Page 89 of Her Rival

"I don't want to."

"Okay."

We lay there.

The morning light came up against the blinds the way it had on Sunday. The room was the same room. The bed was the same bed. The duvet was the same duvet. The man next to me was the same man. The woman I'd been in this bed two nights before was, in some unaccountable way, no longer the woman I was now. Something had shifted in me overnight that I didn't yet have language for, and I lay in the bed with my eyes closed and let the lack-of-language be a thing I could have for a while without forcing it.

His hand came across the bed and found mine under the duvet. We laced fingers. Neither of us said anything.

"Hartley."

"Yeah."

"Hollis emailed at five thirty. He's been at the Metropolitan jail since seven last night. They processed him at three this morning. Marielle was there. She offered him the plea at six. Misdemeanor stalking charge dropped if he agrees to a permanent no-contact order, leaves the state of Nevada within twenty-four hours, and does not return for the duration of his life. Any contact with you after today is a federal felony."

"Did he take it."

"He took it at six-eighteen."

"He's gone."

"He's on a plane back to Nashville this afternoon. Marielle's putting him on it personally. A Tennessee state trooper she's worked with before is meeting him at the gate in Nashville to confirm he comes off the plane and goes home."

"That's an awful lot of resources."

"Marielle doesn't do things halfway. Victoria doesn't pay her to do things halfway. The number of women he can harm from this day forward is one fewer than it was yesterday morning, and that includes you, and the math on that for everyone in this network is worth the trouble. You don't have to thank anyone for it. They've been doing this for other women for years."

"Who else."

He hesitated.

"Two women who worked at one of the rinks. A goalie's mother. A player's sister. The reason Hollis is paid what he's paid is that he runs a wing of his job that never goes on the team's books. Victoria pays him out of her personal accounts for the network. She's been doing it for a decade. Yours is the one she doesn't fund. Yours I paid for myself, out of my own pocket, so it never touched her books and she never had to know it existed. I figured you should know all of it."

I sat with that.

I'd known, from the moment I said yes to the assignment in Brynn's penthouse, that Victoria Caldwell was a certain kind of woman. I hadn't known until this exact moment what kind of certain kind. The mother of my best friend had been running a quiet network of legal protection for women in her orbit for ten years. I'd been, without knowing it, the latest woman on a list she'd been maintaining since before I ever met her daughter.

It made certain things make sense.

"Okay," I said.

"Jett."

"Yeah."

"I'd like to spend the day in this house."

"Okay."

"I'd like to spend it writing."

"Good."

"I'm going to write the article that's going to come out of this."

"Then write it."

"It's not going to be the hockey article."