Page 129 of Her Rival

She was quiet. Then, dry as anything: "I've known since the second foundation showed up with my name spelled wrong on it."

"It's not spelled wrong."

"It was on the first one. I let it go." A pause with something soft under the flat of it. "I figured you needed me not to know. So I didn't. Six years, I have been a woman who does not know one single thing."

"You don't have to do that anymore."

"No," she said slowly, like she was trying the idea on for size. "I suppose I don't."

It was the most honest quiet we'd had on a phone in nine years.

"She still wants to see you," Mary Beth said. Careful. Not pushing. Just setting it on the counter like a thing too hot to hold.

I'd been turning that one over for five weeks, and somewhere in those weeks, in a glass house with a woman who'd taught me the difference, I'd found the answer.

"I'm not coming to be forgiven. And I'm not coming to forgive her. That's the version she's after, the one where I drive up and we cry in the church lot and everybody gets to be clean. I spent eighteen years in that house learning how to make myself small, and I'm not going back to do it one more time so a sick woman can feel better about the size she cut me down to."

Mary Beth didn't say anything for a moment. "Okay," she said finally, and the okay had a whole held breath in it.

"But if she wants to see my face, she can have that. Not there. Not the church, no audience. Somewhere neutral, you in the room. Once. I'll fly you both out or I'll meet you halfway, and we don't make it mean anything either of us can't carry home after. She'll probably say no. No isn't what she's after. And if she says no, I'm going to be all right. That's the part that's new."

My sister was quiet again. When she spoke, her voice had gone careful in a different direction.

"That's the most reasonable thing I've ever heard come out of your mouth. It's a woman, isn't it."

"It's a few things. One of them is a woman. I don't know yet if she's still speaking to me. I'm about to go find out."

"What'd you do."

"Hid from her. Same way I hide from everybody. Got scared, built a wall, called it keeping her safe." It came out rougher than I planned, so I let it. "I'm new at not doing that. I've already done it wrong twice this week."

A pause. "Well," Mary Beth said. "You called me. That's not how you start a thing you mean to keep welded shut."

"You're the easy one, Mary Beth. No offense."

"None taken. I've been the easy one our whole lives. Somebody had to be." Something moved in her voice, the closest she came to tender. "So go do the hard one. You called your sister to practice, Jettson. I know you did, even if you don't. So you've practiced. Go."

I sat with that, the engine running, the hill dropping away in front of me.

"I'd like you to meet her," I said. "If there's anything left to meet. And if there's not, come anyway. I've got six burners I've never used and a sister who taught me to cook in a house where nobody was allowed to be happy. Whatever happens at the bottom of this hill, I'd like you at that table once. In the light. With your brother. Where I can see you."

I heard her breathe in. Mary Beth, who didn't cry. Who'd spent her whole life letting things go because letting go was the only way to survive holding them.

"Send me the dates," she said. Which was Mary Beth for yes, and for I love you, and for about four other things she'd never had the words for. Same as me. "And Jettson."

"Yeah."

"Glad you're not dead."

"Me too."

I hung up. I sat one more second in the running car with the easy door standing open behind me and the warm shape of my sister still in it.

Then I put the car in gear.

I drove down out of the hills at one o'clock with a manila envelope on the passenger seat. The whole architecture of eight years of hiding folded up inside it. Every entity, every number, the entire map I'd never shown a living soul. And no plan past the envelope, which, for a man who'd planned every move of his life eight years deep, was the most honest I'd been since the bus.

She was at Victoria's. I knew because Brynn had told Stone and Stone had told me, in four words. She's at the penthouse. Which from Stone was a paragraph, and from Stone was also a man holding a door open. I went to the penthouse. I went up in the elevator I had no business being in, the envelope in my hand and the armor not on me, because I'd taken it off on purpose and left it on a hill. A man without his armor in an elevator is just a guy. That was the point. That was the entire point. I was going to go be a guy in front of the only person who'd ever wanted me to be one.