Page 40 of Her Rival

I got up. Made coffee in Brynn's kitchen quietly so I wouldn't wake her. Took it to the guest room. Sat on the bed with my laptop open in my lap and opened a fresh document.

I wrote a sentence.

A man who has been running for nine years can be identified, with very little training, by the way he holds his shoulders in his own kitchen.

I read it back. Added a comma. Read it back. Deleted the comma. Read it a third time. I leaned my head against the headboard and did the thing I hadn't let myself do since I was twenty-two, held a sentence in my head and listened for whether it was the right one or the wrong one. It was the right one. The holding of it felt like a muscle waking up after a long sleep. Slowly. Painfully. With a small sharp pleasure.

I wrote another.

He cooked spaghetti for me because he didn't know how to ask me to stay. He let me ask my own question at the window of my own car because he didn't yet know how to ask his.

I read it back. Changed my own car to a car I had borrowed. The borrowed felt important. It told a reader, without telling them anything they didn't need to know, that the car was someone else's. That the woman in it hadn't yet figured out which car was hers.

I wrote for forty minutes.

It was the most sustained writing I'd done in four years.

None of it was for the article. The article was a long-form feature about the championship season of the Vegas Vipers and what it took to build a team. What I was writing in Brynn's guest room at six-fifteen was not that. It was about a man whose name I hadn't yet typed, in a kitchen whose details I hadn't yet named, doing things I hadn't yet let mean anything. It was about the silence between us in the doorway. The small dry kiss neither of us had stopped. The thing his face had done when I said don't say my name like that, which I now realized my own face had done right back, and which neither of us had named, and which was the actual reason both of us had been forced to lie about what happened.

I wrote two thousand words.

I closed the document without naming the file.

I closed the laptop.

I drank what was left of my coffee and sat with the marble in my chest and understood what the decision was that I'd been forming all night.

I was going to ask Victoria the question I'd asked Jett.

Not because she'd done anything wrong. Not because I suspected her of anything. Because the question, asked of her, was the only honest version I could ask. Why am I writing this article. Why me. Why a woman whose only published byline in four years is six hundred words about a grandmother. Why a woman who hasn't been to Vegas in eight months for reasons her own best friend doesn't know. Why this particular outsider, dropped into the inside of a man I've arranged my whole life around not coming close to, to tell his story to a million strangers.

It might not mean anything.

It almost certainly didn't. Victoria would have a clean answer about the essay, about Brynn's word, about my editing track record, and the clean answer would be the true answer, and that would be that.

But I needed to hear the clean answer. I needed to have asked.

I called her office at seven thirty, which I had a working theory Victoria would consider the earliest civilized hour to call her office, and asked her assistant if she had ten minutes today. The assistant came back inside of three minutes and said Mrs. Caldwell could see me at ten.

I showered. Dressed in the dark blue dress I'd brought for moments I hadn't been sure I'd need. Put on the earrings my grandmother left me. Drank a second cup of coffee at Brynn's island, and Brynn came in around eight in her robe and looked at me with one raised eyebrow and said, "You look like a woman with a meeting."

"Your mom," I said.

"About the piece?"

"What else."

She made her own coffee and stood at the counter and watched me over the rim of her cup. The gentle perceptive Brynn watching that didn't push and didn't look away.

"You came in late," she said.

"Session ran long."

"Mm."

I let the mm sit. Brynn let it sit too. We were excellent at it now, the two of us, at letting things sit. She'd been right at the island Friday night. She loved me. She loved him. She was going to wait for one of us to bring it to her, and she'd committed to that out loud, and she meant it.

"Tell my mother she's a good egg," she said.