Page 85 of Her Rival

The doors of the arena closed. The concourse was quiet. Janice picked up her phone and made a call.

The Caldwell security woman who'd been at the door of the media room two floors up came out into the hallway behind me. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to. She'd been monitoring her earpiece and had clearly been told the situation was resolved.

I stood at the railing a second.

Then I turned. I walked back down the hallway. I went to the media room door. I opened it.

Dani was sitting at the table. She hadn't moved. Her hands flat on the table on either side of her notebook, the way she'd been sitting when I left her, looking at me with the same expression, except a little thinner around the eyes.

"He came in the front door," I said.

"I know. I could hear him."

"You could hear him."

"This building's built to carry sound, Jett. He was yelling my name. Of course I could hear him."

"Okay."

"He yelled that I belonged to him."

"Yes."

"I heard that part too."

"Yes."

"And."

"And the security men took him out the front door inside of two minutes. The police took him from there. Marielle Cho is downstairs handling the paperwork. He walked into a private building he'd been barred from in writing the day before, and when Janice told him to leave he didn't, which makes it criminal trespass, and he did it loud enough that they're adding disorderly conduct on top. That holds him tonight. The rest of it, the letter, the photo from Brynn's doorman, the eight years of letters, the calls, all of it goes to Marielle as a documented pattern, which under this state's law is a stalking charge on its own, and that's the one with teeth. She'll use it to put a permanent order between you and him. By Wednesday he's on a plane back to Tennessee with that order following him. And he crossed a state line to come do this, which Marielle says makes the next time he tries it a federal matter, not a Nevada one. Marielle does not mention a thing like that unless she means to use it."

She closed her eyes.

I came around the table. I knelt down beside her chair. I did not touch her yet. I put my hand on the table next to hers, palm up, the way you put your hand near an animal you want to come to you without scaring it.

She put her hand in mine. I closed my fingers around hers.

"You don't belong to him, Hartley," I said.

"I know."

"He yelled it in a public building. He yelled it loud enough that two floors of people heard it. He yelled it in front of a security team that's been hired to make sure men like him don't get to keep women like you. He did the worst thing he was going to do, and you heard him do it, and you did not break."

"I might break later."

"You can break later. You can break tonight. You can break next week. But you did not break right then, and that's the thing I want you to know about yourself. That's the new thing you get to keep."

She opened her eyes. She wasn't crying yet. She was about to be. The corners of her mouth had started to do the thing.

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"Get me out of this room."

"Yeah."

I helped her up. Picked up her notebook. Her recorder. Her pen. Put them in her laptop bag. Slung the bag over my shoulder. Took her hand.