The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,166

speaking?”

Charlie crossed her arms. “Can I have a minute?”

Sam’s eyebrow arched up, but she managed for once to withhold her opinion. “I’ll be outside.”

Charlie watched her sister leave the room. Sam wasn’t limping as much today. That, at least, was a relief. Charlie could not stand seeing her back in Pikeville, so out of her element, so unprotected. Sam could not turn a corner, she could not walk down the street, without everyone knowing exactly what had happened.

Except for Judge Stanley Lyman.

If there had been a way for Charlie to run up to the bench and slap the bastard across the face for humiliating her sister, Charlie would have risked being arrested.

Sam had always worked so hard to hide the things that were wrong with her, but you did not have to do more than study her for a few minutes to notice the peculiarities. Her posture, always too stiff. The way she walked with her arms tight to her sides rather than letting them swing freely. The way she held her head at an angle, always wary of her blindside. Then there was her precise, maddeningly didactic way of speaking. Sam’s tone had always been sharp, but after being shot, it was as if every word was folded around the corner of a straight edge. Sometimes, you could hear a hesitation as she searched for the correct word. More rarely, you heard the sound of her breath as she pushed out sound, using her diaphragm the way the speech pathologist had trained her.

The doctors. The pathologists. The therapists. There had been a whole team surrounding Sam. They all had opinions, recommendations, warnings, and none of them understood that Sam would defy them all. She was not a normal person. She had not been that way before being shot, and she certainly was not that way during her recovery.

Charlie could remember one of the doctors telling Rusty that the damage to Sam’s brain could shave off as many as ten IQ points. Charlie had almost laughed. Ten points would be devastating for any normal human being. For Sam, it meant that she went from being a genius-level prodigy to just really, really fucking smart.

Sam was seventeen years old, two years on from the gunshot, when she was offered a full scholarship to Stanford.

Was she happy?

Charlie could hear Rusty’s question echoing in her head.

She turned around to face her father’s hideous casket. She rested her hand on the lid. The paint had chipped in the corner, which she supposed was what happened when you hung on it like a demented, foul-mouthed monkey.

Sam did not seem happy, but she seemed content.

In retrospect, Charlie should have told her father that contentedness was the more laudable goal. Sam was thriving in her legal practice. Her temper, once a roiling tempest, finally seemed to be under control. The anger she had carried around like a brick in her chest was clearly gone. Of course, she was still pedantic and annoying, but that came with being their mother’s child.

Charlie tapped her fingers on the casket.

The irony was not lost on Charlie that both she and her sister had failed miserably in matters of life and death. Sam had not been able to ease her husband’s suffering. Charlie had not been able to provide a place of safety for her growing child.

“And here they come again,” Charlie mumbled as tears filled her eyes. She was sick of crying. She didn’t want to do it anymore. She didn’t want to be a bitch anymore. She didn’t want to feel sad anymore. She didn’t want to be without her husband anymore.

As hard as it was to hold onto things, it was even harder to let them go.

She pulled over one of the reflecting chairs. She yanked off the baby-blue satin cover, because this was not a teenage girl’s sweet sixteen party.

Charlie sat down on the hard plastic.

She had told Sam her secret. She had opened the box.

Why did she not feel different? Why had things not miraculously changed?

Years ago, Rusty had dragged Charlie to a therapist. She was sixteen. Sam was living in California. Charlie had started acting out in school, dating the wrong boys, screwing the wrong boys, slicing the tires on the cars that the wrong boys drove.

Rusty had probably assumed that Charlie would tell the truth about what had happened, just as Charlie had assumed that Rusty would expect her to leave that part out.

Hello, familiar impasse.

The therapist, an earnest man in a sweater vest, had