Page 48 of Her Rival

"For coming here with this. I didn't know where else to."

"That's the correct place to have come."

"Don't be nice to me."

"I'm not being nice. I'm being correct. The correct thing to have done was to come here, and you did the correct thing, and we're now going to do the next correct thing, which is sit down and decide what we do about the rest of it. Keep your coat on. Take it off. I have water. I have wine. I'm not going to ask you any more questions about your father tonight unless they're questions I need answers to in order to do my job, and my job tonight is to keep you safe in this house and figure out what we do tomorrow."

She didn't move.

"Why is your job to keep me safe."

I hadn't anticipated her asking that. I hadn't anticipated, in the long forty-six minutes at the island, that she'd ask me to defend the position I'd clearly already taken without asking her permission to take it. I had to think for a second about how to answer it.

"Because you came here," I said. "Because you came here with this in your hand and set it on my counter, and that means you decided, somewhere on the drive over, that I was the person you wanted in the room when you put it down. And I'm taking that decision very seriously. That's the whole answer. I'm not going to ask anything else of it tonight. Not about the dance. Not about Brynn. Not about any of the rest of it. You came to me. I'm here. That's the entire arrangement until you change it."

She closed her eyes.

She stood at the island with her coat still on and her hand on the bag and her eyes closed, the desert night outside the wall of glass behind her and the city below it, and I watched the breath go out of her shoulders an inch at a time over what was probably ten seconds and felt longer.

"Okay," she said.

I waited.

"Can I sit down."

"You can sit down."

She sat. Took off her coat and laid it over the back of the next stool. Kept her hand on the bag a second longer, then took her hand off it and set it on the counter, and the bag stayed there between us with the photograph next to it, and we both let it be there.

I got up. Got her a glass of water without asking. Refilled my own. Sat back down across from her.

"Tell me what he said on the phone tonight," I said.

She did.

She told me the call in full. Told me the silence she'd let him sit in for fifteen seconds before he'd spoken first, which was a thing he'd never had to do with her in her life, and I let that one register in my chest with the small clean satisfaction it deserved. Told me his voice. The three options he'd given her. His calling her Ashley twice in three sentences. Her own response, the only response she'd ever given him in twenty-six years, the threat of police and Victoria and the city. I sat across from her with my hand around the water glass and listened, and I did not interrupt, and I did not put my hand on hers across the counter, even though the hand that was on the glass wanted to put itself on hers more than it had wanted to do almost anything in my life.

I didn't, because she hadn't asked me to.

She finished the call. She drank her water.

"He'll come tomorrow," she said. "Or Sunday. He gave me until Sunday. He's not bluffing. He paid a courier to put a photograph in my hand last night. He's been planning this for months. He has the time and the money for it now and there's no reason he wouldn't."

"Okay."

"I haven't told Brynn."

"Don't tell Brynn yet."

"What."

"Don't tell Brynn yet. Let me think. Tomorrow morning, before noon, you and I decide together whether you tell Brynn and Victoria. There are reasons to. There are reasons not to. I'd like a few hours to think before we decide. If you tell them tonight, the entire Caldwell apparatus goes into motion in a way that doesn't include either of us. I'd like the next few hours to be ours."

"Okay."

She held the look.

"Why don't you want me to tell Brynn," she said.