Page 66 of Her Rival

I was going to keep my word.

I was going to be the wall.

The rest, I'd figure out as I went.

She came down at seven forty-three in one of my old practice shirts she'd found in the bathroom and a pair of leggings she'd brought in her bag the day before. Hair up. Face washed. She looked, in the early morning light at my kitchen island, like a woman who'd slept the deepest sleep she'd slept in a long time, and I tried not to take credit for that, and I failed, and I let myself take a small quiet amount of credit for it anyway.

"Morning," she said, voice still thick with sleep.

"There's coffee."

"God, yes."

I poured her a cup. Slid it across. She picked it up.

"Hartley."

"Yes."

"He left the motel at five forty-seven this morning."

She stilled.

I let her go still.

I didn't say anything else until she nodded.

"Hollis is on him. I'll know where he is by seven thirty. We have time to figure out the day. I'm telling you now because I'm not going to keep things from you that I know, and I want you to have your coffee while we think about it, not after. Drink your coffee."

She drank her coffee.

She thought about it.

She set the cup down.

"Okay," she said. "Let's figure out the day."

The sun came up. The phone, face down on the counter, didn't buzz yet. The valley was alight. The woman across from me had slept in my bed, the first time in eight years any woman had slept in my bed at all, and she had her hands wrapped around a coffee cup and her hair up and the faint mark of a finger-shaped bruise on the soft skin where her shoulder met her neck, which she hadn't noticed yet and which I had no intention of pointing out.

We figured out the day.

We had a lot of day to figure out.

There was a game in it. Phoenix, at home, the back half of a split we hadn't played well in either half of. I'd known that schedule cold since training camp, every back-to-back and every flight and every gap I could use to sleep, and I'd never once in eight years woken up on a game day and had to remember there was a game.

I remembered late. I remembered with her foot hooked over my shin and the valley coming up gray, and the plain truth was we'd been finding ways to lose games we were built to win, and I lay there in the gray not thinking about a single one of them.

I had a feeling we were going to be figuring out days together for a long time after this one.

I did not, in that moment, mind.

I did not, in that moment, mind one bit.

17

DANI

The nightmare came at three-eighteen in the morning.