Page 119 of Her Rival

"Mom."

"I left him after he found the magazine. The one with your essay. He stood at the kitchen table reading it for two hours one morning in September and he didn't say anything to me when he was done, and then he got in his truck and drove to the post office and mailed an envelope, and that was the morning I understood, after twenty-six years, that the man I'd been protecting myself from was a man I was also helping. I could not be a person who was helping him do that to you, baby. I left him on a Tuesday morning while he was at his second job. I left a note. I have not been back."

I had not been crying.

I'd been, the entire phone call, in the controlled flat space I went into when I had to receive a thing my body hadn't yet given me permission to feel.

I started crying when she said I left a note.

The crying came out of me sideways. It came out the way it hadn't come out at any other point in the previous twelve hours, which I'd spent crying in stages with Jett on the rug and against his chest in the bed. This was a different kind of crying. The other crying had been about being told I was loved. This crying was about being told I'd been protected, late and incompletely but truly, by a woman who'd spent twenty-six years not being able to.

"Mom."

"I know, baby."

"You left him."

"I left him in September."

"Why didn't you call me."

"Because I didn't know what to call you and tell you. I knew you'd figure out from him that I'd left, and I knew I wasn't going to be the one to tell you, because I'd been telling you for twenty-six years and you'd been not believing me, and I knew it wasn't your job to believe me until I'd actually done something."

"Did he know about Marielle."

"Marielle didn't give me his information when she called. She told me a no-contact order was being filed and she offered to make mine concurrent. I've spent the last three days deciding whether to take the offer. I'm taking it. I'm going to call her back this afternoon."

"Good."

"How is he paying for any of this. He never had the money to get to me before."

"He took the savings when I left. Both accounts, and the truck his daddy left him. I didn't fight him for it. I have thought, these three days, that the money he found you with is money I left sitting where he could reach it. I am sorry for that too, baby. I am sorry for a great many things."

"Dani."

"Yes."

"I want to see you."

I'd been bracing for the question and the question had still landed harder than I'd been braced for. I closed my eyes again. The headboard against the back of my head. Jett's hand around mine. The morning bright all the way up through the windows.

"Mom."

"I'm not asking you to come here. I'm not asking you to come to Tennessee. I'm asking. I'm asking if I can come there. To Las Vegas. For a few days. With my own money. With my own ticket. I'll stay in a hotel. I won't stay in your space. I'm not asking for any other thing than to see your face, baby. I have not seen it in eight years and I would like to see it once before I do or do not get to see it again."

"Mom."

"You don't have to decide now. Take a day."

"I don't need a day."

"Take a day anyway. I'm asking."

I opened my eyes. I looked at Jett.

He looked back at me. He did not tell me what to say. He did not nod yes. He did not shake his head. He just looked at me, and I knew, in the way I'd been learning to know, that whatever I said next was a thing he was going to be on the inside of with me.

"Mom," I said.