Page 27 of Her Rival

"Deal?"

"Deal."

She set the knife down. Turned around. Looked at me with the steady direct eyes she'd gotten from her mother. The eyes I'd watched Victoria Caldwell use to take grown men apart in a boardroom.

"Are you going to hurt her, Jett."

I had not been expecting that question.

I'd been expecting did something happen. I'd been expecting are you sleeping with her. I'd been expecting what's going on between you two, all of which I had answers prepared for, all of which were lies wrapped in technically-true sentences. I had not been expecting Brynn to skip every layer and go straight to the load-bearing thing, the only thing about it that actually mattered to her. The safety of her best friend.

The honest answer came up out of me before I could decide to give it.

"No," I said. "Bry. No. I'm not going to hurt her. I would not do that."

She watched my face a long moment. The lemon scent was up between us, sharp and clean and out of nowhere.

"Okay," she said. The good okay. The one I'd been hoping for. The one that meant I believe you and we are moving on. She picked the knife back up. "Then sit there and drink your Coke and watch the tennis and don't bring this up again until you actually have something you want to tell me, and I'll return the favor on her end. Deal."

"Deal."

She finished her lemons. Put them in the well. Wiped her hands on a bar towel. Then she paused, looked at me sideways, and added the thing the way she added the dangerous things. Casual. Light. Like she was just thinking out loud.

"You're being a lot like her right now, by the way."

"Like who."

"Like Dani. The both of you doing the same version of fine. The both of you not telling me what's actually going on. The both of you coming into rooms after spending time with each other looking like you've been hit by a small truck." She shrugged. "I'm just saying. The pattern's interesting. From the outside."

"Bry."

"Drink your Coke, Sturgill."

I drank my Coke.

She turned to the four guys at the other end and brought them another round and chatted about the tennis, and I sat at the corner of her bar and tried to feel less like a man who'd been read top to bottom by a woman who'd just promised not to read him. Which was the trick of Brynn. That was always the trick of Brynn. She could put you back together and let you know she could take you apart again any time, and she'd respect you enough not to.

I drove home around five.

The house was quiet the way it always was. I went out onto the deck and called my sister back, which I hadn't planned to do, which I'd been refusing to do for three months. But somewhere between The Hideout and my own driveway something had shifted. I'd decided that the door I'd been welding shut on my mother and the door I'd been welding shut on Ashley Hartley were the same door, and they were both already cracked, and I might as well crack the easier one a little wider while I was at it.

My sister picked up on the second ring.

"Jettson."

"Mary Beth."

A long silence. There always was. We were not people who knew how to talk to each other, my sister and I. We grew up in the same house with the same parents and shared exactly no language for the things we'd both survived, because the only language we'd ever been given was the language of the church, and the church didn't have words for any of it.

"Mom?" I said.

"She's not great, Jettson."

"How not great."

"She had a thing in October. Didn't tell me about it for two weeks. The doctor said it's the kind of thing that's a warning, that the next one will probably be worse. She's seventy-three. She's been smoking since she was fourteen. She's not going to listen to anybody about any of it."

"Okay."