Page 41 of Her Rival

"She knows she's a good egg."

"She likes hearing it."

I left.

I drove down through the city in Brynn's SUV with the morning still grey on the dashboard and the marble sitting quiet between my ribs. The cabin smelled like Brynn. Her coffee. The faint pine of whatever she'd hung from the mirror last month and forgotten about. The not-smelling-like-him of it was a thing I noticed for the entire drive without meaning to. I'd spent ninety minutes in his kitchen the night before and the night before that. The leather of his stool was still a thing I could feel against my back. The smell of olive oil and garlic and his soap had attached itself to some part of my brain I hadn't figured out how to detach it from, and I drove through Vegas at nine-thirty in a car that didn't smell like him and I missed the smell of him with a specific physical sensation in my chest the size of a small fist.

I'd known the man for nineteen days.

I'd kissed him for half of half a heartbeat at his front door the night before.

I was driving to ask his boss's mother why I'd been chosen to write a story about him.

The whole shape of my life had been rearranged in nineteen days by a man whose mouth I hadn't so much as touched twice.

I parked four blocks from the building, because the garage rates downtown were criminal and I'd been raised by a woman who counted nickels. I walked the four blocks in heels not made for it and let the morning desert sun hit my face and made myself remember I was a working journalist on assignment going to talk to her source's owner, and the small fist in my chest eased about an eighth of a turn.

By the time I got to the elevator I had my professional face on.

By the time I got to the forty-fourth floor I had it all the way on.

It would hold, I told myself, for the duration of the meeting.

Victoria's office was on the forty-fourth floor of a building two blocks off the Strip, in a glass tower that didn't have her name on it because she didn't need it on there. The assistant walked me down a long hallway with no art and one window that looked out at the entire valley laid open, the way Brynn's penthouse view did, the way Jett's house did, the way Caldwell Arena did from the inside. Every space connected to this family had been built to look at the valley from above. I hadn't noticed until that morning that the four people I'd spent the most time with in this city all lived in rooms that looked down.

Victoria was at her desk. Two screens. Coffee. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. She looked up when the assistant let me in and her whole face warmed by some small fixed increment, the same unhurried softening it had done in Brynn's living room three weeks ago. The look of a woman who'd decided to like me and would not be undeciding it.

She came around the desk and gestured to the seating area, two chairs and a small table by the window. I sat in one and she sat in the other, and the assistant brought a pot of coffee and two cups and disappeared.

"You look like a woman with a question," Victoria said.

"Same eyebrow Brynn used about an hour ago."

"She got it from me. What can I do for you, Dani."

I sat a second with the coffee warming the cup against my hands. I'd rehearsed the question in the car. The rehearsal hadn't stuck. I had to just say it.

"Why did you pick me to write this piece."

She looked at me.

"Has someone told you something that made you ask that."

"No. I'm asking because I've been working on this for two and a half weeks and I haven't yet asked you, and I think I'm someone who'd rather ask it than not."

"Okay." She set her cup down. Folded her hands in her lap. Didn't look away. "I picked you because I read The Kitchen on Iris Street twice in September and a third time in October when I needed to make a decision, and the third time I knew. I picked you because Brynn has been telling me for eight years that you're the most talented person she's ever met. I picked you because the editors I respect in New York described you, when I asked, with the kind of language they reserve for people whose names they think the rest of us are going to know in a few years. I picked you because you spent four years not letting any of them see what you could actually do, and I had a working theory that you'd been waiting for someone to hand you the piece on a tray and tell you it was your turn."

She paused. Watched my face.

"That's the answer," she said. "If you came here expecting a different one, you should know I don't have a different one."

I sat with that.

"You didn't know I had a history with Jett," I said. Quietly.

She didn't move.

"I knew you had a history with him," she said. "I did not know what the history was."