19. Dani
DANI
The elevator up to Brynn's penthouse was the longest forty-three seconds of my life.
Jett stood next to me with his hands in his pockets and his back against the rail.
He hadn't said anything in the car since we pulled out of his driveway.
Hadn't said anything in the parking garage.
Hadn't said anything in the lobby. He was, I'd figured out somewhere on the ride down out of the hills, conserving words for the room we were about to walk into, which I was grateful for, because every word he said before then was a word neither of us got back when we needed it.
I watched the numbers climb. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.
"Hartley."
"Yeah."
"You don't have to do this in any particular order. Tell her what you want to tell her in the order it comes out. She'll keep up."
"Okay."
"And whatever she says to you in there, she still loves you.
I know that. I've known her longer than almost anybody in this city and I know what she does when somebody she loves does something that hurts her.
She's going to hurt for a minute and then she's going to fix it.
That's who she is. You came in with the right person and you're walking out with the same one.
I want you to know that before the door opens. "
I looked up at him.
"How do you know that," I said.
"Because she watched her father die when she was twelve," he said quietly, "and she watched her mother grieve a stranger for two years before Coach got close, and she's been collecting the people she loves with both hands ever since, because she knows what it costs to lose one.
She is not going to lose you over this. I have a lot of money I'd bet on that, Hartley, and I don't bet money on anything. "
The elevator dinged.
The doors opened.
He stepped out first. I followed.
The hallway to her door was twenty feet.
It felt like more. I walked it with the envelope in my bag and the lawyer call pending and the man at the library somewhere on the other side of the city and the best friend in the world thirty seconds away through a door I'd been walking through for three weeks like a guest.
I knocked.
She opened it inside of two seconds, which meant she'd been standing on the other side of it, which meant Brynn Caldwell had also been having a forty-three-second elevator ride.
She looked at me. She looked at Jett. She looked back at me.
Her face did the small thing it had been doing for two and a half weeks.
The I am holding back what I'd say if I weren't actively holding back thing.
The perceptive-Brynn thing. She was in leggings and a sweatshirt of Colton's that hung past her hips, her hair up in the messy bun she did when she was actually paying attention and not performing the idea of it, and her eyes were already a little red, which meant she'd cried at some point in the forty-five minutes between my call and our arrival.
"Get in here," she said. Quiet.
I went in. Jett came in behind me. Brynn closed the door and put the chain on, which she'd never done with me before, which meant she'd decided this was going to be a closed-door conversation.
She turned around. She looked at us in her front hallway in our day-after clothes and our coffee breath, and she put both hands on her hips, the way she'd been doing since she was twenty, exactly the way her mother did, and she said:
"Are you both okay."
That was the first thing she asked.
Not what is going on. Not what is wrong. Not why are you here together at eleven in the morning on a Sunday with no warning.
Are you both okay.
"Yes," I said. "I mean. No. But yes."
"Jett."
"Yes."
"Okay. Kitchen."
She turned and walked. We followed.
The penthouse kitchen was the same as it had been the morning before when Brynn did my hair, the morning before that when we ate grilled cheese, every morning of the three weeks I'd been here.
The big island. The bowl of fruit she kept stocked even though she never ate fruit.
The two coffee cups on the counter, one cold-stranded, one warm.
She'd been telling the truth on the phone about the second coffee.
She poured it back into the pot. Poured a fresh cup. Slid it across to me. Poured one for Jett without asking.
She did not pour one for herself.
She stood across the island with her hands flat on the counter, and she looked at me, and she said:
"Go."
I'd thought, on the way over, about what order to tell it in.
The childhood-first version, the dad-arc version, the version that started with the assignment and worked backward.
Every order that might land least hard and let her keep loving me through it.
Standing across the island from her, I understood I'd been planning every version except the true one, which was the one where I'd been a coward with her for eight years.
So I started there. I told her I was sorry.
That I'd been her person for eight years and had let her find out the shape of my life by watching me come home from interviews looking like I'd been hit by a car, instead of telling her.
That I'd been a coward, and I was done being one, and here was the rest of it.
