Page 80 of Her Rival

I picked up my coffee.

I drank it.

Brynn cracked the eggs.

The morning kept coming.

20

JETT

I slept at my own house on Sunday night for the first time in three nights and I did not like it.

The call had been mine to make. I'd made the right one, which has never once in my life made me feel one bit better about a damn thing. The Caldwell security car was at Brynn's building by noon, the lobby man had been briefed, and the safest place in this city for Dani for the next forty-eight hours was Brynn's guest room, not mine. Marielle Cho had served the letter to Dani's father at the public library on Charleston at three forty-seven that afternoon, in person, while Hollis's two guys stood ten feet behind her with their hands visibly empty. He'd read the letter. He hadn't spoken to her. He'd walked out, taken a city bus back to his motel, and that was where Hollis's man still was, parked across the street, watching the door.

The forty-eight-hour clock was ticking.

So I'd driven myself home alone from Brynn's at nine-thirty and let myself into my house and stood in my own kitchen and thought about the fact that the island looked wrong without a coffee cup at the spot where Dani had been sitting that morning. Somewhere in the last seventy-two hours the kitchen had grown a Dani-shaped spot at the island, and nobody had run it by me first. I hadn't clocked it happening. I just stood there now, clocking it empty.

I'd texted her at ten.

Home.

She'd texted back inside of a minute.

Brynn made me eat a second French toast.

The chain on the door.

Yes.

Security car.

Same place it has been since two.

Hollis update?

Subject in motel since 5:14 pm. Has not left. Light on. TV audible from the parking lot.

Okay.

Sleep, Hartley.

You too, Sturgill.

That had been the entire exchange.

I lay in my own bed in the same room she'd been in twenty-four hours earlier and stared at the ceiling for an hour, thinking about a man in a motel watching television, and a woman in a guest room with a chain on her best friend's front door, and the peculiar quality of empty a bed could have when it hadn't been empty the night before.

I eventually slept.

I did not sleep well.

Monday morning came up bright and clean and not at all to scale with the day it was actually going to be.

The interview was on the calendar for eleven. We'd decided, Dani and I, at Brynn's island over French toast, that we were going to keep it. Canceling would have signaled to Victoria that we were hiding more than we'd told her, and Victoria, who'd spent the last twenty-four hours coordinating the security apparatus protecting the woman she'd hired to write a magazine piece, deserved better than that from either of us. So I'd texted Dani at six.

Still on for eleven?