Page 69 of Her Rival

He did not say that's terrible.

He did not say I had no idea.

He said, "Thank you for telling me."

"Thank me?"

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because it's a thing you didn't have to tell me. Because it's a thing nobody had earned by Saturday at three in the morning. Because telling somebody what someone did to you is one of the hardest things a body can do, and you did it sitting up in a bed with a person you've known for nineteen days, and I'm thanking you because I know what that cost you, even if you don't know yet that I know it."

I closed my eyes.

I'd been bracing.

I'd been bracing for I'm sorry and that's so awful and the standard scripts I'd heard, in pieces, the four times in my life I'd let anybody close enough to hear a portion of what I'd just told him whole. I'd been bracing for the kind of compassionate horror that, however well-meant, always ended up being the listener processing something on me instead of with me.

He'd thanked me instead.

He'd thanked me, and I had not, in my entire life, been thanked for telling somebody about my father.

I started to cry again, very quietly, with no production around it.

He pulled me against him.

I let him.

We sat there in the dim warm yellow lamplight with the tea cooling on the nightstand and the valley still dark below the windows, and the man in the motel four hours into Hollis's overnight surveillance, and the woman in the bed crying very quietly against the chest of a man who'd thanked her for telling him about a thing she'd spent eight years training herself not to tell anyone.

I cried a long time.

I did not, this time, apologize for the crying.

That was the new thing. The next new thing in a week that had been nothing but new things.

When the crying stopped, I fell asleep against him.

I did not have another nightmare.

I slept until ten.

I woke up alone in the bed.

The lamp had been turned off. The morning light came in clean and gold through the windows above the bed. There was a glass of water on the nightstand on my side that I didn't remember being there. The sheets where Jett had been were cool. He'd been up a while.

I sat up. Drank the water. Went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, which was a thing I generally avoided in the morning even on good days, and I looked, in a stranger's bathroom in a glass house in the hills, like a woman who'd been through something and survived it. Which I had not, until that morning, ever felt I looked like.

I washed my face. I borrowed his toothbrush, because mine was at Brynn's and there was no version of the morning where I was going down to that kitchen without brushing my teeth.

I came back out. There was a t-shirt of his folded on the chair near the window, the one he'd folded my dress over the night before. A pair of leggings I'd brought in my bag. A hair tie I'd put on his nightstand at some point I didn't remember.

I dressed. I went downstairs.

He was at the kitchen island in sweatpants and a different practice shirt, hair wet from a shower I hadn't heard him take. Two cups of coffee waited on the counter. A phone face-up next to his cup, which he hadn't done at any point on Friday or Saturday. A single sheet of printed paper next to the phone.

He looked up when I came in. He didn't get up. He didn't perform a hi. He waited for me to come to him.