Page 54 of Her Rival

I'd been standing in the front hallway of the penthouse for eleven minutes by then, in heels I'd bought in New York at a boutique on Bleecker Street four years ago and worn exactly twice, and a dress Brynn had pulled out of her own closet at three that afternoon and said try it, you absolute idiot. I'd tried it. It fit. Brynn then refused to let me take it off until the moment I left. Navy, short of the knee, a cut I hadn't worn anything close to in four years of editing manuscripts in cardigans. Hair down. I'd put on the lipstick I'd bought for the trip thinking I might wear it once to a hockey game, which I had not, in three weeks, worn.

I'd spent the eleven minutes standing in the hallway and not panicking. That was the thing.

A week ago this kind of standing-and-not-panicking had been a rare, quiet new development. Tonight it was the second time in twenty-four hours that I'd stood somewhere and not panicked at a thing I'd ordinarily have very much panicked about, and I was starting to wonder if the not-panicking was itself a thing I was going to have to get used to.

I'd spent the morning at his house. The early afternoon at Brynn's, telling her enough to not lie to her and not telling her so much she'd call her mother. Brynn took the not-quite-truth without pushing, the way she'd promised over an onion eight days ago. The Hollis Briar update at noon had said my father checked into a motel off Boulder Highway on Friday night and hadn't left since. Hollis had eyes on the door. The man at the door had been working private security in Las Vegas for sixteen years and was unimpressed by my father's caliber of threat. Jett's text at noon had said: Eyes are on. Hollis updates again at six. Dinner at seven still.

That had been the entire text. Dinner at seven still.

I'd stared at it a long minute on Brynn's counter and then put my phone face-up on the counter for the first time in two weeks, and Brynn hadn't commented on the face-up phone, and we'd spent the afternoon doing each other's nails the way we did in college, her bad Spotify playlist on, and I'd cleared my mind of everything for two hours, the way she needed me to as much as I needed me to.

At six forty-five Brynn hugged me at the door and said go get him, not in any of the dozen tones she could've said it in, but in the specific quiet one that meant I see what is happening and I am rooting for you and I will keep not pushing for as long as you need.

I said love you.

I came down to the hallway. I stood there. I did not panic.

The doorman buzzed.

I picked up the intercom.

"Ms. Hartley," he said. "Your gentleman is here."

I went down.

He was waiting in the lobby in a dark navy jacket that didn't look like anything he'd worn to any of our interviews, and which I knew, in the half-second after seeing him in it, he'd bought or specifically chosen for the night. Clean-shaven. Hair combed. The kind of dress shoes a man wears on purpose, not the kind he pulls out of the closet because the dress code requires it. He looked, in the soft warm light of Brynn's lobby at seven on a Saturday, like a man on a date.

He looked at me when I came out of the elevator and his face moved, barely, nothing dramatic and nothing performative. Just a small registering. A stilling. The look of a man who had to consciously rearrange his own attention to manage the fact of a woman walking across a marble floor toward him.

"Hartley," he said.

"Sturgill."

"You look."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"You're not bad yourself."

He smiled. The first time I'd seen him do it on purpose, in front of me, with no joke attached. A small thing. Gone inside a second. But I saw it. He let me see it.

He offered me his arm.

I had not, in my adult life, taken any man's arm. I'd taken Brynn's, for a wedding once. I had not taken a man's. I took his.

The Pontiac was at the curb. I'd been waiting for a town car or an Uber. Instead he'd driven the car himself. The one he'd restored from the frame up over four off-seasons. The 1969 Firebird I'd recognized in his driveway the second time I'd been to his house and not asked about. He opened my door. I got in. The interior was clean and old and smelled like polish and, very faintly, like him. I sat in the front seat of the car I'd been pretending I didn't know was his until two days ago, and the door closed beside me, and the engine caught with the deep certain sound of a thing a man built with his own hands.

We drove downtown.

We didn't talk much. He had the radio low, something old, country-adjacent. He drove the way he did everything I'd now seen him do, with controlled attention, hands at ten and two, eyes scanning the road and the rearview the way a man scans them when he's spent his adult life moving large amounts of his own body through space at speed. I sat with my hands in my lap and the slick of my lipstick already not feeling like a stranger's anymore, and I let myself just be in the car with him. Which was, I was learning, a thing I was going to have to practice repeatedly until it stopped feeling like a tightrope walk.

He parked in front of a restaurant I'd never heard of, two blocks off Fremont, the kind of place that didn't advertise itself from the street.

"I called ahead," he said, killing the engine. "It's quiet. Nobody knows me here. I asked for the back."

"You picked it on purpose."