Page 73 of Her Rival

"Hey. Are you home."

"I'm at the kitchen island staring at the second cup of coffee I poured you forty-five minutes ago. Where are you."

"I'm at Jett's."

A pause.

"Okay," Brynn said.

"I have to tell you a lot of things."

"Right."

"Most of them are bad. Some of them are not."

"Okay, Dan."

"Can I come over. In about an hour. With Jett."

A longer pause.

"Yes," she said. "Come over with Jett."

"Bry."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry I haven't told you. I'm telling you now."

"Dan. Come over. I'll put the second cup of coffee back in the pot."

We hung up.

I set the phone down. I leaned my head against Jett's shoulder. He didn't move. He let me lean.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go tell my best friend everything."

"Yeah."

"You're going to stay for it."

"If you want me to."

"I want you to."

"Okay."

We got up. We left the coffee on the counter. We went to the front door. He held it open for me. I stepped out into the morning. The Pontiac was in the gravel turnaround. He came up behind me. He hadn't, since I'd come down at ten-twenty, put a hand on me.

He put one on me now. At the small of my back. Light. The exact pressure of a hand whose job is to remind a woman the man touching her is there, without telling her where to go.

We got in the car. We drove down the hill.

The Sunday in Vegas was bright and warm and pink at the edges of the desert, and the man I'd been afraid of for twenty-six years was in a library four miles from where I was about to walk into my best friend's apartment and tell her my entire life, and the man with his hand on the small of my back was driving me toward both of those things at the same time, and the inside of the Pontiac smelled like polish and like him, and I held my coffee in my lap and watched the city come up below us and thought, very clearly, this is the rest of it. This is what comes next.

I had not, in twenty-six years, had a what comes next I'd been able to look at without flinching.

I looked at this one.