17. Dani #2
I sat up. Drank the water. Went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, which was a thing I generally avoided in the morning even on good days, and I looked, in a stranger's bathroom in a glass house in the hills, like a woman who'd been through something and survived it.
Which I had not, until that morning, ever felt I looked like.
I washed my face. I borrowed his toothbrush, because mine was at Brynn's and there was no version of the morning where I was going down to that kitchen without brushing my teeth.
I came back out. There was a t-shirt of his folded on the chair near the window, the one he'd folded my dress over the night before. A pair of leggings I'd brought in my bag. A hair tie I'd put on his nightstand at some point I didn't remember.
I dressed. I went downstairs.
He was at the kitchen island in sweatpants and a different practice shirt, hair wet from a shower I hadn't heard him take.
Two cups of coffee waited on the counter.
A phone face-up next to his cup, which he hadn't done at any point on Friday or Saturday.
A single sheet of printed paper next to the phone.
He looked up when I came in. He didn't get up. He didn't perform a hi. He waited for me to come to him.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi."
"What time is it."
"Ten twenty."
"I slept that late."
"You slept that late, Hartley. You earned it. Coffee."
I picked up the second cup. It was already light and sweet the way I took it. He'd paid attention on Saturday morning. I sat down across from him.
He waited until I'd taken a sip.
"Hollis update came in at eight," he said. "I let you sleep through it because it wasn't urgent and you needed the sleep. I'm telling you now."
"Okay."
"Your father drove west from the motel at five forty-seven, which I already told you.
He drove to a Denny's on the west side. Had breakfast alone.
Sat at the counter and read a paper for two hours.
Hollis's man stayed in the lot. Your father left at eight oh two.
He didn't get back in his car. He walked to a bus stop.
Got on a city bus going east. Hollis's man followed in the car.
The bus stopped at Charleston and Maryland and your father got off and went into the public library. "
"The library," I said.
"What."
"He's been in the library two hours and seventeen minutes, as of the timestamp on this email." He turned the printed sheet toward me. "Hollis has a guy inside now. Your father's at one of the computer terminals on the second floor. He's been on it the entire time."
"What is he doing on the computer."
"Hollis's guy can't get close enough to see the screen without making himself, so we don't know yet.
But your father hasn't approached you. Hasn't gone to Brynn's building.
Hasn't driven by any of the obvious places I'd expect a man like him to drive by.
He is, as of right now, in a library in West Las Vegas using a computer for unknown purposes. "
I sat with that.
I hadn't expected library. I'd braced, for two days, for a confrontation at Brynn's building. On the sidewalk outside the arena. On the gravel turnaround in front of Jett's house, because the man wasn't above driving up into the hills if he'd figured out how. I had not braced for a public library.
"What does it mean," I said.
"I don't know yet."
"You have a guess."
"I have a guess."
"Tell me."
He set his coffee down.
"My guess," Jett said, "is he came to Vegas with a plan, and the plan was to scare you into one of the three options from the phone call.
Drop the article. Come home. Or let him up to Brynn's for a family conversation, whatever that would've meant.
He gave you forty-eight hours because he thinks forty-eight hours is the maximum a person can sit with a deadline without folding.
You didn't fold. You didn't call. You didn't get on a plane.
You didn't move out of Brynn's. He's in a library because the plan didn't work and he's trying to figure out a new one, and the new one probably involves the internet, which is a tool he's not good at, which is why he's taking two hours and seventeen minutes on a library terminal to do whatever he's doing. "
I closed my eyes.
"Okay."
"Hartley."
"Yes."
"This is good."
"What is."
"That he's in a library and not on a sidewalk.
The library is the move of a man whose first move didn't work.
His first move was the photograph and the phone call.
You took the phone call and you spoke first. He didn't have a script for that.
He's been thrown for thirty-four hours and he's trying to figure out what to do next, and the library is where men of his generation go to figure out what to do next, and the figuring out takes him hours, not minutes, which means we have time. "
"Time to do what."
"Time to decide whether you want me to do anything other than have eyes on him."
I opened my eyes.
I hadn't been ready for the question, even though I'd known it was coming, even though it had been the only question for thirty-six hours.
"What are the options," I said.
He picked up his coffee. He drank.
"Option one. We keep eyes on him. We do nothing. He runs his own clock out. He gets on a plane home Monday or Tuesday. The threat dissipates by itself."
"And then."
"And then he sends more envelopes from Tennessee and we deal with each one as it comes."
"Option two."
"We don't engage him directly, but we make his life in Vegas harder. Hollis puts a man on him visibly. Not aggressively. Just so he knows. He'll be more careful. He'll probably leave faster."
"Option three."
"We engage him directly. Through a lawyer.
Letter today, served in person at the library or wherever he is next.
It tells him any further contact with you is harassment, it bars him from every Caldwell property in this city, the arena included, and it gives him forty-eight hours to leave Nevada before we file for a restraining order.
The second he's served, setting foot on one of those properties stops being a civil matter and starts being criminal trespass.
Victoria has lawyers who do this exact thing for the team's players when stalkers turn up. They're very good and very fast."
"Option four."
He looked at me.
"I'm not going to tell you option four, Hartley."
"What is option four."
"Option four is something a man I used to be would have done. The man I am now is not going to do it. I'm not telling you about it because I'm not going to do it. There is no option four."
I drank my coffee.
I sat with the three options. I thought about the man at a library terminal on a Sunday morning in a city he had no business being in, trying to figure out the next way to hurt me.
I thought about the man across the island, who'd stayed up watching me have a nightmare and made me tea with honey and let me cry on his chest and hadn't asked me to apologize for any of it.
I thought about how the two men in my life had built parallel architectures of love and control, and how the one across the kitchen island was a thing I could actually live inside.
"Three," I said.
"Three." He didn't push. He let me build it.
"With Victoria's lawyers. Which means telling Victoria. Which means telling Brynn."
"Which means telling Brynn at the same time. Brynn first, probably. She'd be furious to hear it from her mother before she heard it from you."
"You're right."
"I know."
"How fast can it happen."
He picked up his phone.
"Hollis can have a lawyer on the phone in twenty minutes. Victoria can authorize the letter from her phone in another ten. It can be served by hand at the library inside an hour from now if you give me a yes."
"You already had this planned out."