Page 82 of Her Rival

We did forty minutes of legitimate hockey work. I gave her real answers. She wrote real notes. Victoria sat at the end of the table and didn't say anything, but I felt her listening, the way you felt Victoria listening, which was to say everywhere in the room at once.

At eleven forty-three Brynn's phone vibrated on her clipboard.

She looked at it.

Something crossed her face. The slightly-flattened thing it had been doing since Sunday. The on-alert thing. She looked at Victoria. Victoria nodded once, almost imperceptibly. Brynn picked up the phone and stepped to the doorway. She spoke into it quietly. Three seconds. She hung up. She came back in.

She did not sit.

"Mom," Brynn said. "Hollis."

Victoria stood up.

"Excuse me a moment," Victoria said, very calmly, to Dani and to me.

Brynn and Victoria stepped out together. The security woman at the door stayed where she was. The door closed.

Dani looked at me.

"It's him," she said.

"Probably."

"In the building."

"Probably."

"Okay."

She didn't move. Didn't stand up. Didn't perform alarm. She put her pen down on her notebook the way you put a pen down when you're not sure you'll be picking it back up in the same room you put it down in, and she looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face before. The expression of a woman who'd been waiting for a thing for twenty-six years and had now been told it was finally happening.

I stood up.

"Stay here," I said. "Do not leave this room. The woman at the door stays with you. Whatever happens, you do not leave this room until Brynn or Victoria or I come back through that door. Do you understand."

"Jett."

"I'm not asking, Hartley. Stay in this room."

"Where are you going."

"I'm going to find out what's happening and I'm coming back. I'm not going to put my hands on him. I promised you Friday I wasn't going to do anything in this you hadn't been told about, and I'm keeping that promise. I'm going to find Brynn and Victoria and I'm going to come back here and tell you what's happening."

She nodded.

I went to the door. The security woman looked at me. I looked at her.

"Caldwell instructions are that Ms. Hartley does not leave this room," I said.

"Caldwell instructions are confirmed," she said.

"Thank you."

I stepped out. I closed the door behind me.

I found Brynn and Victoria at the top of the stairs on the second-floor mezzanine, the open part that looked down on the main concourse two floors below. They were leaning over the rail. Victoria had her tablet. Brynn had her phone. Neither of them moved.

I came up next to them. I looked down.