd been smoking since he was fourteen and spent thirty years yelling at women in a kitchen in middle Tennessee. But the voice. The same voice. The one that taught me how to make myself small. The one that had been the soundtrack of every nightmare I'd had into my late twenties. The voice my body recognized before my brain finished placing it, the way my body knew his handwriting.

"I know you're there, Ashley. The line went quiet when you picked up. The phone don't do that on its own."

I did not breathe.

"Your mother and I would like to see you. She's not doing well. I'm not asking. I'm telling you we're going to see you, soon, on a schedule that suits us, and I'm calling tonight to let you know you can decide the manner of it. You can fly home. You can pick up a phone and call your mother on a normal line and have a normal conversation. You can let me drive out there, which I'm willing to do, and have already prepared to do, and which you've seen evidence of in the form of an envelope you received yesterday at your friend's apartment building."

I did not move.

"Your friend lives in a nice building, Ashley. The kind that has a doorman. I imagine he's a courteous man. He's been very courteous with me. I'd like to keep him out of this. You know what I'd like."

I did not move.

"Three options. Pick one by Sunday. I'll be in town until then. I'd rather not run my own clock out on this."

A pause.

"Are you going to say anything to me, Ashley."

I held the phone away from my mouth. I didn't let him hear me breathe. I stood up from the couch and walked to the window. The valley was below me. The lights were on. Somewhere out there, in the city my father was now in, a man named Jett was in his glass house in the hills, and a man named Rhett was in his house with a fire pit and the woman across from him already in his orbit, and my best friend was at a bar two miles south of where I stood. And the only person on the line with me right now was a man I'd spent eight years carefully placing on the other side of every door I owned.

I brought the phone back to my mouth.

"If you come within five hundred feet of me," I said, "I will call the police. If you come within five hundred feet of the woman I'm living with, I will call her mother, who owns this city. You do not know what you're walking into. You think you do. You don't."

He was quiet a long moment.

Then he laughed. A small dry sound. The same one he'd made my whole childhood when one of us said something he found funny because it was small enough for him to crush.

"All right, Ashley," he said. "Whatever you want."

He hung up.

I stood at the window with the phone still against my ear a long time after the call ended. The screen had gone dark. The phone had vibrated once to say the call was over. The valley was below me. I was a woman alone in a glass apartment on a high floor in a city my father was in, and I'd just done the only thing I'd ever done that he hadn't expected me to do, which was speak first.

I'd been silent on a phone with him for twenty-six years.