Page 32 of Her Rival

So I put the phone back face-down on the counter.

I hadn't asked.

I'd also not been able to stop, all afternoon, on every walk through the kitchen, every reach for water, every glance toward the island, from checking whether the phone had lit up.

It hadn't. It wouldn't. The clock was Tuesday and would stay Tuesday, and the woman who'd decided last weekend not to give her father control over her panic decisions was not about to give a man she hadn't yet kissed control over how many times an hour she looked at the back of her own phone. And yet here we were.

I poured myself another half-inch of wine.

Then the doorman buzzed, and Brynn went to the intercom, and came back and stood frozen next to the island and said:

"Dan. There's a delivery for you."

"For me. Here."

"It's marked for you. Hand-delivered. He's holding it downstairs because he didn't want to bring it up without warning me."

"Brynn —"

"Do you want me to go down and get it. Or do you want to go down. Or do you want me to tell him to leave it at the desk and we deal with it tomorrow."

I froze.

The doorman knew Dani Hartley, because Brynn had introduced me at the desk three weeks ago when I moved in. The doorman had instructions, from Brynn, about who and what was allowed up unannounced. The fact that he'd buzzed Brynn instead of sending the delivery up meant it hadn't come in a way that fit the building's usual rhythm. The fact that Brynn was telling me at all meant her doorman radar had pinged.

"What does the package look like."

"He said it's an envelope. Small. Yellow. Like a padded mailer. No return address. Hand-delivered by a courier. Driver paid cash."

My body started up the way it always did. The fine all-over vibration. The hands going somewhere useful. I had my hand around my wine glass before I knew I'd reached for it, and I lifted it and drank half in one pull and set it down.

"I'll go get it," I said.

"I'll come with you."

"Bry."

"I'm coming with you."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to."

She wiped her hands on a dish towel, shoved the towel over her shoulder, and we went down to the lobby together, in the elevator, neither of us talking. The doorman handed me the envelope and said, very gently, I'm sorry, Ms. Hartley, I just thought you'd want to know, and I took it, and we rode back up with the envelope in my lap.

In the kitchen Brynn went back to the stove and turned the heat down on the onion-and-garlic situation that had been quietly burning while we were gone. I sat at the island with the envelope in front of me and looked at it.

Yellow. Padded. The size to hold a few sheets of paper or something small and flat. My name on the front in blue Bic, in his handwriting, smaller and shakier than the last one. No return address.

I knew without opening it that this one was different.

The other ones had been mailed. Stamped. Postmarked. The whole machinery of the United States Postal Service standing between his hand and mine, which was three thousand miles and three to five business days, a buffer I'd come to rely on without knowing I was relying on it. Whatever this was, he'd paid a courier to put it in my hand inside three hours.

He'd figured out where I was.

He'd paid someone to find me.

I lifted the envelope. Light. Almost weightless. Whatever was in it was small.