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“You don’t swim, Mrs. Harrison?”

“Mom wouldn’t swim in that lake if I were drowning in it.”

“Of course I would,” Lily snapped.

“You’ve never gone in deeper than your knees!” Mickey retorted.

“Well, you’ve never been drowning.”

“Pssh,” Sean said, and Mickey jumped, remembering him. “I had to save her that one summer.”

Mickey had forgotten about that.

Sean snuck into the canoe during Marco Polo. He glided past Mickey’s blind, outstretched hands over and over, each of his “Polos” and hoots of laughter coming from an opposite direction. Mickey swam until her arms went rubbery, and then she kept swimming. She resisted the urge to cheat and open her eyes. If he was able to swim that fast, so could she.

But she couldn’t.

When she finally opened her eyes, the shock of her distance from shore took the last of her energy straight out of her, as if her body decided to quit before it had to fail. She slipped under the water with zero dramatics, barely any splashing. She could hardly remember it now, except that her bathing suit had a ruffle, a mangy tutu that billowed out around her, like a tutu is supposed to. It had flowers on it, that bathing suit. She remembered that.

“You saved Mickey from drowning?” Ruth asked Sean, turning in her seat to look at him. “That’s incredible!”

Sean shrugged, his color deepening.

“It was his fault in the first place.”

She had been nine at the time. She remembered his arm around her chest, the way he kicked straight and hard for the shore. She remembered the way he held her up for air, even when doing so pushed him down.

“You must be a really strong swimmer,” Ruth said. Then she did something so crazy, Silas almost swerved off the road. She threw one arm around Sean’s neck and pulled his upper half into her, his sweatshirt fabric gripped in one hand and one of his headphones smooshed against her cheek.

“Mick might be ungrateful that you saved her, but I’m not!”

Ruth let go after one tight squeeze, and Mickey could feel her parents hold their breath, watching him. Mickey watched him too. As far as Mickey knew, no one had touched Sean like that in years. Certainly, none of the family. When they used to try, he made it clear they never should again.

“It was—I mean, whatever,” he said, shrugging again and collapsing back against the car door, adjusting the neck of his sweatshirt. “She’s my sister.”

Mickey wanted to hug him then too. She couldn’t remember the last time she wanted to hug her brother, but suddenly her arms ached with it. She wanted to bulldoze his walls the way Ruth did. Walls Mickey watched him build, brick by brick, until she couldn’t see him at all. Walls that Ruth couldn’t see, or didn’t believe were real. Mickey had no idea that was an option, to simply not believe in them. She watched Lily put her hand on Silas’s, and watched Silas pull her fingers in between his.

Maybe Ruth really was exactly what they needed that summer. Not just Mickey, but all of them.





PEYOTE





THE CALL CAME IN before lunch. I’d spent the better half of the morning watching a father of four in Wales uncover his wife’s affair. He’d gone through her phone for photos of the kids, but instead he found photos of her boss, tonsil-deep. The husband had just drunkenly hurled his wedding ring off a bridge when KQ opened her office door with a bang.

“Pey!” she barked. “Get in here!”

The man stumbled as the water, white rapids like bared teeth, swallowed his faith.

“Boss, I’ve got a Four on the line right now—he’s just about to call; I know it.”

“Give it to someone else. This is more important.”

I gave my computer a longing glance before crossing into KQ’s office and closing the door. But when I scanned her screen, I forgot all about my lonely Welshman.

Domestic hostage situation in Illinois. A man with an AK had forced his way into his girlfriend’s apartment and was threatening to kill her, her two children, and himself. The police were already outside, the street blocked off with yellow tape. They were waiting for their negotiator, and from a distance they looked almost nonchalant, bored. Among them was the kids’ father, who had gotten a frantic call from his daughter when the boyfriend unloaded a clip into their front door, but he hadn’t been able to reach her since. Down the street lived the gunman’s mother. As of now she was oblivious. But not for long.

KQ laughed and slapped the table.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said to no one but me, “the bases are loaded.”



* * *



—

EVEN THOUGH I ARGUED against it—going so far as to suggest Trey instead—KQ demanded that Cal be our Grand Slam third. So a few seconds later the three of us landed at the neighborhood playground, a bona fide Scooby Gang. The sky was ablaze with sun and flickering red and blue lights, reflecting off the windows and the metal bits that held the slide together. KQ was in the grass, head thrown back.

“Fuck, I love this air!” she yelled through loud, sloppy breaths.

“I’m going for the guy with the gun,” I said, looking down at my tablet. “Jake Sutherland. Twenty-five. He hasn’t killed anyone yet, so we can still make a deal. Cal, you could take either Mark Vernon—the kids’ father—or Veronica Sutherland, Jake’s mom. Preference?” Cal looked toward the three-family home, outside of which Mark paced, his movements quick and fierce. I could taste it in my throat—terror, and terror’s favorite companion. Rage.