And then I told her the rest. I'd told it once already that morning, in the dark, to him, and I couldn't stand to lay every word of it out a second time.
The short version is I gave Brynn the same thing I'd given Jett.
The father. The scars. The shoebox in Brooklyn and the eight years of envelopes and the forty-eighth one sitting in my bag four feet from her fruit bowl.
The man in the library four miles away with Jett's investigator on him.
And the older thing underneath all of it: the town we'd both grown up in, the boy I'd known at sixteen, the homecoming dance, what I'd done to the man standing in her kitchen back when he'd been the kindest person available to break.
I told it in the order it came out, the way Jett had said to. Somewhere in the middle her hand went to her mouth and stayed there. She kept up, the way he'd said she would. I stopped when I ran out of breath.
Brynn took her hand off her mouth. She put both hands flat on the counter again.
She had not started crying. Her eyes were wet but she hadn't started, which I'd braced for, which I'd been almost wanting, because crying would have been a thing I could handle.
Not-crying was a thing I hadn't braced for.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"That's a lot. Give me a minute."
"Okay."
She didn't move. She stood with her hands flat on the counter and her eyes on the bowl of fruit and her face very still.
She was, I knew because I'd watched her do it for eight years, processing.
Brynn didn't process out loud. Brynn processed in silence, and what came out at the end was a complete sentence that did the work of an entire paragraph.
I waited. Jett waited. The kitchen waited.
She breathed in for what felt like a very long time. Breathed out. Lifted her eyes from the fruit bowl and looked at me.
"You're telling me," she said, "that you've known the man in my kitchen since you were sixteen."
"Yes."
"And he's known you since you were sixteen."
"Yes."
"And when I introduced you to him three weeks ago in a conference room at my mother's arena, neither of you said anything."
"He said nothing because he didn't want to lay out who he'd been. I said nothing because I was at the mercy of his choice."
"And every conversation I've had with you in the three weeks since, when I asked if you were okay, and you said you were tired, and I knew you were lying."
"Yes, Bry."
"And every conversation I've had with him in the three weeks since, when I watched him perform fine and asked him at the bar if he was going to hurt you, and he said no, and I believed him."
"Yes."
"You've both been lying to me for three weeks while I actively chose not to push, because I told you I wouldn't push."
"Yes."
She closed her eyes.
She didn't say anything for what felt like a minute and was probably eight seconds.
When she opened them, she looked at Jett.
"Sturgill," she said.
"Yeah, Bry."
"I've known you for two and a half years.
You've been a brother to me. I've been at your house.
You've been at mine. You've eaten dinners at my table cooked by my husband-adjacent partner.
I introduced you to my mother. I introduced you to my best friend three weeks ago thinking I was introducing two people who'd never met, and you let me.
You stood in that conference room and let me do that to her, and to you, and to myself. "
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because if I'd told you the truth in that conference room I'd have had to tell you who I was at sixteen.
I've spent eight years and a lot of money making sure nobody in this life ever had to meet that kid.
I wasn't going to introduce you to him on a Monday afternoon in a media room with a magazine reporter watching and no warning.
And I've been trying since Thursday night, when you saw something across the table and asked me a question at your bar, to figure out the right way to tell you.
I didn't figure it out fast enough. I'm sorry, Bry.
I'm genuinely sorry. I wasn't trying to keep it from you.
I was trying to figure out how to give it to you, and I ran out of time. "
Brynn took that in. She looked back at me.
"Dani."
"Yes."
"You were cruel to him in high school."
"Yes."
"Like, by-the-textbook cruel. Like, terror-of-his-adolescence cruel."
"Yes."
"And he forgave you for it."
"He's in the process of."
"And you slept with him last night."
"Yes."
"Okay."
She turned. Walked to the cupboard. Got a glass. Poured water from the dispenser on the fridge. Drank the whole thing standing at the counter. Set the glass down.
She turned back.
"I'm going to say a thing," she said, "and you're both going to let me say it without interrupting, and then I'm going to say what I want to do, and then we're going to do it. Deal?"
"Deal," I said.