believed what she said, but the words had flattened. Her voice lost a fraction of depth from the top and bottom of her range and her eyes seemed to crystallize. She saw me but I wasn’t there. I was only an obstacle in her and Aaden’s path.
Now Detective Li was making her replay her last encounter with Corbett MacDermott. He asked for more details about the conversation, anything she could remember, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something about this entire interview was off. Why had this case been assigned to the man who’d investigated a trainer’s suicide? Wasn’t a hit-and-run accident even more clear-cut than a corpse with a gun and a note? He paced in front of Logan after she said she couldn’t recall any more details, both his posture and face blank, giving nothing away.
“Why were you leaving the tournament so early? Aren’t you the face of the company?”
“No, not anymore. And I was never the brains, right, Gregg?” She gave me a hard, glittering smile. I didn’t answer.
“I was tired,” she shrugged, turning back to the detective. “It had been a long day.”
“And you didn’t hear the accident at all? It must have happened when you were still walking.”
She shook her head. Her voice had tightened. It wasn’t completely flat, not a monotone, but she’d lost a sliver of her range. The wavelength of Logan’s tells. My stomach dropped as I remembered her questions at the meeting, asking if there had been any cameras, any recording of the accident. Suddenly her presence—in full Logan Russo costume and makeup, dangerously on-brand—made perfect, horrible sense.
Logan.
An accountant, one who worked with Nora.
My mouth went dry as Detective Li handed her a card. “If you think of anything else, Ms. Russo, anything at all that might be helpful.”
She took it, nodding, even as she shifted a glance at me. “I’ll call you.”
RED, WHITE, AND BOOM
July 4, 2019
Today’s the day, guys, and it’s not about hot dogs or sparklers or watching parades under a boiling sun.
It’s about the fight.
Imagine, for a second, a 168-year-old marriage that is so shitty it’s not enough to dump the other person’s stuff into the ocean or squeeze them for more money than they own. No one is right or good and it’s not about that anyway. It’s about physically hurting them to show them who’s in charge. You strike and they strike back. You fight until everyone’s bleeding and freezing and starving and eventually even the neighbors get involved to try to settle things. The British thought we were upstart colonists, a cash cow to be crushed back into submission. And we showed them what revolution looks like. We lost a lot of battles, but we never stopped getting back to our feet. We survived traitors and mutiny. We dropped surprise attacks. We were ready to die, to throw it all away, before ever climbing back into that marriage bed again.
Eight years. This country was born in an eight-year bloodbath and, for better or worse, we’ve never lost our taste for the fight. We celebrate with *explosions,* people. So tonight, while you’re oohing and aahing at all the gunpowder decorating the spacious skies, remember:
If you’re being used.
If you’re being underestimated.
If you can’t fucking take it anymore.
Don’t.
Show them you’re ready to blow the whole thing up, that you’ll die before letting them win. Whether your ancestors fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill or they clawed their way out of a civil war to find refuge in this country, you’re a child of blood and you’re not afraid of it. When I say God bless America, I mean God bless the fighter who lives in you.
NORA
HENRY DISAPPEARED and reappeared along the winding trail circling the lake. Woods and reeds crept in on all sides of the dirt path and as the trail veered onto a bridge over the shallows of the water or ducked around a clump of trees, Nora lost sight of her son’s figure before the path opened up and she saw him again.
“Catch up, Mom.”
He wasn’t even out of breath. A two-mile circuit used to exhaust him. He would run in spurts and sprints, his little legs pounding the dirt until he got winded moments later, although he pretended he wanted to stop and look at a turtle sunning itself on a partially submerged log or one of the egrets striding gracefully through the shallows. Now, only a decade into life, his body was already evolving into a man’s. His legs stretched