Page 84 of Her Rival

He yelled it. He yelled her birth name, the one he hadn't said on the phone according to Dani's account, the one he'd used in the letter, the one he was using now to her face two floors of marble away in a building that was no longer his.

"Ashley."

I felt Victoria's hand go off the railing.

I felt Brynn next to me stiffen.

I did not move.

I'd promised. I'd promised Dani in the kitchen the night before that I wasn't going to do anything in this she hadn't been told about. I'd promised her I wasn't going to put my hands on him. I'd promised her option three. And standing on the mezzanine ten feet above the man I'd wanted to hurt with my own hands for seventy-two hours, I was going to keep my promise.

"ASHLEY. I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME."

He was looking up.

He'd figured out, in the small instinctual way men like him figure these things out, that his voice would carry up to the upper floors, and that whoever was hiding her was hiding her on one of them. He'd planted himself in the center of the concourse and he was yelling up into the architecture of the building like a man making a final argument to a sky he believed had been wrong about him.

I did not look over the railing at him.

I did not let him see me.

Brynn beside me had her phone to her ear, speaking quietly. He's escalating. We need them now. We need them now.

"ASHLEY HARTLEY. YOU GET DOWN HERE."

The four security men moved in.

They did it the way they'd been trained to. Three of them very gently and one of them with a hand on the man's arm. The hand was loose. Not aggressive. Just the establishment of contact. The we have you now, sir, this is over contact. The other three positioned themselves so that any direction he tried to move was a direction with a man in it.

"Get your hands off me."

"Sir, you're going to come with us."

"I have not done anything wrong."

"You have, sir. That letter in your hand bars you from this building, and you walked in holding it. Come with me, sir."

"She is my DAUGHTER."

"Yes, sir."

"She BELONGS TO ME."

That sentence echoed off the marble of the main concourse.

It echoed.

It echoed in the precise particular way a sentence echoes when it's been screamed into a building specifically designed to amplify sound.

Beside me Brynn made a small sound in her throat that I will, for the rest of my life, remember more clearly than the rest of the words spoken in that arena that afternoon.

The security men closed the rest of the distance. They got him. Both arms now, not just one, and they walked him out the way the Caldwell security people walk any unruly drunk fan out of any Caldwell event. Efficiently. Professionally. With no apparent emotion. With the practiced economy of men who did this multiple times a season. His legs went out from under him at one point and they caught him under the arms and kept him moving. He was still yelling. His voice was getting hoarse. The yelling no longer made sense. It was about Tennessee and about Ashley and about no daughter of mine and about a Bible verse I didn't catch the citation of.

They put him into a Caldwell security van at the curb.

The police arrived as the van pulled away.

Marielle Cho arrived two minutes after the police.