Page 79 of Her Rival

"Okay."

"And then," she said, looking back at Jett, "when the threat's contained, you and I are going to have a separate conversation, Sturgill, that you and I haven't had yet. Because you've been my brother for two and a half years and I haven't yet been your sister the way I should have been, and I want to do that, and I want to do it with all the information you haven't given me, on your timeline, the right way."

Jett nodded.

"Okay, Bry."

"Good."

She turned back to me. Picked her water glass back up. Refilled it. Drank half.

She set it down.

"Okay," she said. "Call my mother. The phone's in the cradle. Sit down. Dan, drink your coffee. Sturgill, sit. Both of you sit down at my island. I'm going to make us a proper breakfast and then we're going to wait for the lawyer to call back, and then we're going to spend the rest of the day in this apartment with the chain on, because the way I love people is I feed them and I lock the doors, and that's what's happening today."

"Okay."

"Okay."

I picked up the phone.

Victoria answered on the second ring and called me sweetheart, which she'd never called me before, which told me she'd already been thinking about me, possibly all morning. I told her the short version, the present-tense facts without the apology, because the apology had been Brynn's. When I finished she told me Marielle would call within the hour, and asked to put Brynn on for a minute.

I handed Brynn the phone. She took it to the window and had the kind of quiet, efficient, thirty-second conversation with her mother that two people have when they've run hard logistics together before and trust each other all the way. She hung up. Came back to the island and put her hand flat on the counter. "It's handled," she said.

She turned to the stove.

"French toast."

"French toast, Dan. That's what I make when I love you. Sit down. I'm not taking suggestions on this."

I sat down. Jett sat down beside me.

He put his hand on my back, light, the same exact pressure as at the front door, the I am here pressure with no instruction in it, and I leaned a tiny amount into it and he let me and didn't perform anything around the leaning. Across the kitchen island Brynn started cracking eggs into a bowl and turned on the bad Spotify playlist from the day before, the one she'd played while we did each other's nails on a Saturday afternoon I was now five different people removed from.

I watched her crack eggs.

I drank my coffee.

I leaned into Jett's hand.

I had, in the last seventy-two hours, told two people my whole life. I'd told the man who had every reason to use it against me, and he'd said thank you for telling me. I'd told the woman who had every reason to be wounded by it, and she was making me French toast.

I'd spent twenty-six years bracing for the bad version of being known.

The bad version had not, as it turned out, been the version that came.

I sat at my best friend's kitchen island in the warm midday light of a Sunday in November and watched her crack eggs into a bowl while the man whose body I'd been inside of seven hours earlier rubbed his thumb slowly across the small of my back. And the man who'd taught me what to brace for sat in a library in West Las Vegas four miles from me, with no idea that the people he'd spent my life telling me would never love me were sitting in a kitchen on the high floor of a building in his city, loving me with both hands.

He'd been wrong about almost everything.

He'd been so completely wrong about almost everything.

That was, I knew with a clarity I hadn't previously had access to, possibly the actual point of the entire morning.

The man at the library was wrong.

I was about to spend the rest of my life being right.