Page 72 of Her Rival

"Hollis can have a lawyer on the phone in twenty minutes. Victoria can authorize the letter from her phone in another ten. It can be served by hand at the library inside an hour from now if you give me a yes."

"You already had this planned out."

"I had it planned out at four in the morning while you slept. I planned it three different ways. This was the one I was going to recommend if you asked. I wasn't going to recommend it without you asking."

I looked at him. I looked at him across his kitchen island with my coffee cooling between my hands.

"Why are you doing this," I said.

He set the phone down. He looked at me with the same controlled attention he'd looked at me with on Friday night when I walked into his kitchen with the photograph in my hand.

"Because you came to me," he said.

"That's not the whole answer."

"It's the part I'm comfortable saying out loud at ten in the morning on a Sunday twenty days after I sat down across from you in a conference room. The rest is a longer conversation."

"Okay."

"All right."

I picked up his phone. I looked at the screen. I handed it back.

"Call Hollis," I said. "Yes."

"Okay."

"And Jett."

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, Hartley."

He picked up the phone. He stepped out onto the deck.

I sat at the kitchen island in a t-shirt that was too big for me and a pair of leggings and a hair tie that had been on his nightstand for ten hours, and I watched him through the wall of glass, pacing the deck with the phone to his ear and the morning sun warm on the back of his hair, and I thought about a man at a library terminal in a city he shouldn't be in, and about the fact that for the first time in my entire life there was someone in my corner making phone calls on my behalf without asking me to perform gratitude for the calls being made.

He came back in at ten forty-two.

"Hollis is on it. The lawyer's name is Marielle Cho. She's handled four stalkers for the Caldwell organization in the last three years and she's never lost. She'll call you within the hour to take your statement. The letter can be served at the library this afternoon if your father's still there, and if not, wherever Hollis's man is when she's ready."

"Understood."

"You're going to call Brynn now."

"Now."

"Now. Before the lawyer calls. So Brynn hears it from you and not from her mother."

"Okay."

He slid the kitchen phone toward me. His landline, which I hadn't known he had. He sat down next to me. He didn't touch me, but he sat close enough that his arm was along the counter against the side of mine, and the warmth of it was steady, and I picked up the phone and dialed Brynn.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Dan?"