Page 96 of Her Rival

She cried again, very quietly, with my body still inside her and my arm still under her head and the duvet half across her cooling skin and the room dim and warm around us.

I held her.

I held her until the crying stopped.

I held her until her breath slowed and her body went heavy against my arm and she went under into the sleep of a woman who'd been awake her whole life without knowing it, and was now, possibly, going to be allowed to be a person who slept.

I slipped out of her carefully.

I pulled the duvet up over both of us.

I lay there with my hand flat against her sternum, feeling her breath rise and fall, and I thought about a Tuesday night in November in a glass house in the desert and a woman who'd told me a thing in the dark at the end of an act, and I thought about the math of it, the same arithmetic I'd done at one in the morning on Sunday holding her hand under the duvet on the other side of the same bed, and the math was still clean.

She slept.

I did not.

I lay there a long time. I thought about all of it. I thought about a girl in a green dress in 2015 and a woman on a shag rug at the foot of my bed in 2024 and how the woman had told me, at the end of the act, the thing the girl had not known how to ask for at the start of her life.

That's all I ever wanted to be.

A good girl for someone.

Not for the man whose belt had left the scars on her back when she was eleven. Not for the boy I'd been at seventeen who she couldn't have heard correctly even if I'd known how to speak.

For somebody.

For somebody who was just going to keep telling her she already was.

I closed my eyes.

I fell asleep with my hand against her chest.

In the morning I was going to figure out how to tell her she already was.

I was going to spend the rest of my life figuring out how to keep telling her.

The morning was coming.

I was, possibly, going to be a man who could do it.

I slept.

23

DANI

The thing I knew about journalism, having edited it for four years before being asked to write it for the first time, was that the part that broke a piece open was almost never the part you went looking for.

You went looking for one thing.

You found two things.

The second thing was the piece.

I found the second thing on Wednesday at four-twelve in the afternoon, at Jett's kitchen island, while he was at practice and I had a fresh coffee and a working draft of an article that was no longer about hockey and hadn't yet decided what it was about instead.

It had started as hockey. The assignment was a profile of a defending champion in the worst November of his career, and for three weeks the slump had been my spine, the thing you hang a feature on. I had the numbers cold. Four losses in six. A goals-against creeping up half a goal a night. A man who hadn't put one in the net in three weeks and had started gripping his stick the way people grip a thing they're afraid of dropping. The beat writers had the word slump and were running it daily, in the standings and on the radio, and they weren't wrong, and they were also not close.