Page 117 of Her Rival

"Mama," I said.

The line was quiet for what was probably four seconds and felt like four minutes. I could hear her breathing on the other end. I could hear, distantly, the sound of a kitchen: a refrigerator hum, a clock I remembered from my childhood, the unmistakable creak of the linoleum in the hallway between the kitchen and the back porch that I had not heard in eight years and was able to identify within a half-second of recognizing it.

She was standing in the kitchen at home.

She was crying.

"Ash," she said. "Sorry. Dani."

"You can call me Ash if you want, Mom."

"I want to call you whatever you want me to call you."

"Then Dani."

"Dani."

"Yeah."

Her breath did the small ragged thing breath does when a person has spent a phone call already crying before the phone call has started. I'd heard the version of this breath, on other people's calls, when I'd been the unintentional eavesdropper in a coffee shop or on a train. I had not, until this morning, heard the version of it coming through a phone line that was attached to me.

"Honey," she said. "Are you okay."

"Yes."

"Did he. Did your dad..."

"He's not a problem anymore, Mom."

"Marielle Cho called me."

I had not been expecting that.

I closed my eyes. Tilted my head back against the headboard of Jett's bed. Jett was next to me. He hadn't moved since I'd picked up the phone. His hand was around mine the way it had been on the rug yesterday afternoon, the way it had been while I slept for twelve hours, the way it had been when I pressed call. He was the still point. He was not, in any visible way, listening to my mother. He was, in every visible way, listening to me.

"Marielle Cho called you," I said.

"On Wednesday morning. She told me there was a no-contact order being filed against your father. She told me his name was on the order and that anyone in his household was likely to be served with notice. She offered to put a similar order in place for me, against him, if I wanted one. She said it was on the house."

"On the house."

"That was her exact phrase. On the house. I did not know what to make of it."

"It was Jett."

"Who's Jett."

I sat with that a second.

She did not know.

Of course she didn't know. She hadn't been in any of the rooms I'd been in for the last four weeks. She'd been in a kitchen in Calvert, Tennessee, doing whatever she did during the day, with the man she'd been married to for twenty-six years until something I didn't yet know about had happened.

"Jett is the man," I said carefully. "I am. With."

I felt his hand squeeze mine.

"You're with a man."