Page 42 of Her Rival

The cup almost slipped in my hands. I set it on the table.

"What."

"I saw your face at the championship game in March, Dani. You sat in my owner's box for three hours with both hands on the railing and you did not look at any man on the ice except one, and you looked at that one like a woman watching a building she used to live in burn down. I didn't know which man, because I wasn't paying close enough attention to either of you to know which man, and I didn't ask, because we didn't know each other yet and it wasn't my business. When Jett's name came up for the centerpiece eight months later, I remembered the look. I didn't connect the two faces until Monday after your first interview, when Brynn came home and told me her best friend had come back to the penthouse looking like a person who'd been hit by a car. I have not asked Brynn about it. I have not asked Jett. I have not asked you. I have spent the last two and a half weeks deciding whether I made a mistake handing you this piece, and the conclusion I came to last Friday, on no information I'm proud of, was that whatever the two of you were doing in those rooms was a thing you'd either work out on your own or come to me about. And I was not going to insert myself either way."

She looked at me steadily. Didn't blink. She was a woman who'd owned a professional sports team for fourteen years and buried a husband and grieved a stranger out of her daughter's bed and her own, and she did not, when it came to the parts of her life that mattered, blink.

"I'm not asking you what the history is," she said. "I'm telling you I know there is one. And I'm telling you the piece I commissioned was, and is, a piece about my championship hockey team and the cost of building it. If it's become, or is becoming, a different piece in your hands, I'd like to know in time to defend it to the magazine. That's the only ask I have. The rest is between you and the man you're interviewing."

I sat a long time.

I'd walked in braced for the clean answer. I had not walked in braced for this one. I hadn't been prepared for the woman across from me to have been three steps ahead of me for three weeks without saying a word.

"I think it is becoming a different piece," I said.

"Okay."

"I don't yet know what the different piece is."

"Take your time."

"What if the magazine doesn't run a different piece."

"The magazine," Victoria said calmly, "will run whatever I tell them to run. I have not exercised that leverage in fourteen years and I'm perfectly happy to exercise it now. Write the piece. Bring me what you have. I'll defend it."

The marble in my chest shifted. Settled. Grew a little. Became something I could pick up and look at.

"Why," I said.

"Why what."

"Why would you do that for me."

Victoria looked at me a long moment. The window behind her had the entire valley in it.

"Because my daughter loves you," she said. "Because the essay was very good. Because you're about to do something brave, and the people who do brave things rarely get told in advance that someone's going to be there when they do."

I cried.

I didn't mean to. I sat in the chair across from Victoria Caldwell in her glass office on the forty-fourth floor and cried, quietly, both hands holding the coffee cup and my face not doing very much. The small contained crying of a woman who'd spent most of her life being told she wasn't allowed to.

Victoria didn't look away. Didn't hand me a tissue. Didn't say anything for the entire forty seconds it took me to finish.

When I'd finished, she said, "Bring me the piece when it's done."

"Okay."

"Don't decide what it is yet. Write your way to it."

"Okay."

"And Dani."

"Yes."

"Whatever's chasing you. This is a good place to stand still."

I'd heard her say that exact sentence in Brynn's living room three weeks ago. Hearing it again, after what she'd just told me, made it land differently. It didn't mean take the job and you'll be safe. It meant I see what you're running from. I see that you don't know I see it. I'm going to keep seeing it until you decide to let me help.