Page 100 of Her Rival

He pulled out the stool across from mine. He sat down. He put both hands flat on the island between us the way I'd put both my hands flat on Brynn's island when I'd told her everything two days ago.

He took a slow breath.

"I have it," he said, "because I've been making it for eight years and I started making it on purpose, because at eighteen I was a kid who'd been thrown out of his hometown and I was extremely scared of ever having to go back, and the only way I could think of to never have to go back was to make so much money that I was never going to be at the mercy of any man in any room ever again. I started with my signing bonus. I made the first ten million in five years and the next hundred in three after that, and after a certain point the money became its own thing and I let it. I've been a person who quietly owns things for a long time. I have not been a person who talked about the things I quietly owned, because the not-talking was the entire point. The point of having the money was to know it was there. Not to use it. Not to perform it. Not to be a man other people saw the size of."

"Okay."

"And I didn't tell you because I didn't tell anyone. I haven't told Coach. I haven't told Brynn. Rhett knows because Rhett was the person I made the first investment with and Rhett wouldn't be Rhett if he didn't know, but Rhett is the only person in my life who knows the full picture. Victoria knows pieces because she had to be told certain pieces when I bought into the team's concessions subsidiary, which I had to do through an attorney she also uses, but Victoria doesn't know the full picture either. The full picture has, until tonight, been a thing one other man on earth has ever seen, and that man has been carrying it for me for eight years and has never told anybody, and now you've seen the full picture, which means two people on earth have seen it, which means we're now going to have a conversation I've been bracing for a long time."

I sat with that.

I said nothing.

I'd been ready to be angry. I'd practiced the angry version on the deck at four thirty-five. I had a version of the conversation in my head where I told him I was a person, not a security risk, and where I told him that being on the inside of his life meant being told the size of his life, and where I told him he'd been treating me, by not telling, the way his church had treated him, which was as a person who couldn't be trusted with information.

That was the version I'd brought into the kitchen.

The man across the island had not given me the conversation I'd brought with me.

He'd given me a different one.

He'd told me a thing he'd told one other person on earth.

"Five hundred and twelve million dollars," I said again, slower this time.

"Yes."

"Jett."

"Hartley."

"I would have been okay with it."

"I know."

"I would have been okay with you having a hundred dollars or five hundred and twelve million dollars or whatever number was the real number. I would have been okay with it."

"I know that too, Hartley."

"Then why."

"Because I've been hiding it since I was eighteen, and I've been hiding it from people I've loved since I was eighteen, and I've built the entire architecture of my Vegas life around the hiding, and you're the first person I've been with who I've wanted to tell, and I didn't figure out how to tell you fast enough. That's the whole answer. There's no version of it that doesn't end with me apologizing for being slow."

"You should have told me when you hired Hollis."

"Yes."

"You should have told me at the dinner downtown."

"Yes."

"You should have told me, possibly, the morning after the first time we slept together, if you wanted me to feel like I was on the inside of your life and not on the inside of a piece of your life you'd agreed to let me see."

"Yes, Hartley."

"You should have told me."

"I should have told you."