Page 103 of Her Rival

I went to my best friend.

Brynn poured the second glass before I'd finished telling her, which was how I knew it was bad. Brynn rationed wine on a weeknight like a field medic.

"Say the number again," she said.

"Six percent."

"Of."

"The team. Your mom's team. Through three holding companies and a footnote I almost didn't open."

She set the bottle down. Didn't say anything for a second, and the not-saying-anything was its own thing, because Brynn always had something. She looked at the middle distance the way you look at a column of figures that just stopped adding up.

"That absolute vault of a man," she said finally. Some anger in it, some awe, and no effort to sort which.

"You're not mad he didn't tell you?"

"I'm a little mad. I'm going to be a little mad for maybe a day. Then I'm going to be over it, because it's Jett, and I have never once managed to stay mad at Jett, and I quit expecting myself to." She drank. "He's owned a piece of my mother's company since 2022 and sat at her Thanksgiving table and passed me the potatoes. I should be furious. I'm mostly impressed he kept his face straight."

"Are you telling her?"

"Mom signed the part that touches the team. She knows the slice she needs and she's chosen not to know the rest, which is the most Victoria thing a person can do." She tipped her glass at me. "Two Caldwell women sitting on the same secret about the same man. Apparently that's the family business now."

I almost laughed. First thing in two days that came close.

She watched me not-quite-laugh, and something in her settled, like she'd finally gotten the reading she'd been after all night.

"Here's the thing. I've been waiting till you put the glass down to say it." I had not put the glass down. She said it anyway. "You're not actually angry, Dan."

24

JETT

I sat at the kitchen island after the front door closed and I did not get up for forty-three minutes.

I knew because the clock on the oven said seven oh nine when the door clicked shut behind her, and the next time I came up for air it said seven fifty-two. Forty-three minutes, gone, and I couldn't have told you where to. The kitchen hadn't gotten warmer or colder. Her laptop sat closed where she'd closed it. Half a sandwich sat on the plate going stale. I just sat there with all of it.

I didn't move because I hadn't yet decided which thing I was going to do first, and I'd figured out somewhere in the last forty minutes that doing the wrong thing first was going to set me up to do the wrong thing second.

The list of things I was not going to do was longer than the list of things I was.

I was not going to text her. I'd told her I'd text her once tomorrow morning, once tomorrow night, neither one asking her to come back. I was going to keep that promise.

I was not going to call Brynn. Brynn was about to be the woman across a glass of wine from Dani for the next eight hours, and calling Brynn to ask her to lobby for me would have been the move of a man who didn't trust the woman he'd just told he loved to come back to him on her own timing, and that man was not the man I was going to be tonight.

I was not going to call Coach. Coach didn't need to know about this, for the same reason Coach didn't need to know about most of the things in my life, which was that I'd built my life specifically so I wouldn't have to bring most of it to Coach.

I was not going to drive past her best friend's building. I was not going to circle her best friend's block. I was not going to do any of the small physical-presence things a less-controlled man would have done in the first three hours after the woman he loved left his house with her laptop bag packed.

What I was going to do was sit in the kitchen.

I sat in the kitchen.

The phone vibrated on the counter at eight oh one.

Brynn.

She made it here. She is on my couch with a glass of wine. She is okay. She is going to be okay. She told me what happened. I will not be calling you tonight. I will not be reporting to you. I am telling you she got here safe because the only thing I think you have a right to know tonight is that she got here safe. Go to bed, Sturgill.