Page 33 of Her Rival

I peeled the seal.

A single photograph slid out onto the counter.

It was a photograph of me, taken with a long lens, from across what I recognized after a second as the players' lot at Caldwell Arena. I was walking from Brynn's SUV to the side entrance. Sweater, jeans, hair up. Unmistakable. The photo was dated four days ago in the lower right corner where a digital file stamps the time. Wednesday afternoon. The afternoon I'd gone in for the second of the week's three sessions with Jett.

A Post-it on the back. Same blue Bic. Three words.

See you soon.

I sat at Brynn's kitchen island and looked at the photograph and held the very small dry sound in my throat that wanted to come out, and I held it, and I held it, and I did not let any of it out. Because if I let one piece out, the rest was going to come.

Brynn was at the stove. Brynn had not seen the photo.

I slid it back into the envelope. Slid the envelope into my back pocket. My hand was steady when I did it.

"You all right?" Brynn called from the stove.

"Yeah."

"What was it."

"A magazine clipping. From an industry friend. Nothing."

The lie came out smooth. I'd told that exact lie three times in the last six years, and it always came out smooth, because the muscle for it had been built when I was twelve. I'd been performing fine since I was old enough to perform anything.

"You sure."

"Yeah, Bry. I'm sure."

She turned, looked at me a second too long, and turned back to the pan. She didn't push.

"Pasta's in three minutes."

"Okay."

I picked up my wine and finished it. Poured another. I sat at the island with the photograph in my back pocket and watched my best friend cook me dinner and made myself eat half a bowl of pasta and laughed at the right places, and I thought, with the small clear part of my brain that had been keeping notes my whole life, he's in Vegas.

He was in Vegas already. The Post-it said see you soon because he'd moved. He'd been close enough to me on Wednesday to photograph me from a parked car. He'd decided to switch from mailing to delivering. He'd paid to do it. The escalation had a date on it, and the date was four days old.

See you soon meant within the week.

Which meant I was about to have to make a decision I was very much not prepared to make.

After Brynn went to bed I sat in the guest room with the envelope on the nightstand and tried to make the decision and couldn't. I could call Brynn. Tell her the whole thing. Right now. Walk down the hall and wake her up and say here is the rest of it, here is the shape of what I've been carrying, my father knows I'm here and he's coming. Brynn would believe me. Brynn would help. Brynn would call Coach. Coach would call Victoria. Victoria would call her lawyers. The whole machinery of the Caldwell family would activate around me inside an hour, and my father would be a man trying to penetrate a fortress instead of a man hunting his daughter, and I'd be safer than I'd been at any point in my adult life.

I'd also be a woman who'd let her best friend's billionaire family handle her problem for her, when her best friend didn't know any of the actual problem, and when telling Brynn the actual problem meant telling Brynn about the dance, and Jett, and all of it. I didn't have the language for that yet. I was not going to do that conversation in a panic at one in the morning over an envelope.

I could call Jett.

I sat with that a long moment. Jett was the only other person in this city who knew what my father was. Jett had built his entire life around getting away from a town that contained a version of the same kind of father, even if his hadn't laid a hand on him in the same ways. Jett would understand the photograph instantly. Jett, I knew with a certainty I didn't want to examine, would do something. Jett wouldn't call Coach. Jett would handle it.

I did not call Jett.

I didn't call him because I hadn't earned the right to call him with a problem at midnight. Because I'd spent a week pretending I could be in a room with him and not be in a room with him at the same time. Because the line between I need your help and I am asking for something you have not offered was a line I wasn't yet willing to step across.

I did not call anyone.

I sat in the guest room and held the photograph in both hands and did the small clean cold-blooded calculation I'd been doing my entire life when his name came up.