being thought of as a two-bit con artist. He didn’t like being called a liar. And he especially didn’t like having his integrity questioned.
Even if everything she suspected about him was true.
It wasn’t as if he ever really hurt anyone. As Montague had always said, you can’t cheat an honest man. Logan considered himself something of a teacher — a teacher of the hard lessons that people needed to learn. Better from him than from some mean-spirited criminal who would leave them unable to recover.
Logan’s scams were always clean and neat. He came, he squeezed, he left. End of story. No attachments, no regrets, and no real consequences.
He’d already paid his dues long ago.
Logan had learned the first of life’s dirty lessons when he became a ward of the state of Alabama at the age of five. He had never known his father, and no one explained to him why his mother had vanished from his life. Each night, after he was sent to a strange bed in a strange home, he would lie awake for hours, remembering bedtime stories and whispered prayers, songs his mother had sung while she bathed him, the laughter in the house where they’d lived. She had never left him before, except at a babysitter’s while she worked, and he had always trusted that she would come back for him.
Until the day she didn’t.
By the time he was six, he’d stopped looking for her in crowds. When he turned seven, he’d forgotten what she looked like. At eight, he learned to curse her for leaving him alone, and by the time he was nine, her memory was just a numbness in the center of his heart. He had neither expectations nor answers.
By the time he was ten, he had learned that no one — especially his mother — really wanted him, and that he was nothing more than an unwelcome burden to the string of families who’d taken him in.
In his foster homes, his brightness wasn’t seen as an attribute. Instead, he came across as sarcastic and smart-mouthed. His youthful inquiries into the workings of the world often landed him in the attic or basement for punishment. When his third foster mother withheld meals from him for an entire day because of what she considered a “sassy mouth,” he stole five dollars from her purse, climbed out the bathroom window, and went to the corner convenience store, where he bought a bag of potato chips and a soda.
It had been the perfect crime — until the worried store clerk, not accustomed to seeing children out so late, reported it to his foster father, who was a regular in the store. When his punishment resulted in a beating, and his teachers reported his bruises, Logan was moved once again.
As Logan grew older, he channeled his intelligence into surviving. He knew that he had been denied the blessings that other children his age took for granted, and that good things weren’t likely to come his way unless he found a way to take them.
Taking those things landed him in more than his share of trouble and got him thrown out of every home he was dumped into. By the time he was eleven, he’d given up on the idea that anyone would ever love him and began to rely on his size and intellect to get him out of scrapes. He looked at least three years older than he was, and that number seemed to multiply exponentially as he got older.
At the age of twelve, standing five feet eight inches tall, he went to live with the Millers. Evelyn Miller, a small woman with a pallid complexion and a perpetual scowl, embraced martyrdom and never missed an opportunity to tell anyone within earshot how miserable her existence was. Her husband, Scotty, was a foul-mouthed ex-construction worker with a bad back that kept him from holding a job.
That Scotty lived next door to the local pool hall was no coincidence, Logan discovered. Scotty spent every night there, drinking with his cronies and shooting pool — bad back or not — laying down bets that he usually won. For the first time in his life, Logan found himself fascinated by something. As time went on, he found it increasingly difficult to stay away from the pool hall when Scotty was playing. But Evelyn fought hard to keep Logan away from the place, afraid that if the state found out, they would close down the Millers’ foster home and stop