20. Jett
JETT
I slept at my own house on Sunday night for the first time in three nights and I did not like it.
The call had been mine to make. I'd made the right one, which has never once in my life made me feel one bit better about a damn thing.
The Caldwell security car was at Brynn's building by noon, the lobby man had been briefed, and the safest place in this city for Dani for the next forty-eight hours was Brynn's guest room, not mine.
Marielle Cho had served the letter to Dani's father at the public library on Charleston at three forty-seven that afternoon, in person, while Hollis's two guys stood ten feet behind her with their hands visibly empty.
He'd read the letter. He hadn't spoken to her.
He'd walked out, taken a city bus back to his motel, and that was where Hollis's man still was, parked across the street, watching the door.
The forty-eight-hour clock was ticking.
So I'd driven myself home alone from Brynn's at nine-thirty and let myself into my house and stood in my own kitchen and thought about the fact that the island looked wrong without a coffee cup at the spot where Dani had been sitting that morning.
Somewhere in the last seventy-two hours the kitchen had grown a Dani-shaped spot at the island, and nobody had run it by me first. I hadn't clocked it happening.
I just stood there now, clocking it empty.
I'd texted her at ten.
Home.
She'd texted back inside of a minute.
Brynn made me eat a second French toast.
The chain on the door.
Yes.
Security car.
Same place it has been since two.
Hollis update?
Subject in motel since 5:14 pm. Has not left. Light on. TV audible from the parking lot.
Okay.
Sleep, Hartley.
You too, Sturgill.
That had been the entire exchange.
I lay in my own bed in the same room she'd been in twenty-four hours earlier and stared at the ceiling for an hour, thinking about a man in a motel watching television, and a woman in a guest room with a chain on her best friend's front door, and the peculiar quality of empty a bed could have when it hadn't been empty the night before.
I eventually slept.
I did not sleep well.
Monday morning came up bright and clean and not at all to scale with the day it was actually going to be.
The interview was on the calendar for eleven.
We'd decided, Dani and I, at Brynn's island over French toast, that we were going to keep it.
Canceling would have signaled to Victoria that we were hiding more than we'd told her, and Victoria, who'd spent the last twenty-four hours coordinating the security apparatus protecting the woman she'd hired to write a magazine piece, deserved better than that from either of us. So I'd texted Dani at six.
Still on for eleven?
Still on. Brynn driving me. Security car following us. Marielle says it's fine, he won't move while the letter's in his hand.
Okay.
The drive to the arena was the most ordinary thing I'd done in a week, which after the week I'd had felt almost like an insult.
I got there at ten-fifteen the way I always did on a Monday, parked in my usual spot, walked in through the side entrance, said hi to Janice at the security desk, went to the locker room, changed into the team polo, and walked down to the media room on the second floor at ten fifty-five.
Brynn was already there. Setting up the chairs.
Doing the Brynn thing. She was in the navy blazer she wore when she was running point on something official, hair up, her face wearing the precise expression I'd come to recognize over the weekend as I am operating in crisis-management mode and you will not be able to tell from looking at me.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey."
"They're downstairs. Came in through the front like a normal interview party. Mom is with them."
"Victoria's here."
"Mom's taking the interview today. She wants to be in the room. She wants the room visible to her. She's doing the thing she does, Jett, which is put herself in the center of the situation so the situation has to go through her."
"Okay."
"You okay with that."
"I'm okay with that."
"Good. They'll be up in two minutes. Dani's good. She slept four hours. She ate. She's terrified. She's also wearing the dark blue dress, the one from Saturday, which my husband-adjacent boyfriend tells me is a thing women do when they need armor that looks like a dress."
I almost laughed.
I did not laugh.
I sat down at the table in the chair facing the door, because I'd decided in the elevator that I was going to be the first thing she saw when she walked in, and I waited.
She came in two minutes later with Victoria one step behind her and a Caldwell security guard one step behind Victoria.
The guard, a woman in her forties in a black suit with a clear earpiece, took a position by the door.
She didn't introduce herself. She didn't need to.
