Page 78 of Her Rival

"Yes."

"Like, by-the-textbook cruel. Like, terror-of-his-adolescence cruel."

"Yes."

"And he forgave you for it."

"He's in the process of."

"And you slept with him last night."

"Yes."

"Okay."

She turned. Walked to the cupboard. Got a glass. Poured water from the dispenser on the fridge. Drank the whole thing standing at the counter. Set the glass down.

She turned back.

"I'm going to say a thing," she said, "and you're both going to let me say it without interrupting, and then I'm going to say what I want to do, and then we're going to do it. Deal?"

"Deal," I said.

"Deal," Jett said.

"Okay." She put her hands back on the counter. She did not look away from me. "The thing I want to say is this. I've loved you since I was eighteen. There's no information you could give me, this morning or any morning, that's going to change that. None. There's no shape of cruelty you could have committed at any age I haven't been alive for that would make me stop being in your corner. I want you to know that, Dani, because I have a feeling you've spent the last three weeks bracing for me to say something that would prove the opposite, and I'm telling you to put down the bracing. I'm not going anywhere."

I started to cry.

She kept talking.

"That said. The thing I'm going to be hurt about for a while, Dan, is not that you were cruel to him in high school. I knew you were cruel in high school. Not specifically. Generally. You told me when we were twenty about a thing you'd done to a girl named Cassie at a slumber party in tenth grade and you cried about it for an hour, and I told you then that I forgave you for any of it before you told me, because that's how I work and that's how I'm going to keep working. I'm not hurt about the cruelty. I'm not hurt about Jett. I'm hurt that you didn't tell me about your father."

"Bry."

"You've had me for eight years, Dan. I've been your person. And you've been carrying a shoebox under your bed in Brooklyn that I didn't know existed and a man on the other end of it I didn't know was a man you were running from, and I had no idea. I've asked you about him. You told me he wasn't in your life. That's been the phrase. Three words. Not in my life. For eight years. I didn't push. I didn't ask. I believed you because you wanted me to believe you, and I've been a person you could tell and you didn't tell me, and that's the part that hurts."

She stopped.

She was crying now too. Not big. Just leaking, the way she did when she didn't want to be crying but the body had other plans.

I came around the island. I put my arms around her. She let me.

We stood there in her kitchen for I don't know how long, the two of us crying very quietly into each other's shoulders, Jett a step away at the island with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the floor, giving us the space he'd clearly known we were going to need. He didn't move. He didn't perform. He just stood there and waited.

When Brynn pulled back, she put her hand on my face. Her thumb brushed my cheekbone. The way her mother had done in the chair on the forty-fourth floor.

"You're telling me now," she said.

"I'm telling you now."

"Okay. Then I'm going to tell you what I want to do."

"Okay."

She looked at Jett. She looked back at me.

"Here's what I want. I want you here tonight, in my guest room, with a security car at my door until Marielle Cho says the threat's contained. The plan is the plan, Dan. My mother and Hollis can run the plan. My one job today is you, in this apartment, where I can see you."