Page 75 of Her Rival

I want to be straight that it did not feel like the right thing. The right thing is supposed to feel like something. The lawyer felt like standing still in the road while the truck came on. Choosing it meant choosing to leave Dani's father upright and breathing and unbroken in a city she still had to live in, when I had the means and the want and the plan I'd built while she slept to change all three at once, and in my body it felt like failing her. Like keeping my own hands clean at her expense. Like cowardice in the suit restraint wears to look respectable.

I did it anyway. I told myself the feeling was just the old me, sulking about a healthy scratch.

Beside me Dani took the lid off the coffee, looked into it, and put the lid back on without drinking. I watched her do it out of the side of my eye and kept my hands at ten and two.

She was about to walk into Brynn's home and set the whole of it on the counter. The father. The scars. The shoebox. The eight years. The thing she'd done to a kid in a Tennessee church basement when she was sixteen, told now to the one person in her grown life she'd let all the way in. She was going to say it with her own mouth, in her own order, with her eyes up, because somewhere overnight she'd decided she was finished letting people learn the shape of her by watching her flinch. Nobody was making her. There was no letter on her, no plan, no man with a ledger voice handling it for her. There was just a woman who'd decided, sometime before the coffee, to be seen on purpose by somebody who had the standing to leave.

The bravest thing in that car was not me keeping my hands in my pockets. It wasn't close. It was her, with her cold coffee and her steady face, driving straight at the one conversation no lawyer on earth could have for her.

I thought, if she can do that, I can keep one promise.

The city took us in. I came off the highway into the part of it that gleamed, found Brynn's building, put the Pontiac against the curb, and cut the engine. The quiet that dropped in after was louder than the road had been.

For one second neither of us moved.

Then Dani breathed all the way out, squared the thing that had been living behind her face into the front of it, and reached for the door handle.

I'd keep the promise. I'd keep my hands where I'd told her I would and let a woman with a ledger voice and the whole machine of the city do the thing I'd wanted to do myself, barefoot, at four in the morning. I'd let Dani be the one who decided what happened in Dani's life, because the only other option was to be one more man who took that decision away from her and told her it was a gift.

I told myself that was the same as protecting her. I told myself letting her hold the wheel and keeping her safe were one act with two names.

It would be a while yet before I learned the difference. Before Stone stood in front of me and told me, in the plainest words anybody in that careful family ever used on me, that I hadn't protected her at all. That I'd protected the bus. That the two had never once been the same thing. But that was a worse week, still some way off, and this was only the gray end of a Sunday, and I didn't know yet how badly I'd need the lesson.

I got out of the car. I went around to her side, not to open her door, she'd have hated that, but to be standing there when she came up out of the seat and into the morning. She did. She looked at the building. She looked at me. Then she squared up and went for the doors, and I walked in beside her, keeping, for one more day, the easy half of a promise whose hard half I had not yet been made to understand.

19

DANI

The elevator up to Brynn's penthouse was the longest forty-three seconds of my life.

Jett stood next to me with his hands in his pockets and his back against the rail. He hadn't said anything in the car since we pulled out of his driveway. Hadn't said anything in the parking garage. Hadn't said anything in the lobby. He was, I'd figured out somewhere on the ride down out of the hills, conserving words for the room we were about to walk into, which I was grateful for, because every word he said before then was a word neither of us got back when we needed it.

I watched the numbers climb. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.

"Hartley."

"Yeah."

"You don't have to do this in any particular order. Tell her what you want to tell her in the order it comes out. She'll keep up."

"Okay."

"And whatever she says to you in there, she still loves you. I know that. I've known her longer than almost anybody in this city and I know what she does when somebody she loves does something that hurts her. She's going to hurt for a minute and then she's going to fix it. That's who she is. You came in with the right person and you're walking out with the same one. I want you to know that before the door opens."

I looked up at him.

"How do you know that," I said.

"Because she watched her father die when she was twelve," he said quietly, "and she watched her mother grieve a stranger for two years before Coach got close, and she's been collecting the people she loves with both hands ever since, because she knows what it costs to lose one. She is not going to lose you over this. I have a lot of money I'd bet on that, Hartley, and I don't bet money on anything."

The elevator dinged.

The doors opened.

He stepped out first. I followed.

The hallway to her door was twenty feet. It felt like more. I walked it with the envelope in my bag and the lawyer call pending and the man at the library somewhere on the other side of the city and the best friend in the world thirty seconds away through a door I'd been walking through for three weeks like a guest.