Page 65 of Her Rival

"Eleven."

"Mary Beth was eleven when our mother stopped speaking to us for the first time. I have a thing about eleven-year-olds."

"I gathered."

"He's never going to put a hand on you again, Hartley. I want to say that out loud once, and I want you to hear it, and then I want you to go to sleep."

She closed her eyes.

"Okay," she said.

"Sleep."

"Sleep."

I turned the lamp off.

The dark came down soft on the room. Her hand found mine under the duvet and her fingers laced into mine, and we lay there like that for I don't know how long. The warm Saturday-night dark of the desert all around us. The city below us. The man at the motel four hours into Hollis Briar's surveillance. The woman in my bed with her scars finally washed and her hand finally in mine. And somewhere behind the doors I'd welded shut for nine years, a piece of me cracked open that I hadn't known how to crack open before.

I did not name it.

She did not ask.

I felt her breathing slow as she went under.

I held her hand until she was gone.

Then I lay in the dark a long time without sleeping, looking at the ceiling, doing the math on a man in a motel and a woman in my bed and the eleven-year-old girl with a belt-shaped scar on the back of her left thigh.

The math came out clean.

It had been clean since the kitchen on Friday night, if I was being honest with myself. Maybe since that first afternoon three weeks ago, when I watched her hand shake on a pen and decided not to burn her down because the burning wasn't worth the cost. Clean for longer than I'd been letting myself admit. The woman in my bed was a problem I was going to spend the rest of my life solving, and the problem wasn't a problem. The problem was the answer to a question I'd been refusing to ask for nine years.

I closed my eyes.

I fell asleep with her hand in mine.

In the morning I woke up at six.

She was still asleep. Her hair a mess across my pillow. Her face relaxed in a way I hadn't seen it relax in any room I'd ever been in with her. The duvet up to her chin. Her hand still in mine, though it had loosened in sleep the way hands do.

I did not move. I watched her sleep a long minute.

Then I carefully extracted my hand and got up. Pulled on sweats. Went down the stairs in bare feet. Made coffee. Sat at the island with the coffee in front of me and the morning sun spilling over the ridge into the valley through the wall of glass, and checked my phone for the Hollis Briar update I'd scheduled for six.

It was there.

Subject left motel at 5:47 a.m. Driving west. Tracking. Will update at 7.

I sat with that.

I sent a one-word reply. Eyes.

I put the phone face-down on the counter.

I sat with my coffee and waited for her to wake up, and I did the small clean math on the rest of the day that was coming, and I did not panic, because panic belongs to a man who hasn't yet decided what he's going to do, and I had decided.

I'd decided in the kitchen at one in the morning, holding a woman's hand under a duvet in a house I hadn't let anyone see, exactly what I was going to do.