Page 34 of Her Rival

He wanted me to know he was close. That was the whole purpose of the photograph. He hadn't delivered an actual threat because he hadn't needed to. The photograph was the threat. The point was to put me on edge. The point was that I was supposed to make a panic decision in the next forty-eight hours. The wrong one. The one he could exploit. He'd been raising me my whole life to make exactly the kind of decision he wanted me to make in this exact kind of moment.

I was not going to make it.

I was not going to call Brynn at one in the morning. I was not going to call Jett. I was not going to leave Vegas. I was not going to go to Tennessee. I was not going to do any of the things he wanted me to do.

I was going to bed.

I was going to wake up in the morning. Drink coffee. Go to my interview on Tuesday and do my job. I was going to put the photograph in my laptop bag, where Brynn wouldn't find it, and carry it around as evidence of a thing I knew, and make the decision about who to tell on my own schedule. Not his.

I'd been giving my father control over my decisions for twenty-six years. I was not going to do it tonight.

I put the photograph in the side pocket of my laptop bag.

I went to bed.

I did not sleep, but the not-sleeping was mine.

That was the thing I gave myself, on a Friday night in a glass palace in his city, with an envelope full of him under the bed in my best friend's penthouse. I gave myself the not-sleeping. He didn't get to take that from me. He could close in. He could find me. He could pay a man with a camera to photograph me in a parking lot. He could not have the inside of my own head.

That was not nothing.

That was, in fact, the only thing I'd ever managed to keep from him.

I lay in the dark and I kept it.

Tuesday was three days away.

He was, I was very certain, closer.

12

JETT

She came to the house on a Tuesday and a Thursday, and the second time she came she laughed.

I'd been doing my job for two and a half weeks by then. The job of being the polished, sanded-down, cold-war version of myself across a kitchen island from a woman I had not figured out how to be in a room with otherwise. I gave her hockey. I gave her quotes. I gave her the precise rationed amount of myself I'd decided, in the players' lot a week and a half ago, I was willing to give her. Which was not much. Which was holding the line between her and the kid in the suit by exactly the muscle I'd built at twenty-two in order to leave Tennessee and never look back.

The line was holding. The job was holding.

The thing I hadn't factored in, when I designed the line, was the laughing.

The thing about Dani Hartley laughing was that I'd never heard her do it.

Not at seventeen. Not back home. I'd been three years in her orbit at school, and the closest I'd come to her actual laugh was the long mean trilling sound she used to make in the hallway with her friends when somebody walked past in the wrong shoes. The sound she'd aimed in my direction at least a hundred times. The sound I'd heard in my head for years afterward when I couldn't sleep. That was the only Ashley Hartley laugh I had on file, and I'd filed it under do not play.

She made a different sound on a Tuesday at my kitchen island when she misread one of her own notes.

She'd been asking me about the second-line forecheck and gotten the names wrong, called Tank "Moose" and Moose "Tank," and looked down at her notebook and made a small horrified noise, and then a slightly larger noise, and then a real one. An actual laugh. Head down, hand over her face, shoulders going. The entire animal sound of a person who'd genuinely amused herself in spite of herself and was not in control for about three seconds.

I sat across the island holding the bottle of water I'd just refilled for her and forgot, for the whole duration of those three seconds, what I was doing in the room.

She caught herself. Looked up. Saw me looking. Her hand went flat against her notebook and her face shut down, the soft animal thing of her laughter gone in a tenth of a second, and she said, Sorry. Where were we, and I said Tank, and we kept going.

But I'd heard it now.

And it wasn't the trilling thing from the hallway in 2015. It was an entirely different sound, made by an entirely different woman. Smaller. Plainer. A sound that came out of her chest and not her throat. That surprised her. That she didn't want to be making in the room with me.

The first time she'd laughed in my hearing in nine years, and it had been at her own notes.