Allison, who crossed her arms during my diatribe, holds a long stare on me, her head cocked to one side. Her eyes are cold and steady. But she remains calm. Calmer than I expected. Calmer than I want.
“Feel better?” she asks.
“I don’t feel anything,” I say. “Not for you. Not anymore. I’m done with you.” I draw a line in the air. “So fucking done.”
Hurt flashes across her eyes. I hit her harder than she expected. But she’s in battle mode. I know that version of Allison. She will not crack. Not here. Not now.
She finally breaks eye contact, rolls her tongue inside her cheek. Then she steps closer to me, leans into my ear.
“Don’t be so sure,” she whispers.
She turns and heads for the door.
41
Allison
On my drive to the office, my hands are shaking. I’m ready for whatever Luke can bring. I already have a counterpunch. That’s not the problem. It’s his words to me. They hit me harder than I want to admit.
Life has taught me to keep my face impassive when lawyers screamed at me across courtroom tables, when witnesses quarreled with me or hit me with surprise testimony, when men belittled my accomplishments or talent, when Mommy Dearest told me I was an overweight disappointment. It taught me how to turn outrage or fear or abject sorrow into argument and reason and unrelenting determination. It did not, however, teach me how to steady the part of me that is still a little girl who adores her big brother.
The boy who snuck food to me when Mom put me on one of her extreme diets. Who held Dillon Teager’s head under the water at the pool until he apologized to me for stealing my rainbow cone. Who sat on my bed one night, after I got a C+ on a sophomore comp essay, and kept me laughing with his corny jokes until I stopped crying.
I’m done with you. The words play on a loop in my head, like a verdict read aloud in a hushed courtroom. Final. Absolute.
He meant it. Or at least he thinks he did. As if our history could be wiped from the record with no notice, no appeal.
My first reaction is pure anger; how dare he walk away from the person who has always been on his side? It burns. That pain threatens to fold me, to make me softer than I need to be. For a moment, I let it.
Then I straighten my shoulders. If Luke has decided to cut me out, he’s misjudged me. I won’t beg. I won’t plead.
I will bring him to heel—not by breaking him, but by remaking the terms of our fight. I will make him see what he’s abandoned: the steadiness I lend when everything else splinters, the clear mind that untangles chaos, the fierce stubbornness that gets us through crises. I know him better than he knows himself. I know his weak points, the soft places he disguises with sarcasm. I will be unyielding, exacting, the sort of ally who will not be discarded like an inconvenient prop.
This is not petty revenge. He hurt me, yes, but only because he thinks I hurt him first. No, this is a lesson, a demonstration. I will pull together the evidence of what I do, assemble it into a case he can’t ignore. Then I will stand there and watch him realize the truth: he needs me. When that recognition comes—when his jaw goes slack and whatever pride he’s clung to finally yields—I’ll be ready. Not because I want him groveling, but because we are family, and you don’t split with family. You keep them close.
He’s not done with me. I love my brother, and he loves me back. I’ll prove him wrong. I’ve never lost a case.
42
Luke
Yeah, it might seem odd that I’d get back at my sister by getting myself arrested and putting my career in jeopardy. But the more I thought it out, the more sense it made.
When Trinity showed me the security video, when I realized what Allison had done, the idea came to me. Yes, I was furious with her. Yes, part of the plan was to get back at my sister. That part would be easy. Trinity had the video of Allison planting the pills, and her DNA and fingerprints would be all over the contraband. Allison would be caught dead to rights.
But someone had to drive that car when the police pulled it over. Who would be crazy enough to do that?
Well, how about someone who was ready to leave Mortimer, who didn’t want to preside over a baseball factory, who wanted to move on to the next reclamation project—but who didn’t know how to hand the program off to his trusted assistant, Alan McIntyre?
See, that had been my problem. I had planned to leave Mortimer after last season, but I knew the chancellor would name his buddy as the next coach, not Alan. That was unacceptable to me. Alan deserved the chance, and the team deserved Alan. I couldn’t leave the program knowing that they’d toss Alan aside. I could bring Alan with me, buthe’d moved around so much while in the minor leagues; he and his wife had finally planted roots here.
So suddenly, I had an opportunity. If I got caught with the pills in the car, just before the season was to begin, the chancellor would have his excuse to get rid of me, but it would be too close to the start of the season for him to name anyone but Alan as the interim coach. Alan would have this year to prove himself, with probably the best Division III team in the country.
And me? Well, sure, I’d have a few weeks of bad publicity. But then it would all come out—the video of Allison, the DNA and fingerprint results. And I knew that Allison had somehow tipped off the police to be looking for Trinity’s car—I figured that would eventually come out, too. It would be clear for all to see that Allison had tried to set up Trinity. Meaning I would not merely be acquitted—I would be publicly exonerated, a victim, not a criminal. I’d lose a season of coaching, but I’d catch on somewhere the next year, I had no doubt.
I didn’t see a hole in the plan. Still, we tested things out first. We removed the drugs from the car right away, of course. Trinity drove the car around for a couple weeks, as she normally would, waiting for the local cops to pull her over. They never did. That confirmed for me what I’d thought all along—the car would be stopped on the highway on the way to Olivet Nazarene. Allison herself had said that weekday highway driving was the m.o. of drug traffickers. So then I just had to pick a Monday, close to the start of the season, to drive on the interstate. Presidents’ Day was two weeks before the start of the season. I put the Oxy in one of Allison’s bags, tossed in a tube of her lipstick, threw the bag in the trunk, and drove to Olivet Nazarene.
Audacious, I realize. But it worked. Alan is the coach. I will be exonerated soon.
