Page 86 of Her Rival

I walked her out of the media room.

Brynn and Victoria were at the top of the stairs. Victoria didn't say anything when we came out. She did the small Victoria-thing of stepping forward and putting her hands on the sides of Dani's face. She didn't embrace her. She held her face. She looked at her. Dani looked back.

"Sweetheart," Victoria said.

Dani's chin trembled.

"I'm taking her home," I said.

"To Brynn's."

"To my place."

Victoria looked at Brynn. Brynn nodded.

"Okay," Victoria said. "Brynn will follow with a guard. The guard will stay at your gate overnight. Marielle will call by five with the booking confirmation."

"Okay."

Victoria let go of Dani's face. Her thumb caught a tear that hadn't yet fallen, and she swept it away with the same precision she did everything, and stepped back.

"Take her home, Jett."

"Yes ma'am."

I took her home.

I held her hand the entire drive. She didn't say anything for the first ten miles. I didn't push. I drove the Pontiac up out of the city and into the canyon and up the road to my place, and the desert came up around us, and the sun was high and hard and white-bright on the valley, and the woman next to me had had the worst piece of her childhood yelled at her in a public building she hadn't been able to hide in, and she had not broken.

We came up the gravel turnaround. I parked. I turned the engine off.

I sat with her in the cabin of the Pontiac a long moment without saying anything. The pings of the engine cooling. The desert wind. The quiet.

"He yelled my name," she said.

"Yes."

"He yelled the name I haven't used since I was twenty-one."

"Yes."

"It didn't feel like my name."

"No?"

"No. It felt like the name of a person I used to know. A name I used to live under, and then moved out of. He yelled it at the building and I heard it in the conference room and the only thing I thought was, who is he yelling at. The answer was: a person who hasn't lived in me for nine years. He was yelling at a ghost."

"Okay."

"That's the thing I want you to know. He did not yell at me today. He yelled at someone who used to live in me. She was already gone. He didn't get to her."

"Okay, Hartley."

"Yeah."

I turned and looked at her in the passenger seat of the car I'd built with my own hands, in the driveway of the house I'd built to keep the man I'd once been protected from any further damage, and I thought about the small precise distance she'd just named between Ashley Hartley and Dani Hartley. And the small precise distance between the boy in the too-big suit and Jett Sturgill. And how the two of us had spent our whole adult lives putting names on the parts of ourselves we'd outgrown so we could stop having to live under them. And how the two of us, on a Monday afternoon in November, had ended up sitting in a car together, having survived both of our oldest selves out loud, on the same day, in the same building.

"Come inside, Hartley," I said.