Page 106 of Her Rival

There was a game in it. Seattle, at home, a team we should have handled the last two times and hadn't. I'd be at the rink by four. I'd put the gear on the way I'd put it on nine hundred times. I'd stand for the anthem next to Stone with a chest that had a brand-new thing living in it, and I'd play sixty minutes for a slumping team with my whole life sitting in a guest room across town waiting to come back, and that was new, and it did not make me worse. It was the first thing in three weeks that hadn't.

I went to get through it.

25

DANI

I drove back up into the hills at three in the afternoon on a Thursday.

I hadn't slept the night before. I'd left Brynn's a little after one with two glasses of wine in me and the thing she'd said on the couch still sitting in my chest, that I wasn't actually angry. She'd said it the way she said everything, like a fact about my face she'd been reading all night, and I'd lain awake in the guest room until I found out she was right.

I'd walked into a man's kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon believing the man to be a certain shape. I'd walked out knowing he was a different shape. The difference wasn't bad. It wasn't even surprising in retrospect. But it was a thing my body needed a night to absorb. My body had been operating against a wrong picture for three weeks and was now being asked to recalibrate it.

The recalibration was, it turned out, not the same thing as anger.

I hadn't been angry by the time I drove away. I'd been calibrating.

I'd finished the calibrating at six this morning.

At six fifteen I'd sent him the second text I knew he wasn't expecting. Coming back today. Don't make plans. He'd written back inside of thirty seconds. No plans. The kitchen is yours.

I'd stayed at Brynn's all day on purpose, because I wanted the day apart to be a full day and not a half-day, because I wanted us both to know the day had been a real thing and not a pause. Brynn made me lunch. We went for a walk around the rooftop garden of her building. She asked me, at two, whether I was actually going to be okay, and I said yes, and she looked at me long enough to verify the yes was real, and then she told me to go.

I drove.

The Pontiac was in the gravel turnaround when I came up. I parked next to it. I sat in the SUV a long minute with the engine off.

I checked my hair. Checked my face. I'd washed both at Brynn's an hour ago and I hadn't, in the three minutes since I'd pulled in, done anything to either, but I checked them anyway, because I was a woman about to walk back through a door I'd walked out of twenty hours earlier and the checking was a thing my hands wanted to do.

I got out. I went to the front door.

He'd been watching from the kitchen. I knew because the front door opened before I could reach for the handle. He was standing in the doorway in the same hoodie he'd worn Wednesday night, his hair slightly damp from a shower twenty minutes old. His face wore the small still expression of a man who'd been waiting in his own kitchen for the door to open, and had decided, when he heard the SUV come up the drive, that he'd be the thing on the other side of the door, not the thing the door opened to find.

"Hartley," he said.

"Sturgill."

"You came back."

"I told you I would."

"I know. I'm acknowledging it."

I had not, until that exact moment, fully understood that I hadn't yet, in the time I'd known him, made him uncertain about whether I was going to come back to a thing. He'd built his life around handling other people's uncertainty. He had not, until twenty hours ago at his kitchen island, had to sit alone in a house with the uncertainty of whether the woman he loved was going to walk back through his front door. And the fact that he was standing in the doorway right now telling me he was acknowledging that I'd told him I was coming back was the quiet tell that he'd spent the day not believing it all the way until I pulled into the driveway.

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"I love you."

"I love you too, Hartley."

"Can I come in."

"Yes."

He stepped back. I came in. He closed the door behind me and flipped the deadbolt, the absent-minded muscle memory of a man who lived alone in a house in the hills and was used to being responsible for locking his own doors.