Page 19 of Her Rival

The thing about going to a man's house to break is you have to break before you ring the doorbell. You can't get all the way to the doorstep with the words still inside you and then break in the man's actual living room, because then the breaking happens to the room and the man both, and that's bad manners. And I'd been raised, whatever else I'd been raised with, to have manners. So I sat in the car and did the work of getting the worst of it out where Rhett wouldn't have to see it. Dragged the back of my hand across my eyes a couple times. Breathed through my nose. Gathered the loose pieces of myself into a vague person-shape.

Then I went up and rang the bell.

Victoria opened the door, which I hadn't expected, and her face did the brief soft thing it did when she saw me. The oh, you thing. Victoria Caldwell, terrifying woman, had decided about a year ago that she liked me, and once Victoria decided to like you, she did it the way she did everything. Completely. For keeps. I had not yet gotten used to being on the receiving end of that.

"Hi, kid," she said.

"Hi, Vic."

"He's on the back deck. Six-pack in the fridge in the garage if you want it. I'm making myself scarce." She squeezed my arm as she passed, brief, no comment, the way Victoria touched the people she'd decided to keep. Then she was up the stairs and gone.

I got the six-pack. Went through the house, through the kitchen, out the slider to the deck. Rhett was already out there, fire pit going, hair still wet from his shower, in a henley and the same kind of joggers we'd all been wearing for ten years. A bottle of tonic water sweating on the table next to him.

I set the six-pack down. Opened one. Sat.

For a while we sat the way two men sit on a deck and don't say anything. The fire popped. Somewhere down the valley a coyote called. Vegas glittered past the rim of his land like somebody'd tipped a tray of broken glass into the dark. I drank the first beer in maybe four pulls and opened the second before I realized I was doing it.

"Slow down," Rhett said. Not a chirp. Just a flat observation.

"Yeah."

I slowed down.

He waited. He was good at waiting. He'd been a man who waited eighteen months in plain sight for a woman who couldn't yet see him. Waiting another forty-five minutes for me was nothing.

I drank half the second beer. Set it down. Looked at the fire.

"I know her," I said.

He didn't ask which her. Didn't say who. He just turned his head slightly, the smallest tilt. The listening posture.

"The writer," I said. "Brynn's friend. Dani Hartley. The one doing the feature." I rolled the bottle between my palms. "She and I grew up in the same town. We went to high school together. I knew her then."

He waited.

"She bullied the absolute hell out of me, man. For years. Sophomore through senior year. She was the worst of them. She's the reason I left home as fast as I left home." The words came easier than I'd thought once I'd started, which was the trick of it. The only hard part was getting them started. "There was this thing she did our junior year. A dance thing. A whole set-up where she pretended to like me for a couple weeks, then made me look like an idiot for it in front of the whole school. After that it was bad until I graduated. Then I got out. And I have not said her name out loud in nine years."

Rhett let that sit.

"Brynn doesn't know," I said. "Brynn's been her best friend for eight years and Dani never told her any of it. Brynn doesn't know I knew her in high school. Doesn't know what Dani did. Doesn't know the person she introduced me to on Monday is the same person I've spent years not being. Brynn has no idea."

"And on Monday Dani walked into the conference room."

"You didn't say anything."

"I didn't say anything."

He thought about that. Looked at the fire. Took a sip of his tonic water. The thinking was real. That was the thing about Rhett: he actually thought when he was thinking. He wasn't just queueing up his next sentence.

"Why didn't you," he said.

"Because to tell Brynn what Dani was, I'd have had to tell Brynn what I was. The kid she made me. The before-version. And I couldn't." I stopped. Started again. "I've built a whole life out here on top of that kid. I don't even know if he's still in there. I'm not going to find out for the first time at twenty-six, on a Monday afternoon, with a national magazine watching."

He nodded once, small. He got it. The fact that he got it without me having to argue any of it was such a relief I had to look away for a second, because my eyes had gone hot in a way I wasn't going to let him see.

"So you're going to keep doing the interviews."

"I'm going to keep doing the interviews."