11. Dani #4
She turned, looked at me a second too long, and turned back to the pan. She didn't push.
"Pasta's in three minutes."
"Okay."
I picked up my wine and finished it. Poured another.
I sat at the island with the photograph in my back pocket and watched my best friend cook me dinner and made myself eat half a bowl of pasta and laughed at the right places, and I thought, with the small clear part of my brain that had been keeping notes my whole life, he's in Vegas.
He was in Vegas already. The Post-it said see you soon because he'd moved. He'd been close enough to me on Wednesday to photograph me from a parked car. He'd decided to switch from mailing to delivering. He'd paid to do it. The escalation had a date on it, and the date was four days old.
See you soon meant within the week.
Which meant I was about to have to make a decision I was very much not prepared to make.
After Brynn went to bed I sat in the guest room with the envelope on the nightstand and tried to make the decision and couldn't. I could call Brynn.
Tell her the whole thing. Right now. Walk down the hall and wake her up and say here is the rest of it, here is the shape of what I've been carrying, my father knows I'm here and he's coming.
Brynn would believe me. Brynn would help.
Brynn would call Coach. Coach would call Victoria.
Victoria would call her lawyers. The whole machinery of the Caldwell family would activate around me inside an hour, and my father would be a man trying to penetrate a fortress instead of a man hunting his daughter, and I'd be safer than I'd been at any point in my adult life.
I'd also be a woman who'd let her best friend's billionaire family handle her problem for her, when her best friend didn't know any of the actual problem, and when telling Brynn the actual problem meant telling Brynn about the dance, and Jett, and all of it.
I didn't have the language for that yet.
I was not going to do that conversation in a panic at one in the morning over an envelope.
I could call Jett.
I sat with that a long moment. Jett was the only other person in this city who knew what my father was.
Jett had built his entire life around getting away from a town that contained a version of the same kind of father, even if his hadn't laid a hand on him in the same ways.
Jett would understand the photograph instantly.
Jett, I knew with a certainty I didn't want to examine, would do something.
Jett wouldn't call Coach. Jett would handle it.
I did not call Jett.
I didn't call him because I hadn't earned the right to call him with a problem at midnight.
Because I'd spent a week pretending I could be in a room with him and not be in a room with him at the same time.
Because the line between I need your help and I am asking for something you have not offered was a line I wasn't yet willing to step across.
I did not call anyone.
I sat in the guest room and held the photograph in both hands and did the small clean cold-blooded calculation I'd been doing my entire life when his name came up.
He wanted me to know he was close. That was the whole purpose of the photograph.
He hadn't delivered an actual threat because he hadn't needed to.
The photograph was the threat. The point was to put me on edge.
The point was that I was supposed to make a panic decision in the next forty-eight hours.
The wrong one. The one he could exploit.
He'd been raising me my whole life to make exactly the kind of decision he wanted me to make in this exact kind of moment.
I was not going to make it.
I was not going to call Brynn at one in the morning. I was not going to call Jett. I was not going to leave Vegas. I was not going to go to Tennessee. I was not going to do any of the things he wanted me to do.
I was going to bed.
I was going to wake up in the morning. Drink coffee. Go to my interview on Tuesday and do my job. I was going to put the photograph in my laptop bag, where Brynn wouldn't find it, and carry it around as evidence of a thing I knew, and make the decision about who to tell on my own schedule. Not his.
I'd been giving my father control over my decisions for twenty-six years. I was not going to do it tonight.
I put the photograph in the side pocket of my laptop bag.
I went to bed.
I did not sleep, but the not-sleeping was mine.
That was the thing I gave myself, on a Friday night in a glass palace in his city, with an envelope full of him under the bed in my best friend's penthouse.
I gave myself the not-sleeping. He didn't get to take that from me.
He could close in. He could find me. He could pay a man with a camera to photograph me in a parking lot.
He could not have the inside of my own head.
That was not nothing.
That was, in fact, the only thing I'd ever managed to keep from him.
I lay in the dark and I kept it.
Tuesday was three days away.
He was, I was very certain, closer.