11. Dani #3
I looked at the back of her head and I loved her so much it physically hurt, in a way I hadn't felt in years. A clean simple pain in my chest about a friendship I didn't deserve to have and had somehow managed to keep.
"Thank you," I said.
"You're welcome."
That was all we said about it.
We cooked the rest of dinner the way we'd cooked dinner a thousand times in college.
Her on the stove, me on the salad, the radio low, the wine open.
We didn't talk about Jett. We didn't talk about my mother.
We didn't talk about my father or his letters or the conference room or the video review room or the deadline that was now four and a half weeks away.
We talked about a movie we both wanted to watch.
A friend from college who'd gotten engaged.
Brynn's mother, who'd texted that morning to say she was thinking of taking up tennis.
My phone was on the counter next to the wine bottle.
Face down. I hadn't put it face down on purpose, except I had, which was the kind of thing I'd been doing all week without quite admitting it.
I checked it once when Brynn turned to put a lid on the pot.
Two texts. A magazine I had a subscription to that I was going to cancel.
A reminder about a dentist appointment I hadn't rescheduled. Nothing from him.
I hadn't expected anything from him. I hadn't asked anything from him.
We'd done a session Wednesday night at his kitchen island that ended at eight-fifteen with him walking me to my car and saying drive safe, Hartley, and the next session was Tuesday, and there was no version of our particular arrangement that included a check-in text on a Friday at six.
The cold-war truce didn't allow for it. The terms we hadn't negotiated out loud had been very clear on the point.
So I put the phone back face-down on the counter.
I hadn't asked.
I'd also not been able to stop, all afternoon, on every walk through the kitchen, every reach for water, every glance toward the island, from checking whether the phone had lit up.
It hadn't. It wouldn't. The clock was Tuesday and would stay Tuesday, and the woman who'd decided last weekend not to give her father control over her panic decisions was not about to give a man she hadn't yet kissed control over how many times an hour she looked at the back of her own phone. And yet here we were.
I poured myself another half-inch of wine.
Then the doorman buzzed, and Brynn went to the intercom, and came back and stood frozen next to the island and said:
"Dan. There's a delivery for you."
"For me. Here."
"It's marked for you. Hand-delivered. He's holding it downstairs because he didn't want to bring it up without warning me."
"Brynn —"
"Do you want me to go down and get it. Or do you want to go down. Or do you want me to tell him to leave it at the desk and we deal with it tomorrow."
I froze.
The doorman knew Dani Hartley, because Brynn had introduced me at the desk three weeks ago when I moved in.
The doorman had instructions, from Brynn, about who and what was allowed up unannounced.
The fact that he'd buzzed Brynn instead of sending the delivery up meant it hadn't come in a way that fit the building's usual rhythm.
The fact that Brynn was telling me at all meant her doorman radar had pinged.
"What does the package look like."
"He said it's an envelope. Small. Yellow. Like a padded mailer. No return address. Hand-delivered by a courier. Driver paid cash."
My body started up the way it always did. The fine all-over vibration. The hands going somewhere useful. I had my hand around my wine glass before I knew I'd reached for it, and I lifted it and drank half in one pull and set it down.
"I'll go get it," I said.
"I'll come with you."
"Bry."
"I'm coming with you."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to."
She wiped her hands on a dish towel, shoved the towel over her shoulder, and we went down to the lobby together, in the elevator, neither of us talking.
The doorman handed me the envelope and said, very gently, I'm sorry, Ms. Hartley, I just thought you'd want to know, and I took it, and we rode back up with the envelope in my lap.
In the kitchen Brynn went back to the stove and turned the heat down on the onion-and-garlic situation that had been quietly burning while we were gone. I sat at the island with the envelope in front of me and looked at it.
Yellow. Padded. The size to hold a few sheets of paper or something small and flat. My name on the front in blue Bic, in his handwriting, smaller and shakier than the last one. No return address.
I knew without opening it that this one was different.
The other ones had been mailed. Stamped.
Postmarked. The whole machinery of the United States Postal Service standing between his hand and mine, which was three thousand miles and three to five business days, a buffer I'd come to rely on without knowing I was relying on it.
Whatever this was, he'd paid a courier to put it in my hand inside three hours.
He'd figured out where I was.
He'd paid someone to find me.
I lifted the envelope. Light. Almost weightless. Whatever was in it was small.
I peeled the seal.
A single photograph slid out onto the counter.
It was a photograph of me, taken with a long lens, from across what I recognized after a second as the players' lot at Caldwell Arena.
I was walking from Brynn's SUV to the side entrance.
Sweater, jeans, hair up. Unmistakable. The photo was dated four days ago in the lower right corner where a digital file stamps the time.
Wednesday afternoon. The afternoon I'd gone in for the second of the week's three sessions with Jett.
A Post-it on the back. Same blue Bic. Three words.
See you soon.
I sat at Brynn's kitchen island and looked at the photograph and held the very small dry sound in my throat that wanted to come out, and I held it, and I held it, and I did not let any of it out. Because if I let one piece out, the rest was going to come.
Brynn was at the stove. Brynn had not seen the photo.
I slid it back into the envelope. Slid the envelope into my back pocket. My hand was steady when I did it.
"You all right?" Brynn called from the stove.
"Yeah."
"What was it."
"A magazine clipping. From an industry friend. Nothing."
The lie came out smooth. I'd told that exact lie three times in the last six years, and it always came out smooth, because the muscle for it had been built when I was twelve. I'd been performing fine since I was old enough to perform anything.
"You sure."
"Yeah, Bry. I'm sure."