Page 8 of Her Rival

"I didn't hate it." That, at least, was true. "I loved seeing you that happy. I loved your mom. I just had work."

"You always just had work."

"That was true until four days ago," I said, and she laughed, surprised out of her, that bright bark of a laugh that had been getting me through the worst years of my life since I was eighteen. The heaviness in the car lifted half an inch. Which was all either of us could take right then.

The penthouse was obscene.

I mean that with love. Floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides, the whole valley dropping away beneath it, the Strip stacked up in the distance like a circuit board somebody had stood on end. Brynn had clearly tried to make it hers, throw blankets, a wall of books, about nine hundred candles. But you could feel the bones of it underneath. The bachelor-coach money palace it had been before she softened it. The place a drone had once flown up to and photographed her bare back through the glass, during the scandal she still wouldn't tell me the full story of.

"Guest room's down here," she said, hauling my bag before I could stop her. "Own bathroom, blackout curtains, the whole deal. Stay as long as you want. I mean that. There's no clock on this, Dan."

"I'm not going to mooch off you and Colton."

"You're not mooching, you're visiting, there's a difference, and also I don't care." She set my bag on a bed bigger than my entire Brooklyn bedroom. "And tomorrow my mom wants to see you."

Something in me went still.

"Your mom."

"She heard you were coming. She's got some kind of work thing she wants to talk to you about. She was being all mysterious about it, you know how she gets." Brynn waved a hand. "I told her to let you breathe for a day. She's coming by tomorrow afternoon. You can say no to whatever it is. But she asked specifically, and Mom doesn't ask for much."

"What kind of work thing?"

"I genuinely don't know. She wouldn't tell me. Which means it's either nothing or it's a big deal. There's no in-between with her." She leaned against the doorframe and studied me again, softer this time. "You okay? You went somewhere just now."

"I'm fine. Just tired."

"You keep saying that."

"It keeps being true."

She let it go. Crossed the room and hugged me again, quick and fierce, the way she had her whole life, like she could squeeze the bad stuff out of me through sheer force. For one second I let myself lean into it and pretend it worked.

"I'm really glad you're here," she said. "Even if it took your whole life falling apart to get you on a plane."

"Thanks."

"Grilled cheese in an hour. The fancy kind, three cheeses, the thing where I butter it weird."

"I've missed the butter-it-weird."

She grinned and left me alone. I stood in the enormous quiet guest room with the whole lit-up valley spread out past the glass, and I made myself unzip my bag and put things in drawers, because if I didn't keep my hands busy I was going to think.

I thought anyway.

His city. I was sleeping in his city. A few miles from wherever he slept, breathing the same dry air, under the same too-blue sky. Somewhere out there in those hills or down in that valley was a man who'd been a boy I ruined. I'd spent nine years making sure our lives never touched. Declining every invitation. Sending gifts instead of showing up. Building my whole careful distance one polite no at a time.

And now here I was. In his city. Out of money, out of job, out of road.

I told myself it was temporary. A couple weeks. Get my feet under me, hear out whatever Victoria wanted, find somewhere else to land that wasn't here and wasn't Tennessee and wasn't a Brooklyn apartment with a shoebox full of my father in the dresser.

I told myself a lot of things, putting socks in a stranger's drawer in a glass palace in the desert.

I almost believed some of them.

Down the hall Brynn started banging cabinets and singing to herself, off-key, happy. I closed the drawer and went to go be with my friend. She was the one true safe thing I had left. And I only had so many hours of pretending in me before tomorrow came and Victoria Caldwell sat me down and changed my life again. I didn't know that yet.

I just knew the grilled cheese was going to be good.