Page 125 of Her Player

I showed it to Rhett. He shook his head slowly.

“He forgets his wallet every Tuesday,” he said.

“Every Tuesday,” I confirmed.

“You know he does it on purpose.”

“I know.” I set the phone down. “It gives her an excuse to drive them both and then complain about it. Which she loves.” I picked up my coffee. “They’re getting an apartment together.”

Rhett looked at me. “Yeah?”

“She told me last week. They found something in Summerlin. Good neighborhood. Good light.” I paused. “She seemed happy.”

“Is that okay?” he asked quietly.

I thought about the question. About the version of myself that would have answered it two years ago, sitting alone in an arena that felt too big and a house that felt too empty and a life that felt too much like maintenance and not enough like living. About the version of myself that answered it months ago at the boards of a championship arena with confetti falling and forty thousand people watching.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s okay.”

He reached across the desk and tucked that rogue strand of hair behind my ear.

“Good,” he said.

I swatted his hand away, but not before he caught my fingers and held them for a second. His thumb traced across my knuckles the way it always did. That small, unhurried gesture that he’d been doing since the beginning and that I had stopped pretending not to notice.

“I walked past the trophy this morning,” I said.

“How’d it look?”

“Good.” I turned toward the window, toward the pale March light coming through the glass and falling across the carpet in long gold stripes. “Ryan always said that case was optimistic.”

Rhett was quiet beside me. He always knew when to be quiet. It was one of the ten thousand things about him that had undone me completely.

“He was right,” I said. “It was optimistic.” I looked back at the folder on my desk. At the arena filling up outside. At the coffee from the good place sitting next to Rhett’s boots on my desk like it belonged there. “I think I was optimistic too. I just didn’t know what I was being optimistic about yet.”

“And now?” Rhett asked.

I looked at him.

At those ice blue eyes that had been watching me for three years before I finally let myself look back. At the disheveled black hair and the freckles across his nose that I hadn’t noticed for the first six months and couldn’t stop noticing now. At the man who showed up at my door in the middle of the night to change a tire nobody asked him to change and who had been showing up ever since in every way that mattered.

“Now I know exactly what I was being optimistic about,” I said.

He smiled.

Not the boyish grin he used on the rest of the world. The real one. The quiet one he saved for rooms where it was just the two of us and nobody else needed anything from him. The one I was fairly certain nobody else had ever seen.

“Miss C,” he said.

“Rhett.”

“For the record.” He set his coffee down. “I knew what I was being optimistic about three years ago.”

I clicked my tongue. “You were insufferable three years ago.”

“I’m insufferable now.”

“Deeply.”