Page 1 of Her Rival

1

DANI

The envelope was on the mat when I got upstairs. I didn't need to check the return address.

His handwriting. His pen, the blue Bic he bought in bulk from the Family Dollar on Route 31, same strip mall it had sat in since I was twelve. White envelope, business size, the kind they sold fifty to a pack at that same Family Dollar. He'd been mailing them to me since I was eighteen.

This one made forty-eight.

I'd been counting since the eighth. Which sounds crazy, and probably is. But when you grow up watching a man hit your mother in the kitchen on a Tuesday because he didn't like how she folded a dishtowel, you get specific about patterns young. The counting kept track of him for me. As long as the envelopes came, I knew where he was and what he was doing. Sitting in Tennessee. Thinking about me. The day they stopped was the day I'd have to wonder why.

He hadn't stopped.

I picked it up.

My key was already in the door, which helped, because my hands were doing the small useless thing they did and I needed them holding something that wasn't my own face. I got the door open. Dropped my bag. Set the envelope on the counter and didn't look at it. Pulled the bourbon down from the cabinet over the fridge, the bottle I kept for emergencies and weddings. I'd had neither in a while.

Poured two fingers.

Drank one.

I felt the burn in my throat as I stood there looking at the envelope the way I looked at it every time. Wondering if this was the one I threw away.

I'd thrown some out before. Maybe nine, total. The other thirty-nine were in a shoebox in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Brynn had asked about that box once, two Christmases ago, and I'd told her it was tax stuff. I'd lied to Brynn maybe three times in eight years of friendship. One of those lies was about a shoebox.

She didn't know about him. Didn't know what was in the box, didn't know I kept a count, didn't know I could pick his handwriting out of a lineup of forty envelopes with my eyes shut. Brynn knew me better than anyone alive, and she didn't know the first real thing about me.

I drank the second finger.

I picked up the envelope.

I opened it.

A clipping fell out onto the counter. From a magazine I'd had no business letting publish me, an essay I'd written on impulse and submitted on impulse and only let them run because the deadline was Friday and I was three glasses of wine into a Tuesday when they said yes. Six hundred words about my grandmother and the kitchen on the back of her house in Knoxville. The first thing I'd put my name on in four years. It had run two months ago.

He'd circled my byline in blue.

I turned the clipping over. More writing on the back, same blue, his hand smaller than it had been eight years ago and a little shakier, the way an old man's gets when his hands start to go.

Saw this in a magazine your aunt sent down. Beautiful piece, Ashley. About time.

Call your mother. She doesn't have much time.

I stood at the counter a long time.

Ashley.

He hadn't called me Ashley in eight years. Last time he used it I was eighteen, standing in my dorm hallway at three in the morning, screaming into a phone that if he ever said that name again I'd change my number, my address, my last name, my whole life. He went quiet for a second. Then he said, all right, Dani, in the voice that meant for now. He'd used Dani in every letter since. Forty-six envelopes of Dani. Like he was being reasonable. Like he was the kind of father who respected his daughter's wishes.

He'd called me Ashley today.

Which meant he was done being reasonable. Whatever he was building toward was already moving, and he wanted me to know it was coming.

The clipping sat on the counter. The bourbon sat next to it. Outside, a siren went up Bedford and faded. I stood there in my coat with my keys still in my hand and tried to think about what I was supposed to do next.

I couldn't. My head was already full. It had been full since 10:42 that morning, when Caroline folded her hands on the conference table on the twentieth floor and told me what I'd seen coming for six months.

I'd been laid off. Acquisition. The imprint absorbed. Three editors kept, six let go. I fought for you, Dani. I knew she had. I knew it hadn't mattered.