20. Jett #3
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.
I walked her out of the media room.
Brynn and Victoria were at the top of the stairs. Victoria didn't say anything when we came out. She did the small Victoria-thing of stepping forward and putting her hands on the sides of Dani's face. She didn't embrace her. She held her face. She looked at her. Dani looked back.
"Sweetheart," Victoria said.
Dani's chin trembled.
"I'm taking her home," I said.
"To Brynn's."
"To my place."
Victoria looked at Brynn. Brynn nodded.
"Okay," Victoria said. "Brynn will follow with a guard. The guard will stay at your gate overnight. Marielle will call by five with the booking confirmation."
"Okay."
Victoria let go of Dani's face. Her thumb caught a tear that hadn't yet fallen, and she swept it away with the same precision she did everything, and stepped back.
"Take her home, Jett."
"Yes ma'am."
I took her home.
I held her hand the entire drive. She didn't say anything for the first ten miles.
I didn't push. I drove the Pontiac up out of the city and into the canyon and up the road to my place, and the desert came up around us, and the sun was high and hard and white-bright on the valley, and the woman next to me had had the worst piece of her childhood yelled at her in a public building she hadn't been able to hide in, and she had not broken.
We came up the gravel turnaround. I parked. I turned the engine off.
I sat with her in the cabin of the Pontiac a long moment without saying anything. The pings of the engine cooling. The desert wind. The quiet.
"He yelled my name," she said.
"Yes."
"He yelled the name I haven't used since I was twenty-one."
"Yes."
"It didn't feel like my name."
"No?"
"No. It felt like the name of a person I used to know.
A name I used to live under, and then moved out of.
He yelled it at the building and I heard it in the conference room and the only thing I thought was, who is he yelling at.
The answer was: a person who hasn't lived in me for nine years. He was yelling at a ghost."
"Okay."
"That's the thing I want you to know. He did not yell at me today. He yelled at someone who used to live in me. She was already gone. He didn't get to her."
"Okay, Hartley."
"Yeah."
I turned and looked at her in the passenger seat of the car I'd built with my own hands, in the driveway of the house I'd built to keep the man I'd once been protected from any further damage, and I thought about the small precise distance she'd just named between Ashley Hartley and Dani Hartley.
And the small precise distance between the boy in the too-big suit and Jett Sturgill.
And how the two of us had spent our whole adult lives putting names on the parts of ourselves we'd outgrown so we could stop having to live under them.
And how the two of us, on a Monday afternoon in November, had ended up sitting in a car together, having survived both of our oldest selves out loud, on the same day, in the same building.
"Come inside, Hartley," I said.
"Yeah."
"I'm going to make you something to eat. I'm going to put on the TV. I'm going to put a blanket on you. I'm going to sit next to you on the couch and we're not going to talk about anything important for the rest of the afternoon."
"Okay."
"And then tonight."
"Tonight."
"You're staying."
"I'm staying."
"In my room."
"In your room."
"Okay."
We got out of the car. I held her hand up the path.
Unlocked the door. Held it open for her.
She walked in. The house was quiet. The afternoon light came in through the wall of glass in the kitchen and lit the island and the coffee cups still sitting where they'd been at ten that morning.
The cups we'd drunk from and not yet washed because we'd been on our way to an interview that had turned into something else.
She walked to the kitchen. She put both hands flat on the island. She stood there.
Then she leaned forward and rested her forehead against the cold stone of the counter, and her shoulders started to shake, and I came up behind her and put my arms around her from behind without picking her up, without moving her, without performing any of the comfort I'd performed in three different rooms in the last seventy-two hours.
Just held her against the counter while the shaking went through her body and ran its course and finished and ended.
She straightened up. She wiped her face on the back of her hand.
"What are you making me," she said.
"Grilled cheese."
"Brynn made me French toast."
"I know. I'm making you grilled cheese. I'm calling Brynn and she's going to tell me what to put in the grilled cheese to make it exactly the way she makes it, and then I'm going to make it exactly that way, because today is a day when grilled cheese is what's happening and you're going to eat it."
She almost smiled.
She did not smile.
But the corners of her mouth did the smallest thing they'd done since walking into the conference room two hours earlier, and I caught the small thing, and I let her keep it.
"Okay," she said.
I made the grilled cheese. She ate half of it. I ate the other half.
We sat on the couch. I put a blanket on her. I put the TV on. I sat next to her.
She fell asleep against my shoulder around three.
I let her sleep. I sat with her against my shoulder for the rest of the afternoon and I didn't move and I didn't check my phone and I didn't do anything other than sit with a woman whose father had been removed from her life that morning by four men in suits and a Caldwell security van and a piece of paper drafted by a lawyer who'd never lost.
She slept for two hours. She woke up at five. She looked at me.
"Hi," she said. Hoarse.
"Hi."
"Is it over."
"It's over."
"For real."
"For real, Hartley."
She closed her eyes again.
"Okay," she said.
I held her. The sun came down on the valley. The day ended. The first one she'd ever lived in his absence. The first one she'd ever lived with the man who'd haunted her childhood physically removed from her city by an institution she was now, by virtue of her own choices, on the inside of.
It was a good day to end.
It was a good day to start.
I held her until the room went dark.
She did not let go of my hand.