Page 28 of Her Rival

"She wants to see you."

"Mary Beth."

"I'm just telling you what she said. I'm not asking you to do anything. I know we don't do that with you. I know the deal. I know the rules. She just said it and I told her I'd tell you."

The deal was that I didn't come home and they didn't ask. The rules were that I sent money, a quiet amount, untraceable, through a foundation in my sister's name that she pretended she didn't know about, and they didn't come looking, and the family kept on being a family without me in it. Which was the way I'd needed it to be, and the way I'd carefully arranged it at eighteen, and the way it had stayed for eight years.

The rules were, in other words, the same rules I'd been operating with about Ashley Hartley. And they appeared to be falling apart along the same fault line at the same time.

"I'll think about it," I said.

"That's more than I expected."

"Don't get excited."

"Jettson."

"Yeah."

"You sound different."

"I know."

She let that go. She was good at letting things go, my sister. It was the most useful thing she'd ever been to me. She'd been the one who let me leave at eighteen without trying to stop me, and the one who kept my number from our father in the months after, and she'd earned, in the silent unrewarded way certain people do, an absolute permanent pass from me for the rest of our lives.

"I'll call you next week," I said.

"Okay."

We hung up.

I sat on the deck a long time after that. The sun went down on the valley. The lights came up. I drank a beer and I didn't think about Dani Hartley, and then I thought about her, and then I didn't, and then I did, and the pattern was the same as it had been at three in the morning. Except now it was sitting on top of a conversation with my sister I hadn't had in three months, and a Coke at Brynn's bar, and the small unwelcome fact that I appeared to have decided, somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, that I was no longer in the business of welding shut.

I was going to have to figure out what I was in the business of instead.

I went inside the empty house and tried to figure it out. Made it about half an hour before I gave up and went to bed.

Tuesday was three days away.

She was three days away.

I shoved that out of my head, turned off the light, and lay in the dark counting my way to sleep the way I'd learned to count when I was a boy. Twenty heartbeats with the breath in. Twenty heartbeats with the breath out. A trick from the church, ironically. A thing they'd given me without meaning to. A thing I'd taken with me when I left, the way I'd taken so few things, and held onto.

I slept eventually.

In the morning Tuesday was a little closer.

It kept getting closer all weekend.

11

DANI

You cannot write a man from a conference room.

I'd known that going in, and I'd let myself do it anyway for a week and a half. Because the conference room was a place where I held the pen and he held still, and that arrangement suited a woman who'd spent her whole life arranging the furniture so the dangerous thing in the room stayed where she could see it. But the piece I was being paid to write was not a piece about a man who held still. It was a piece about a man who, eight years ago, walked into a league that didn't want him and made it want him. You don't get that from across a table. You get it from the ice.

So I emailed Brynn, who emailed her mother, and at six forty the next morning a security guard I'd never met held a door for me into the cold dark bowl of Caldwell Arena and pointed me at a row of seats behind the glass at center ice. I sat down in the empty building with a coffee going lukewarm in my hand and my notebook open to a clean page, and I waited.