Page 47 of Her Rival

I looked at it a while. Long enough to make myself understand what I was looking at.

A photograph of Dani, taken from across the players' lot at Caldwell, with a long lens. The kind of long lens you use when you have reason to believe the subject won't consent to being photographed. She was walking from Brynn's SUV to the side entrance. A small digital timestamp in the lower right corner. Wednesday. Four days ago.

A Post-it on the back. I turned it over without taking the photo out of my hand.

Three words in blue ink.

See you soon.

I read the three words. Read them again. Set the photograph face-up on the island between us and left both my hands flat on the counter on either side of it, and I did not move them.

"My father," she said. "It was hand-delivered to the doorman at Brynn's building last night during dinner. Sunday's the deadline he gave me. Tonight he called. From a cell phone. In Tennessee. The first time I've heard his voice in eight years. He's already in Vegas."

I did not move.

I didn't say anything for a long moment, because I'd learned the hard way, in my mid-twenties, in the brief period I spent in therapy nobody on this team knew about, that the worst thing you can do in a room with a woman who's just put something hard on a counter is react too fast. The reaction belongs to the room. The reaction belongs to the air around the counter. The reaction does not belong to my mouth.

So I let it sit.

I let her see me sit with the entire shape of what she'd put in front of me without speaking, and the longer I sat with it the more she eased the smallest possible degree against the counter. The way a body eases when it's been bracing for something and the something hasn't happened.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay."

"Tell me everything."

"I just told you everything."

"Tell me the rest. Tell me what he sounds like. Tell me what he wants. Tell me what he said tonight, word for word, if you can. Tell me how long he's been mailing you. Tell me whether he has ever, in your life, hit you, and I'm asking that very specifically and I'm asking because I need to know how to think about him, not for any other reason."

She looked at me.

She had not, I realized, been expecting that question.

She'd been expecting I'll kill him. She'd been expecting who does this motherfucker think he is. She'd been expecting the kind of male anger that I knew, from watching her sit across from me at five interviews now, her body had been trained to associate with what came next. She'd been bracing for a man's reaction in the room, and she hadn't yet recalibrated that the man's reaction in this room was going to be different.

"He has," she said, very quietly. "Not me. Not often. He hit my mother. A lot."

"Okay."

"He yelled at me. He locked me in places when I was small. He's been writing me letters for eight years and I've kept them in a shoebox under my bed in Brooklyn and not opened most of them. The letters have been escalating since September, because I let my byline appear on an essay and he saw it. He's been threatening this trip for two months. Telling me he was coming. I didn't believe him because he hasn't had the money to make the trip, and now apparently he does, and now he's here."

"Okay."

"You keep saying okay."

"I know."

"Why are you saying okay."

"Because I'm taking it in. Because I want to be very careful about what I say after I've taken it in. Because if I say the first three things I'd normally say, I'd say them wrong and scare you the same way you've already been scared tonight, and I'm not going to do that to you in my kitchen, Hartley."

She looked at me. Her face went soft the way it had at the front door on Thursday. The soft animal thing where she'd stopped controlling it.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"For what."