Her job was being in the room and being a thing in the room, and she did it the way the Caldwell security people did everything, which was to disappear into the wall while remaining visibly present.
Dani sat across from me. She set the recorder down. The notebook down. The pen down. She looked at me. The look did the work of a sentence I'll never be able to write down.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"You look tired."
"You look beautiful, Hartley."
She almost smiled. Pulled it back. Brynn hadn't closed the door. Victoria had taken the chair at the end of the table with her tablet in front of her and her reading glasses up on her head, and she gave me a particular look that meant we are proceeding as normal, please cooperate. I cooperated.
We did the interview.
Dani had a list of follow-ups from the previous Thursday's session, the one at my kitchen island, the one with the spaghetti, though neither of us mentioned the spaghetti and the existence of the spaghetti was not in the room with us.
She asked about the second-line forecheck again, the part she hadn't been satisfied with.
About the playoff defenseman pairing Coach had used in the third round.
About a specific shift I'd taken in game four of the conference final that I hadn't realized she'd clocked, which she had, and which she wanted to talk about with the kind of detail that meant she'd watched the tape and rewatched it.
Then she asked about this season. Not the championship. This one. The one we were standing in the middle of, where we'd come out of the gate as defending champions and spent November playing like a team that had left something somewhere in the summer and couldn't remember the room it was in.
She had the numbers better than I did. She knew we'd dropped four of six.
She knew the goals-against had crept up half a goal a night.
She knew I personally hadn't put one in the net in three weeks, and that I'd been on the ice for two against in the Phoenix loss that I should have killed and hadn't.
She didn't say any of it like an accusation.
She said it like a woman trying to understand a thing she was watching come apart at the edges, which was her whole job, and which was also, I was realizing, the most honest anybody had looked straight at my season in a long time.
"You are pressing," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I am pressing," I said.
She didn't ask me why. She was too good to ask me why in a kitchen where she already knew the answer was sitting across the island from her in wet hair and my shirt. She wrote something down. I let her.
We did forty minutes of legitimate hockey work. I gave her real answers. She wrote real notes. Victoria sat at the end of the table and didn't say anything, but I felt her listening, the way you felt Victoria listening, which was to say everywhere in the room at once.
At eleven forty-three Brynn's phone vibrated on her clipboard.
She looked at it.
Something crossed her face. The slightly-flattened thing it had been doing since Sunday.
The on-alert thing. She looked at Victoria.
Victoria nodded once, almost imperceptibly.
Brynn picked up the phone and stepped to the doorway.
She spoke into it quietly. Three seconds. She hung up. She came back in.
She did not sit.
"Mom," Brynn said. "Hollis."
Victoria stood up.
"Excuse me a moment," Victoria said, very calmly, to Dani and to me.
Brynn and Victoria stepped out together. The security woman at the door stayed where she was. The door closed.
Dani looked at me.
"It's him," she said.
"Probably."
"In the building."
"Probably."
"Okay."
She didn't move. Didn't stand up. Didn't perform alarm.
She put her pen down on her notebook the way you put a pen down when you're not sure you'll be picking it back up in the same room you put it down in, and she looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face before.
The expression of a woman who'd been waiting for a thing for twenty-six years and had now been told it was finally happening.
I stood up.
"Stay here," I said. "Do not leave this room. The woman at the door stays with you. Whatever happens, you do not leave this room until Brynn or Victoria or I come back through that door. Do you understand."
"Jett."
"I'm not asking, Hartley. Stay in this room."
"Where are you going."
"I'm going to find out what's happening and I'm coming back.
I'm not going to put my hands on him. I promised you Friday I wasn't going to do anything in this you hadn't been told about, and I'm keeping that promise.
I'm going to find Brynn and Victoria and I'm going to come back here and tell you what's happening. "
She nodded.
I went to the door. The security woman looked at me. I looked at her.
"Caldwell instructions are that Ms. Hartley does not leave this room," I said.
"Caldwell instructions are confirmed," she said.
"Thank you."
I stepped out. I closed the door behind me.