Page 104 of Her Rival

I read it twice.

I wrote back. Thank you.

She wrote back. Go to bed.

I did not write back to that. I put the phone face-down.

I got up off the stool for the first time in nearly an hour and walked through my own kitchen and looked at the things in it that had become hers in the last seventy-two hours. The mug she'd been drinking out of in the morning. The notepad she'd been writing on. The stool she'd been sitting on. The exact place at the corner of the island where the sandwich plate was, which was the place she'd sat down at on a Wednesday afternoon to do research that had broken open the actual shape of my life.

I picked up the plate. I threw the rest of the sandwich in the trash. I washed the plate. I dried the plate. I put the plate in the cupboard.

These were not the actions of a calm man. These were the actions of a man performing the activity of being calm in the hope that the activity would produce, in the man, the actual quality of calm. I'd read about the trick of it somewhere once. A therapist in San Diego had tried to walk me through it years back, and I had not, at the time, believed it would work. I'd believed, at twenty-five, that the only way through a feeling was to argue your way through it.

I'd been wrong about that.

I washed her wine glass too, the one from dinner, the one she'd left on the counter. I put it in the cupboard. I turned the kitchen lights off.

I went upstairs.

I sat on the edge of the bed and I called Rhett.

He picked up on the second ring.

"You all right."

"No."

"What."

"She found the LLCs."

A pause.

"Okay."

"She found all forty-seven of them, Stone. She found J.S. Holdings. She did the math. She told me she would have been okay with it. She told me she was angry that I hadn't told her, not that I had the money. She told me she loved me. She's at Brynn's for the night."

He took a long breath on his end.

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"She's coming back."

"How do you know."

"Because she told you she loved you on her way out the door, and a woman who's not coming back does not say that on her way out the door. You know that. Take the night."

"Yeah."

"And Jett."

"Yeah."

"You're a slow learner about some things."

"I know."