Page 128 of Her Rival

It was about the box.

I was not going to write the smaller version. I was going to write the true one and put my name on it, the whole name, out loud, on a cover or not on a cover, career or no career, because the piece was true and I'd made it and I was done being a person who made true things and then hid them. He'd sealed the money. Fine. I would write the man without the money. The church town. The kid in the suit. The architecture of a person who'd rather vanish than be known. I'd been writing, I realized, a piece about both of us the whole time, and had only had the nerve to put his name near it.

"There's a game tomorrow night," I told Brynn in the car going back. "Seven o'clock. My mother has a ticket. I have a credential."

"You don't have to go," Brynn said. "Nobody would blame you for not going."

"I'm going," I said.

Not for him. I want that on the record too. I did not decide, in that car, to forgive Jett Sturgill. I did not decide we were going to be okay. I had no information about what he was doing four miles up the hill at that exact moment. No idea that a man was on the phone with a lawyer undoing the very thing he'd done, making himself impossible to lose, walking through every wall he owned.

I just decided I was done hiding.

I was going to go to the building where the whole city could see me. I was going to stand in the press box with my name on a credential and my sober mother in the stands and my true piece half-written on a laptop, and I was going to be a person who showed up in the light. Findable. Reachable. Seeable. Whatever came of it.

If a man who'd spent his life unfindable wanted to find me there, he was going to have to come all the way out into the open to do it.

I did not know yet that he already had.

32

JETT

Brett called at noon on Friday to tell me it was done.

"You're unsealed," he said. "Re-domiciled back, members public, the works. Anything she pulled last month, she can pull again. You're standing in plain sight now." A pause, the Brett pause that meant he was about to say a thing he wasn't paid to say. "For the record, in eight years you've never once asked me to make you more findable. I want you to know I noticed."

"Noted," I said. "Send me everything. Hard copy. The whole file, every entity, every number, the full map. I'm going to give it to her."

"Give it to her." Brett said it back slow, like he was making sure he'd heard right.

"All of it. The thing I have never shown anybody. I'm going to put it in her hands and tell her it's hers to do whatever she wants with. Run it. Sit on it. Burn it. Her call."

"That's eight years of cover, Jett. If she runs it, there's no putting it back."

"I know what it could do." I was already getting in the car. "It's hers. That's the whole point, Brett. I sealed it to control what she could do with me. I don't get to seal it and also decide that was the right call. I unseal it and she chooses. Even if she chooses to put every wall I own on a national cover. That's what the choice is."

I said that to Brett with the engine already running in my driveway. Then I hung up, and I did not put the car in gear.

There was one more door. An easier one. I'd been owing the call for five weeks, and Stone's voice was still in me from Thursday, the thing about which doors I protected and which ones I left welded, and I understood, sitting there with my foot on the brake and the hard drive waiting at the bottom of the hill, that I could not make myself go open the welded one until I'd opened the one that didn't scare me. The practice version. The one where being known couldn't cost me anything I wasn't already sure of.

I called my sister.

She picked up on the second ring. "Took you long enough."

"I know."

"Five weeks. I had you down for dead or married. Couldn't decide which."

"Neither, yet. Working on the math."

That stopped her. I heard her set something down on her end, a pan or a mug, the small sounds of my sister's kitchen two thousand miles away.

"Go on, then," she said.

So I went. The thing first. The one I'd never said to a living soul in plain words.

"I've got money, Mary Beth. More than the foundation. A lot more, the kind with lawyers and islands attached to it. As of about an hour ago every bit of it is sitting out in public where anybody can find it, because I spent eight years making sure nobody could, including you, and I'm done doing that. Whatever Mom needs, it's handled. It was always going to be handled. I should've told you to your face instead of running it through a name on a piece of paper so neither of us had to say it out loud."