17. Dani #3
"I had it planned out at four in the morning while you slept. I planned it three different ways. This was the one I was going to recommend if you asked. I wasn't going to recommend it without you asking."
I looked at him. I looked at him across his kitchen island with my coffee cooling between my hands.
"Why are you doing this," I said.
He set the phone down. He looked at me with the same controlled attention he'd looked at me with on Friday night when I walked into his kitchen with the photograph in my hand.
"Because you came to me," he said.
"That's not the whole answer."
"It's the part I'm comfortable saying out loud at ten in the morning on a Sunday twenty days after I sat down across from you in a conference room. The rest is a longer conversation."
"Okay."
"All right."
I picked up his phone. I looked at the screen. I handed it back.
"Call Hollis," I said. "Yes."
"Okay."
"And Jett."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome, Hartley."
He picked up the phone. He stepped out onto the deck.
I sat at the kitchen island in a t-shirt that was too big for me and a pair of leggings and a hair tie that had been on his nightstand for ten hours, and I watched him through the wall of glass, pacing the deck with the phone to his ear and the morning sun warm on the back of his hair, and I thought about a man at a library terminal in a city he shouldn't be in, and about the fact that for the first time in my entire life there was someone in my corner making phone calls on my behalf without asking me to perform gratitude for the calls being made.
He came back in at ten forty-two.
"Hollis is on it. The lawyer's name is Marielle Cho.
She's handled four stalkers for the Caldwell organization in the last three years and she's never lost. She'll call you within the hour to take your statement.
The letter can be served at the library this afternoon if your father's still there, and if not, wherever Hollis's man is when she's ready. "
"Understood."
"You're going to call Brynn now."
"Now."
"Now. Before the lawyer calls. So Brynn hears it from you and not from her mother."
"Okay."
He slid the kitchen phone toward me. His landline, which I hadn't known he had. He sat down next to me. He didn't touch me, but he sat close enough that his arm was along the counter against the side of mine, and the warmth of it was steady, and I picked up the phone and dialed Brynn.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Dan?"
"Hey. Are you home."
"I'm at the kitchen island staring at the second cup of coffee I poured you forty-five minutes ago. Where are you."
"I'm at Jett's."
A pause.
"Okay," Brynn said.
"I have to tell you a lot of things."
"Right."
"Most of them are bad. Some of them are not."
"Okay, Dan."
"Can I come over. In about an hour. With Jett."
A longer pause.
"Yes," she said. "Come over with Jett."
"Bry."
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry I haven't told you. I'm telling you now."
"Dan. Come over. I'll put the second cup of coffee back in the pot."
We hung up.
I set the phone down. I leaned my head against Jett's shoulder. He didn't move. He let me lean.
"Okay," I said. "Let's go tell my best friend everything."
"Yeah."
"You're going to stay for it."
"If you want me to."
"I want you to."
"Okay."
We got up. We left the coffee on the counter. We went to the front door. He held it open for me. I stepped out into the morning. The Pontiac was in the gravel turnaround. He came up behind me. He hadn't, since I'd come down at ten-twenty, put a hand on me.
He put one on me now. At the small of my back. Light. The exact pressure of a hand whose job is to remind a woman the man touching her is there, without telling her where to go.
We got in the car. We drove down the hill.
The Sunday in Vegas was bright and warm and pink at the edges of the desert, and the man I'd been afraid of for twenty-six years was in a library four miles from where I was about to walk into my best friend's apartment and tell her my entire life, and the man with his hand on the small of my back was driving me toward both of those things at the same time, and the inside of the Pontiac smelled like polish and like him, and I held my coffee in my lap and watched the city come up below us and thought, very clearly, this is the rest of it. This is what comes next.
I had not, in twenty-six years, had a what comes next I'd been able to look at without flinching.
I looked at this one.
I did not flinch.
He drove. I drank my coffee.
In the side pocket of my bag, the envelope with the photograph was still where I'd put it Friday night.
Sometime today I'd take it out and hand it to Marielle Cho with my statement, and it would stop being a thing I had to carry, and it would become a piece of evidence in a folder in a law office, and my father's blue Bic would belong to somebody else's filing system.
I'd been carrying his Bic in some form since I was four years old.
It was, possibly, time to put it down.
I drank the rest of my coffee.
The Pontiac came down out of the hills.
We headed for the city.