“Brenna, your phone is ringing,” Georgi called through the door. “Want me to answer it?”
“Yeah,” I yelled back.
When I came out, she had my phone on speaker. Our mother’s voice sounded higher pitched than normal.
“Calm down,” Georgi was saying. “I can’t understand you. What happened?”
“He’s getting out,” my mother yelled. “He got pardoned. Roy Beckett is coming home this week!”
Georgi’s mouth fell open, and she gaped up at me. “How did that happen?”
“He asked the governor to pardon him. My lawyer said he laid out a whole case about how he was innocent and wrongly convicted, and apparently convinced the governor. Forget the jury. That man is pardoning people left and right.”
Was I hearing right? I grabbed the phone out of Georgi’s hand. “Wait. So he can just pardon a convicted murderer and let him walk? Shouldn’t we have had a chance to weigh in on that? Don’t they talk to the victim’s family?”
“I guess he didn’t care how we felt. The governor said that even if Beckett did it, it was a crime of passion and not likely to happen again.”
“Unless he drinks and gets in a fight.”
“Your father didn’t fight with him. He walked away.”
“I know. Still . . .” I was sweating now, feeling a little sick. “When will he be home?”
“They said probably tomorrow.”
My heart was pounding again, and I could see that Georgi was struggling too. She got her purse and dabbed at the tears in her eyes. “I have to go.”
“Georgi . . . ,” my mother said.
“Mom, I’ll call you back,” I said. I clicked off the phone and went to my sister, but she shook me off.
“The world has gone completely bonkers. Roy Beckett back on the streets, and your husband suing the best mom in the world to take away custody. I can’t stand it.”
“Ex-husband,” I whispered.
“I’m going. I have to tell people this is happening. Warn them.”
“Yeah.”
She swept her blonde hair back and then let it fall into her face. She turned to me before she went out the door. “Try to sleep tonight. Seriously. Don’t do what you do, okay?”
I lied. “I’ll be okay.”
“Call me if you need me.”
“I will.”
“And if you don’t sleep, write.”
I nodded and watched her leave. Writing would be a good escape, if I could motivate myself tonight. But I’d had writer’s block for a full decade when the rest of my life had to be rewritten. I didn’t yet know how my own plot should go.
When I closed the door, the house, which was about two thousand square feet smaller than my previous one, felt enormous and empty.
I went to the kitchen and got a big bottle of wine. Wine wasn’t so awful, was it? It wasn’t as bad as straight vodka. All I needed was a little numbness. Just enough to survive.
I poured a tall glass of wine, called my mother back, and let her rant as I drank.
I felt a little more numb, but it wasn’t enough. When I got off the phone, I stared at the empty glass, hating myself. What was I doing?
I wasn’t going to let Jack Hertzog or Roy Beckett send me into the abyss. But I felt like a kid walking on top of a narrow wall. I was going to fall all by myself.
I went to the couch and opened my laptop. Instead of going to Word where my piecemeal fiction efforts were parked in promising folders, I clicked on Snapchat and saw that Rayne had already posted. She was sitting in the backseat between my brooding children, doing one of her clichéd duck-lip poses. Noah and Sophia wore their forced “say cheese” smiles. “Me and my sweetie pies,” Rayne had written.
Three dozen of her closest friends had commented already.
I slammed the computer shut and took my glass back to the kitchen. I thought better of pouring another glass and set it in the sink. I got the cork, intending to put it back into the bottle. But before I’d even made the decision to, I was pouring it again.
I would drink until I fell asleep. Then in the morning I would guzzle Pedialyte and try to get myself to Georgi’s boutique to work. Georgi couldn’t suspect what I’d done to cope. She’d have me in some kind of rehab within the hour.
If my father had lived, he would have died all over again to learn that one of his daughters drank any alcohol at all, much less as much as I did. The preacher’s daughters were supposed to be above reproach. Georgi had been the problem child, with her bad-boy relationships and a five-week marriage. But she was an entrepreneur now, doing well in spite of the bad choices of her youth, and I was the one who drank to survive. I was glad he couldn’t see it.
And what would he think about the man who’d killed him being back on the streets?
I went to my bedroom that still didn’t feel like home. I hadn’t completely unpacked all the boxes yet. I’d focused more on the kids’ rooms and the den and kitchen, so Noah and Sophia would feel at home. I stood in front of the mirror and looked at myself. Failure, victimhood, and hatred weren’t a good look. But I didn’t know how to change it. Somehow I had to channel my anger into a legal strategy.
I drank some more and crawled onto my bed. It wasn’t going to get better anytime soon. The best I could do was hang on and pray like mad.
But I doubted God was listening to me anymore.
Chapter 2
Nate
From the sky, the fire was beautiful, burning in a neon arc down the side of the mountain, moving with rapid grace. But the grace was only visual. I knew it was really a monster, creeping down the slope to devour everything in its path.
That lethal wind whipped against my ears as I stood at the open hatch of the plane, trying to make the target our spotter had decided on. The darkness would make it a tough battle, but this type of challenge only pumped my adrenaline more. I glanced at the houses just a few miles downhill from the fire. The lights I could see from the air twinkled with hominess and ironic calm. It could have been my hometown of Carlisle, its residents distracted by homework and sitcoms, football games and dancing lessons, bedtimes and prayers. Few headlights were on the roads. From here, nothing in the town suggested a sense of urgency.
This fire had been burning in a fairly contained area for three days, but because the other teams of smokejumpers and helitacks had been tied up in a battle with some fires farther north until yesterday, it had been considered low priority. It had been a longer-than-normal fire season that had stretched us all thin, but with the drought continuing, it didn’t seem close to ending. Now the wind had whipped up and the fire had taken a turn. We wouldn’t get any sleep tonight, and the work wouldn’t be pleasant. We would spend the night chainsawing trees to create a fire line, a gap where the fire would stop because there was nothing there to burn. I wished for sunlight to aid in our fight, but it would come soon enough.
I checked my parachute as the pilot flew toward the target, several miles south of the moving arc of flames. “All right!” I shouted to my team of Hotshots behind me. “See you in the furnace!”
I hurled myself out the door of the plane as adrenaline and dopamine rushed through my body like the beating wind. It never got old. Over the sound of the air rushing around my ears, I heard the whoop of the teammate who’d jumped next to me. I counted off seconds as I fell through the sky, letting gravity have its way . . . then pulled the cord. The parachute walloped out into a mushroom, jerking me out of gravity’s pull as the wind took over.