Page 44 of Her Rival

I'd spoken first.

The world had not ended.

I put the phone down on the island. I sat on the floor of the kitchen with my back against the cabinets and I cried, the second time in one day, the second time in roughly six hours, and this time I let it come the whole way through.

When I was done, I picked up the phone.

I did not call Brynn.

I did not call Victoria.

I did not call the police, because he hadn't actually committed a crime, and I'd threatened to call them only as a thing to say.

I called Jett.

He picked up on the first ring.

"Hartley."

"Are you home."

"Yeah."

"Can I come over."

A pause.

"Yes," he said.

I drove to him.

I didn't know yet what I was going to tell him. Didn't know yet how much of any of it I'd say. I only knew there had been one person in the world tonight whose number my hand had reached for, after I'd decided not to give my father the panic decision he'd spent my whole life training me for. And the number had been his.

That was the thing I hadn't, until that moment, fully understood.

I hadn't called him because I hadn't yet earned the right to.

I'd earned it tonight.

I drove up into the hills toward the glass house, and the marble in my chest had become something else by then, something I could pick up and hold, and what I was holding as I drove was a small clear specific decision. I was going to walk into the man's kitchen, and put the photograph and the phone call on his counter, and let him see all of it.

I was going to stop carrying it alone.

That was what tonight had cost me, and what tonight had given me, and the cost and the gift were the same shape.

I drove.

14

JETT

Here's the thing nobody tells you about being the champs.

You'd think the ring buys you a quiet night. You'd think nineteen thousand people who watched you hoist the trophy in March would let you off easy in November. They do not. Every barn we walked into that season was sold out and snarling, because there's no crowd on earth more motivated than a crowd that gets to watch somebody try to take the champs down a peg, and no team more motivated than the one with the chance to do it. We had a target on our backs the size of the jumbotron, and most nights I loved it. Most nights the target was the best part. Give me a building full of people who want me to lose and I'll show them, personally, one shift at a time, exactly how wrong they are.

Most nights.

This was not most nights. The reason was sitting forty feet above the glass in the auxiliary press box in a navy blazer with a laptop she wasn't typing on. I'd clocked her during warmups, which was the first mistake, because once I clocked her I couldn't unclock her, and a hockey player who knows exactly where a specific woman is sitting is a hockey player who is, to a measurable degree, no longer entirely playing hockey.