Page 90 of Her Rival

"I know."

"You knew that."

"I've known that since the night at my kitchen island when you asked me at the window of your car why Victoria picked you. I knew it before you knew it, Hartley. I've been waiting for you to start writing it."

I turned my head on the pillow. I looked at him.

He was still looking at the ceiling, but he turned his head when he felt me look.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay."

"You don't have to ask what it's going to be about."

"I'm not asking what it's going to be about. You'll show me when you're ready."

"It might have you in it."

"It might."

"In specific ways."

"Hartley. You're a writer. I am, as of yesterday afternoon, the man you're with. You're going to write what you need to write, and I'm going to read it when you give it to me, and that's the deal, and I'm not going to give you notes on it before you give it to me."

"You sound like you've given this some thought."

"I have."

"How much thought."

"Since the second interview, more or less. I figured out somewhere in there that whatever you ended up writing was a thing I was going to have to make peace with not getting to control. I've been making the peace incrementally."

"You're a strange man, Jett Sturgill."

"I've been told."

I rolled onto my side. I put my hand on his chest. The fabric of the t-shirt he'd slept in. The steady rhythm of his breath underneath it.

"He's gone," I said. Quietly. Like I needed to test the sentence in the room.

"He's gone."

"I do not know what I'm supposed to do with that."

"You're not supposed to do anything with it today, Hartley. You're supposed to drink coffee. You're supposed to eat the breakfast I'm going to make you. You're supposed to sit at my kitchen island and open your laptop and write whatever sentences come, and not write whatever sentences don't. You're supposed to take a walk on the deck if you need to. You're supposed to fall asleep on the couch if you need to. There's no thing you're supposed to do today that I haven't just listed. The doing-things-with-it starts tomorrow at the earliest."

"Okay."

"Okay."

He turned his head back to the ceiling. He breathed.

I lay against him, and the morning got brighter on the windows, and somewhere in the desert below us a plane was being readied at Harry Reid for an afternoon flight to Nashville, and the man who'd spent twenty-six years telling me what to be afraid of was being walked through booking paperwork by a woman who'd never lost a case, and I did not, in that moment, have any further feelings about him.

I'd run out of feelings about my father, at least for the morning.

What I had instead was a man's chest under my hand.