Page 76 of Her Rival

I knocked.

She opened it inside of two seconds, which meant she'd been standing on the other side of it, which meant Brynn Caldwell had also been having a forty-three-second elevator ride.

She looked at me. She looked at Jett. She looked back at me.

Her face did the small thing it had been doing for two and a half weeks. The I am holding back what I'd say if I weren't actively holding back thing. The perceptive-Brynn thing. She was in leggings and a sweatshirt of Colton's that hung past her hips, her hair up in the messy bun she did when she was actually paying attention and not performing the idea of it, and her eyes were already a little red, which meant she'd cried at some point in the forty-five minutes between my call and our arrival.

"Get in here," she said. Quiet.

I went in. Jett came in behind me. Brynn closed the door and put the chain on, which she'd never done with me before, which meant she'd decided this was going to be a closed-door conversation.

She turned around. She looked at us in her front hallway in our day-after clothes and our coffee breath, and she put both hands on her hips, the way she'd been doing since she was twenty, exactly the way her mother did, and she said:

"Are you both okay."

That was the first thing she asked.

Not what is going on. Not what is wrong. Not why are you here together at eleven in the morning on a Sunday with no warning.

Are you both okay.

"Yes," I said. "I mean. No. But yes."

"Jett."

"Yes."

"Okay. Kitchen."

She turned and walked. We followed.

The penthouse kitchen was the same as it had been the morning before when Brynn did my hair, the morning before that when we ate grilled cheese, every morning of the three weeks I'd been here. The big island. The bowl of fruit she kept stocked even though she never ate fruit. The two coffee cups on the counter, one cold-stranded, one warm. She'd been telling the truth on the phone about the second coffee.

She poured it back into the pot. Poured a fresh cup. Slid it across to me. Poured one for Jett without asking.

She did not pour one for herself.

She stood across the island with her hands flat on the counter, and she looked at me, and she said:

"Go."

I'd thought, on the way over, about what order to tell it in. The childhood-first version, the dad-arc version, the version that started with the assignment and worked backward. Every order that might land least hard and let her keep loving me through it. Standing across the island from her, I understood I'd been planning every version except the true one, which was the one where I'd been a coward with her for eight years.

So I started there. I told her I was sorry. That I'd been her person for eight years and had let her find out the shape of my life by watching me come home from interviews looking like I'd been hit by a car, instead of telling her. That I'd been a coward, and I was done being one, and here was the rest of it.

And then I told her the rest. I'd told it once already that morning, in the dark, to him, and I couldn't stand to lay every word of it out a second time. The short version is I gave Brynn the same thing I'd given Jett. The father. The scars. The shoebox in Brooklyn and the eight years of envelopes and the forty-eighth one sitting in my bag four feet from her fruit bowl. The man in the library four miles away with Jett's investigator on him. And the older thing underneath all of it: the town we'd both grown up in, the boy I'd known at sixteen, the homecoming dance, what I'd done to the man standing in her kitchen back when he'd been the kindest person available to break.

I told it in the order it came out, the way Jett had said to. Somewhere in the middle her hand went to her mouth and stayed there. She kept up, the way he'd said she would. I stopped when I ran out of breath.

Brynn took her hand off her mouth. She put both hands flat on the counter again.

She had not started crying. Her eyes were wet but she hadn't started, which I'd braced for, which I'd been almost wanting, because crying would have been a thing I could handle.

Not-crying was a thing I hadn't braced for.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"