Page 12 of Her Rival

"I'm putting together a piece about my team." She opened the folio, turned it to face me. Inside was a one-page brief, typed, clean, a magazine's masthead at the top that made my stomach do something I hadn't felt in a year. A real one. A national one. The kind of name that, on a byline, changed a career. "Long-form. Eight to ten thousand words. The full story of how a punchline of a franchise became a championship team in four years. They've committed to running it as a cover feature. And to a number I think you'll find isn't insulting."

She slid a second sheet across. I looked at the number.

It was not insulting. It was six weeks of severance and then some. It was the credit card balance. It was air.

"I have approval over the writer," Victoria went on. "That was the whole of my negotiation with them, the only thing I cared about. I won't hand my family's story to a stranger who'll turn it into something cheap. I've read three of the long pieces you edited at Riverstone. The ones with your name in the acknowledgments, where the writer thanked you for — I'm quoting — teaching them what their book was actually about." She tilted her head. "And I read the piece you ran in the Gnomon Review in September. The Kitchen on Iris Street. I read it twice. That's what made the call easy."

I went very still.

I had not expected anyone in this room to know that essay existed. I'd told Brynn the night it came out. I'd told no one else.

"Brynn's told me for years that you're the most talented person she knows and the worst at letting anyone see it," Victoria went on, her eyes steady on me, as if she didn't register the small thing my face had just done. "I tend to trust Brynn about people. But the Iris Street piece told me she was right. The writer who wrote that essay can write what I want for this team. I want her. Not the editor. Not the version of you you've spent four years pretending was the whole of you. The writer."

"I haven't been a writer in a long time."

"I know."

"I gave it up for a reason."

"I know that too." Her gaze didn't move. "I don't need to know what the reason was. I just need to know whether the reason is still there."

I sat with that. The blue Bic and the forty-eight envelopes were three thousand miles away in a Brooklyn drawer. The man who'd taught me a byline was a flag I'd be planting on a map for the rest of my life had circled the Iris Street byline in that same blue Bic and mailed it to me. The reason was extremely still there.

"It's still there," I said.

"Then we'll work around it." She closed the folio. "I'm not asking you to become someone. I'm asking you to do the thing you already are, on a subject I'm handing you with full access, for a number that solves your year. That's the entire offer."

I should have asked the question. I knew I should ask it. It was sitting right there in my mouth, the only question that mattered, and Victoria was watching me with those still patient eyes. I made myself say it like it was nothing. Like logistics.

"Who's the centerpiece?"

"Jett." She said it with the smallest warmth, the way you'd say the name of a difficult child you loved anyway. "Of course it's Jett. He's the story. The mouthy kid who buried the championship goal, the one the cameras can't get enough of, the one nobody actually knows a single true thing about." She stood, smoothing her slacks. "Everybody wants the loud one. The trick of the piece — the reason I want you and not a beat writer — is that I think there's somebody underneath the loud one. And I think you're the kind of writer who'd find him."

The whole valley was burning white through the glass behind her.

I had a number that solved my year on the coffee table. A byline that solved my career. And the only thing between me and both of them was the fact that the somebody underneath the loud one was a boy I'd watched walk six miles home in dress shoes.

"Can I think about it overnight?" I said.

"Of course." She picked up her folio. At the door she paused, turned, and gave me a look I'd come to know well in the weeks ahead. The look that saw more than it said. "Brynn loves you a great deal, Dani. Whatever's chasing you — this is a good place to stand still for a while."

Then she was gone, the door clicking shut with the same precision as everything else she did. I sat alone in the glass palace with the offer on the table and my whole life narrowed to a single yes or no.

I already knew what I was going to say. That was the worst part. I'd known before she finished the sentence. No job, no money, a father in Tennessee sharpening himself against my silence, and Victoria Caldwell offering me air. I was going to take it. And taking it meant walking into a room and pointing a recorder at the one person on earth I'd spent nine years making sure I'd never have to face.

He'd been my opposite as long as I'd known how to point myself at another person. First across a high school I ruled and he only survived. Now across whatever table Victoria put between us, a recorder running, a story he wouldn't want told. I'd never once stood on the same side as Jettson Sturgill. I had no reason to think this was the time that changed.

I picked up the brief and read the number one more time.

Then I texted Brynn, who was downstairs pretending she hadn't been hovering: tell your mom yes.

The reply came back in four seconds. All caps. A row of hearts.

I put the phone face down on the coffee table and looked out at the city with his name written all over it, and I thought, Monday.

Monday I'd walk into Caldwell Arena and find out what a man looked like nine years after I taught him exactly what I was.

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