Page 39 of Her Rival

"You asked."

"You're not helpful."

"I never said I was helpful. I said I was here. There's a difference."

I almost laughed. Made some sound on the way to one.

"Friday," he said.

"What."

"Come over Friday. Whether you want to or not. Come over Friday."

"Okay."

We hung up.

I stood in my entryway and looked at the door I'd kissed her against half an hour before. I thought about Tuesday. I thought about the question she'd asked me. I thought about what Victoria Caldwell, who did not make accidents, had done by picking Dani Hartley to write a magazine piece about me.

Then I went to bed in a house too big for one person, and I lay in the dark, and I did the math on the next forty-eight hours.

Tuesday was three days away.

She'd come into my kitchen. The recorder would be off. I'd ask her the question I'd been avoiding for two and a half weeks.

She'd tell me as much of the answer as she had.

And I'd tell her, I realized as I lay there, that I'd been on her side for longer than either of us had agreed to. Not all of it. Not the money. Not the kid in the suit. Just enough of it to let her see what kind of man was choosing not to burn her down. Just enough to let her decide what she was going to do with that information.

Tuesday.

Three days.

I closed my eyes and tried to count my way to sleep.

I made it to four hundred before I gave up.

13

DANI

I woke up Friday morning at six and lay in the dark of Brynn's guest room and tried to decide whether I was the kind of woman who'd kissed a man last night. The answer was that I was. The next question was whether I was going to panic about it. The answer was that I was not.

That was the new thing.

I'd been bracing for the panic the whole drive home from the hills. The entire forty minutes down through the desert and back into the city. I'd waited for it on the elevator up to the penthouse, the way I'd waited for it Monday night in the parking garage. I'd carried it up to the guest room, set it on the dresser, turned to deal with it the way a woman deals with a thing that's been making her sick.

It hadn't been there.

What was there instead was a different thing. A small clear hard thing about the size of a marble, sitting quiet in the center of my chest. A decision, or the precursor of one. It had the weight of something that had been forming for two and a half weeks without my noticing and had finally, on his front step in the desert cold, finished forming.

I didn't yet know the shape of the decision.

I knew the weight of it.

I lay there and watched the day come up grey through the window I'd cracked the night before, and I thought about Jett Sturgill's mouth on mine for half of half a heartbeat, and I did not panic about it.

That was the new thing. That was the only thing I had to work with at six in the morning, and it turned out to be enough.