13. Dani #3
I didn't say hello. I didn't say anything. I held the phone to my ear and listened to the silence on the other end, and after a moment I heard a man breathe in, and then I heard the voice I hadn't heard in eight years.
"Ashley."
I closed my eyes.
It was the same voice. Maybe a little thinner.
Maybe a little hoarser. The vocal cords of a man who'd been smoking since he was fourteen and spent thirty years yelling at women in a kitchen in middle Tennessee.
But the voice. The same voice. The one that taught me how to make myself small.
The one that had been the soundtrack of every nightmare I'd had into my late twenties.
The voice my body recognized before my brain finished placing it, the way my body knew his handwriting.
"I know you're there, Ashley. The line went quiet when you picked up. The phone don't do that on its own."
I did not breathe.
"Your mother and I would like to see you.
She's not doing well. I'm not asking. I'm telling you we're going to see you, soon, on a schedule that suits us, and I'm calling tonight to let you know you can decide the manner of it.
You can fly home. You can pick up a phone and call your mother on a normal line and have a normal conversation.
You can let me drive out there, which I'm willing to do, and have already prepared to do, and which you've seen evidence of in the form of an envelope you received yesterday at your friend's apartment building. "
I did not move.
"Your friend lives in a nice building, Ashley. The kind that has a doorman. I imagine he's a courteous man. He's been very courteous with me. I'd like to keep him out of this. You know what I'd like."
I did not move.
"Three options. Pick one by Sunday. I'll be in town until then. I'd rather not run my own clock out on this."
A pause.
"Are you going to say anything to me, Ashley."
I held the phone away from my mouth. I didn't let him hear me breathe.
I stood up from the couch and walked to the window.
The valley was below me. The lights were on.
Somewhere out there, in the city my father was now in, a man named Jett was in his glass house in the hills, and a man named Rhett was in his house with a fire pit and the woman across from him already in his orbit, and my best friend was at a bar two miles south of where I stood.
And the only person on the line with me right now was a man I'd spent eight years carefully placing on the other side of every door I owned.
I brought the phone back to my mouth.
"If you come within five hundred feet of me," I said, "I will call the police. If you come within five hundred feet of the woman I'm living with, I will call her mother, who owns this city. You do not know what you're walking into. You think you do. You don't."
He was quiet a long moment.
Then he laughed. A small dry sound. The same one he'd made my whole childhood when one of us said something he found funny because it was small enough for him to crush.
"All right, Ashley," he said. "Whatever you want."
He hung up.
I stood at the window with the phone still against my ear a long time after the call ended.
The screen had gone dark. The phone had vibrated once to say the call was over.
The valley was below me. I was a woman alone in a glass apartment on a high floor in a city my father was in, and I'd just done the only thing I'd ever done that he hadn't expected me to do, which was speak first.
I'd been silent on a phone with him for twenty-six years.
I'd spoken first.
The world had not ended.
I put the phone down on the island. I sat on the floor of the kitchen with my back against the cabinets and I cried, the second time in one day, the second time in roughly six hours, and this time I let it come the whole way through.
When I was done, I picked up the phone.
I did not call Brynn.
I did not call Victoria.
I did not call the police, because he hadn't actually committed a crime, and I'd threatened to call them only as a thing to say.
I called Jett.
He picked up on the first ring.
"Hartley."
"Are you home."
"Yeah."
"Can I come over."
A pause.
"Yes," he said.
I drove to him.
I didn't know yet what I was going to tell him.
Didn't know yet how much of any of it I'd say.
I only knew there had been one person in the world tonight whose number my hand had reached for, after I'd decided not to give my father the panic decision he'd spent my whole life training me for. And the number had been his.
That was the thing I hadn't, until that moment, fully understood.
I hadn't called him because I hadn't yet earned the right to.
I'd earned it tonight.
I drove up into the hills toward the glass house, and the marble in my chest had become something else by then, something I could pick up and hold, and what I was holding as I drove was a small clear specific decision.
I was going to walk into the man's kitchen, and put the photograph and the phone call on his counter, and let him see all of it.
I was going to stop carrying it alone.
That was what tonight had cost me, and what tonight had given me, and the cost and the gift were the same shape.
I drove.