Page 71 of Her Rival

"What is."

"That he's in a library and not on a sidewalk. The library is the move of a man whose first move didn't work. His first move was the photograph and the phone call. You took the phone call and you spoke first. He didn't have a script for that. He's been thrown for thirty-four hours and he's trying to figure out what to do next, and the library is where men of his generation go to figure out what to do next, and the figuring out takes him hours, not minutes, which means we have time."

"Time to do what."

"Time to decide whether you want me to do anything other than have eyes on him."

I opened my eyes.

I hadn't been ready for the question, even though I'd known it was coming, even though it had been the only question for thirty-six hours.

"What are the options," I said.

He picked up his coffee. He drank.

"Option one. We keep eyes on him. We do nothing. He runs his own clock out. He gets on a plane home Monday or Tuesday. The threat dissipates by itself."

"And then."

"And then he sends more envelopes from Tennessee and we deal with each one as it comes."

"Option two."

"We don't engage him directly, but we make his life in Vegas harder. Hollis puts a man on him visibly. Not aggressively. Just so he knows. He'll be more careful. He'll probably leave faster."

"Option three."

"We engage him directly. Through a lawyer. Letter today, served in person at the library or wherever he is next. It tells him any further contact with you is harassment, it bars him from every Caldwell property in this city, the arena included, and it gives him forty-eight hours to leave Nevada before we file for a restraining order. The second he's served, setting foot on one of those properties stops being a civil matter and starts being criminal trespass. Victoria has lawyers who do this exact thing for the team's players when stalkers turn up. They're very good and very fast."

"Option four."

He looked at me.

"I'm not going to tell you option four, Hartley."

"What is option four."

"Option four is something a man I used to be would have done. The man I am now is not going to do it. I'm not telling you about it because I'm not going to do it. There is no option four."

I drank my coffee.

I sat with the three options. I thought about the man at a library terminal on a Sunday morning in a city he had no business being in, trying to figure out the next way to hurt me. I thought about the man across the island, who'd stayed up watching me have a nightmare and made me tea with honey and let me cry on his chest and hadn't asked me to apologize for any of it. I thought about how the two men in my life had built parallel architectures of love and control, and how the one across the kitchen island was a thing I could actually live inside.

"Three," I said.

"Three." He didn't push. He let me build it.

"With Victoria's lawyers. Which means telling Victoria. Which means telling Brynn."

"Which means telling Brynn at the same time. Brynn first, probably. She'd be furious to hear it from her mother before she heard it from you."

"You're right."

"I know."

"How fast can it happen."

He picked up his phone.