21. Dani
DANI
I woke up at six-fourteen in a bed that wasn't mine and turned my head on the pillow and found him already awake.
He was on his back. His hands folded on his chest over the duvet. He was looking at the ceiling the way a man looks at the ceiling when he's been doing it a while.
"Morning," I said.
"Morning."
"How long have you been up."
"Forty minutes."
"Why didn't you get out of bed."
"Because I'd have woken you up. And the only thing I wanted to do for the first hour of this day was be in this bed with you, so I figured I'd do that for a while before I went and did other things."
I closed my eyes again.
It was the simplest sentence he'd ever said to me. No architecture in it. A man telling a woman why he'd been still for forty minutes, and the answer was you, and the answer was unadorned.
"What time's your morning skate," I said.
"Skipped it."
"What."
"I texted Coach last night. He said take the day. He said don't make me say it twice, Sturgill. So I'm not."
"Coach knows."
"Coach knows what he needs to know. The official version is I was at the arena during a security incident yesterday afternoon and he's giving me a day.
The unofficial version Brynn handled with her mother last night, who handled it with Coach, who's decided he doesn't need to be in the loop on the unofficial version, which I appreciate about him. "
"Okay."
"You can go back to sleep."
"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."
"I know."
"You knew that."
"I've known that since the night at my kitchen island when you asked me at the window of your car why Victoria picked you. I knew it before you knew it, Hartley. I've been waiting for you to start writing it."
I turned my head on the pillow. I looked at him.
He was still looking at the ceiling, but he turned his head when he felt me look.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay."
"You don't have to ask what it's going to be about."
"I'm not asking what it's going to be about. You'll show me when you're ready."
"It might have you in it."
"It might."
"In specific ways."
"Hartley. You're a writer. I am, as of yesterday afternoon, the man you're with. You're going to write what you need to write, and I'm going to read it when you give it to me, and that's the deal, and I'm not going to give you notes on it before you give it to me."
"You sound like you've given this some thought."
"I have."
"How much thought."
"Since the second interview, more or less. I figured out somewhere in there that whatever you ended up writing was a thing I was going to have to make peace with not getting to control. I've been making the peace incrementally."
"You're a strange man, Jett Sturgill."
"I've been told."
I rolled onto my side. I put my hand on his chest. The fabric of the t-shirt he'd slept in. The steady rhythm of his breath underneath it.
"He's gone," I said. Quietly. Like I needed to test the sentence in the room.
"He's gone."
"I do not know what I'm supposed to do with that."
"You're not supposed to do anything with it today, Hartley.
You're supposed to drink coffee. You're supposed to eat the breakfast I'm going to make you.
You're supposed to sit at my kitchen island and open your laptop and write whatever sentences come, and not write whatever sentences don't. You're supposed to take a walk on the deck if you need to.
You're supposed to fall asleep on the couch if you need to.
There's no thing you're supposed to do today that I haven't just listed.
The doing-things-with-it starts tomorrow at the earliest."
"Okay."
"Okay."
He turned his head back to the ceiling. He breathed.
I lay against him, and the morning got brighter on the windows, and somewhere in the desert below us a plane was being readied at Harry Reid for an afternoon flight to Nashville, and the man who'd spent twenty-six years telling me what to be afraid of was being walked through booking paperwork by a woman who'd never lost a case, and I did not, in that moment, have any further feelings about him.
I'd run out of feelings about my father, at least for the morning.
What I had instead was a man's chest under my hand.
What I had instead was a coffee I hadn't yet had.
What I had instead was a sentence in my head about the inside of a kitchen on a Friday night in November in a glass house in the hills, and the sentence wanted out.
"I'm getting up," I said.
"Okay."
"I'm going to write."
"Yeah."
"You're going to make me eggs."
"I'm going to make you eggs."
"Soft."
"Soft."
We got up.
He went down to the kitchen. I went into the bathroom and washed my face and put my hair up and put on the t-shirt of his that was still folded on the chair from Sunday morning, and I came down the stairs barefoot in his clothes for the second time in two days, and the smell of coffee was already coming up the staircase to meet me.
He had two mugs out. The laptop bag open on the island where I'd left it the night before. A small notepad next to one of the mugs and a fresh pen.
He'd been thinking, while I was getting dressed, about what a writer needed at a kitchen island on a Tuesday morning, and he'd set out the materials.
I sat down. I opened the laptop. I opened a fresh document.
I wrote a sentence. I read it back. I added a comma. I read it back again.
The morning was just starting. The coffee was hot. The eggs were going to be soft. The man across the island hadn't asked me what the sentence said.
I wrote another one.