Page 7 of Her Rival

I turned it off. All the way off, thumb on the button till the screen went black. I stood there in the front hall of my ridiculous, beautiful, empty house and breathed until the buzzing in my chest matched the new quiet.

Monday, I thought. One interview. Some friend of Brynn's, here to ask me about hockey.

How bad could it be.

3

DANI

Brynn was waiting at the bottom of the escalator at Harry Reid with a sign.

It said WELCOME HOME DANI HARTLEY GREATEST EDITOR ALIVE in marker, a heart dotting the I in my name, and a drawing in the corner that I think was supposed to be me but looked more like an angry potato in glasses. She'd made it in the cell phone lot in the last ten minutes. The cardboard still had an Amazon shipping label peeling off the back.

I saw her before she saw me, which almost never happened. For a second I just watched her down there, scanning the crowd with the sign over her head, up on her toes, all that energy she'd had since she was eighteen still firing the exact same way at twenty-six. Brynn Caldwell. She'd walked up to me in a freshman comp lit seminar a lifetime ago and announced we were going to be friends, because I'd made fun of the professor's elbow patches under my breath and she'd heard me. She'd been right about that the way she was right about most things involving me.

Then she spotted me. The sign started going up and down like she was directing a plane in for landing, and she yelled my name across the whole baggage claim, and forty strangers turned to look. That was Brynn. That was the whole thing about Brynn.

"You made it," she said into my hair when she got her arms around me. I let myself be held. I did not cry. I'd done my crying in a Brooklyn kitchen four days ago, and I was rationing.

"I made it."

"You look like garbage."

"Thank you. I flew six hours next to a man who ate a tuna sandwich at hour two."

"A crime." She pulled back, hands on my shoulders, and gave me the look. The Brynn scan. She ran it over my face for about a second and a half, and I watched her clock all of it, the no-sleep, the weight I'd lost that I shouldn't have, the whatever-else that lived around my eyes now. And I watched her decide not to say any of it yet. That was new for her, the deciding-not-to-say. She'd gotten gentler somewhere in the last couple years. Or just smarter about me. "Come on. I'm parked illegally."

She was parked extremely illegally, fire lane, hazards on, an airport cop already halfway across the lanes toward her. She charmed him out of the ticket in under thirty seconds while I loaded my bag into the back of an SUV nicer than any car Brynn had ever driven when I'd known her.

I noticed it and didn't say it. There was a lot of that lately, in Brynn's life. Nice cars. A phone that was always the newest one. The way she'd stopped looking at prices. Her mother owned a professional hockey team and her boyfriend coached it, and the money had come into Brynn's life sideways, the way it does when you fall in love with it instead of earning it. She wore it a little awkwardly, like a coat that didn't quite fit. I loved her for the awkwardness. It meant she still remembered being broke.

"Okay," she said, pulling into traffic, sunglasses on, one wrist draped over the wheel. "Here's the plan. We're not talking about anything heavy until you've slept and eaten. Tonight is grilled cheese and bad TV at the penthouse. Colton's got a road trip thing, he's gone till Thursday, so it's just us. Tomorrow you sleep as late as you want. And then at some point, when you're ready and not before, you're going to tell me what's actually going on with you. Because I've known you for eight years and I know it's not just the job."

"Brynn."

"Not now. I said not now. I'm just putting it on the table for later." She glanced over. "It's on the table. That's all. We don't have to pick it up."

I looked out the window.

Vegas slid by, white and tan and relentless. The sky was so blue it looked fake. The mountains stood back from the valley like they were keeping their distance on purpose. I'd forgotten how the light worked here. It came at you from everywhere at once, off the pavement, the stucco, the windshields. No shade anywhere. Nowhere for a shadow to hide. New York was all shadow. You could disappear in New York. You could be one of nine million and nobody would ever find your face in the crowd.

Out here everything was lit up all the way to the edges.

"You're quiet," Brynn said.

"I'm tired."

"You're quiet in the other way."

She wasn't wrong. She was never wrong. But I wasn't ready to hand her the real thing, the thing sitting under my ribs since the second the wheels touched down on his city. So I gave her a smaller true thing instead. A trick I'd learned a long time ago. Hand them something real so they stop digging for the realer thing.

"I haven't been back since the championship," I said. "It's weird being here. Brings it up."

"The championship was a good night."

"It was a great night."

"You barely talked about it after. You flew out at like dawn." She said it lightly, but I heard the small old hurt in it, the thing she'd never pushed on. "I figured you hated it. The hockey. All my new people."