Page 31 of Her Rival

"Don't Bry me. I'm cooking you dinner. I get to ask one question."

She set the knife down and turned to face me. Hair up in the messy bun she did when she was actually working in the kitchen and not performing the idea of it, a smear of something on the side of her wrist that was probably olive oil. She looked at me with the steady direct eyes she'd been deploying on me at random intervals since we were eighteen. The eyes that said, I have you, and I am not letting you slip out of this one with a joke.

"Are you okay," she said.

"I'm fine."

"That wasn't the question."

"It was the question. Just phrased softer."

"Dan." She came around the island. Stood next to my stool. Put one hand on my back, not heavy, just there. "You've been here three weeks. You came out broken. You said you'd take Mom's job and breathe for a minute, and I've watched you take the job and not breathe. You go to interviews. You come home. You go to the guest room. You work. You eat what I put in front of you. You laugh at the right places. And you do all of it with the back of your shoulders held the way you used to hold them sophomore year when your dad called your dorm phone and I picked up on the third ring."

I went still.

"I'm not asking what's happening," she said, very gently. "I'm asking are you okay. Right now. In your body. You can lie. I'll know. I just want you on record."

I closed my eyes.

If I'd been a different woman, with a different set of trained reflexes, I'd have laid my head on her shoulder and told her the whole thing. The dance. Tennessee. The envelopes in a shoebox three thousand miles away. The man whose kitchen island I'd sat at on Wednesday night drinking water he'd poured for me while we talked about a sport I'd never bothered to learn until he was the reason to learn it. What he'd looked like a week ago in the video room, and what I was very carefully not looking at him like every session since.

If I'd been a different woman I'd have done it then, with the onion sweating in the pan behind her and Vegas going pink through the glass and my best friend's hand on my back.

I wasn't a different woman.

"I'm okay," I said. "I'm tired."

She let her hand stay there a moment longer. Then she lifted it.

"Okay," she said. The careful Brynn okay, the one she used when she'd decided not to push past a wall I was holding. She went back around the island. Picked the knife up. Diced the rest of the onion. Dropped it in the pan. The smell of it hit, sharp and clean, and the sizzle came up. "But you're coming with me Sunday. The team's doing a thing at The Hideout for Tank's birthday and we're going. I'm not asking. You can sit at the bar with me, I won't make you mingle. But you're going."

"Bry."

"Sunday, Dan. You can avoid him in person. It's not that hard. The man is six-three and easy to spot."

I almost laughed. A sound came out of me that was on the way to one and didn't make it.

She didn't look at me when she said the next thing, because she knew better than to look at me when she said it. She said it to the pan.

"I'm not asking what's between you. Just so we're clear. I had a conversation with Jett at the bar last week. I asked him one question and got the answer I wanted, and I'm going to take that as the deal both of you and I have. I will not poke at this until one of you brings it to me. And when one of you brings it to me, I'm here. I love you. I love him. That's the whole entire scope of my involvement until either of you gives me more, and I'm telling you now so you know exactly what the room looks like."

The onion sizzled. She added garlic. The smell went up into the air.

I looked at the back of her head and I loved her so much it physically hurt, in a way I hadn't felt in years. A clean simple pain in my chest about a friendship I didn't deserve to have and had somehow managed to keep.

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome."

That was all we said about it.

We cooked the rest of dinner the way we'd cooked dinner a thousand times in college. Her on the stove, me on the salad, the radio low, the wine open. We didn't talk about Jett. We didn't talk about my mother. We didn't talk about my father or his letters or the conference room or the video review room or the deadline that was now four and a half weeks away. We talked about a movie we both wanted to watch. A friend from college who'd gotten engaged. Brynn's mother, who'd texted that morning to say she was thinking of taking up tennis.

My phone was on the counter next to the wine bottle. Face down. I hadn't put it face down on purpose, except I had, which was the kind of thing I'd been doing all week without quite admitting it. I checked it once when Brynn turned to put a lid on the pot. Two texts. A magazine I had a subscription to that I was going to cancel. A reminder about a dentist appointment I hadn't rescheduled. Nothing from him.

I hadn't expected anything from him. I hadn't asked anything from him.

We'd done a session Wednesday night at his kitchen island that ended at eight-fifteen with him walking me to my car and saying drive safe, Hartley, and the next session was Tuesday, and there was no version of our particular arrangement that included a check-in text on a Friday at six. The cold-war truce didn't allow for it. The terms we hadn't negotiated out loud had been very clear on the point.