Page 57 of The Reckless Rookie

My mother sets both coffees down. Then she comes around the table and pulls me into her arms.

I go stiff because that’s what I do when comfort arrives without instructions.

“Ay, mi niña,” she says into my hair, and the name breaks whatever I was holding. I fold against her and let my mother carry my weight for one full minute.

When she lets me go, Elena is still Elena. She reaches for the fixable shape of it, says we will find a way and these things smooth over. But she does not say Sebastian’s name or tell me to be smart. She walks back across the yard slower than she came.

Chapter thirty-two

Catalina

It’s a hundred and fifty yards from my porch to my father’s, and I’ve walked it maybe ten thousand times, and I have never had to make myself do it.

I cross the blue yard carrying three words I have never let myself need.

My father is in the chair worn to his shape, boots on the rail, coffee at his elbow. He spent twenty years on the bench and another lifetime preparing to look unsurprised when his daughter finally asks for help.

“I need help.”

It comes out rougher than I mean it, because the words have never been used. “I made a mess, Dad. I’ve been making it for months. I hid it, and I made it worse, and this is not one I can fix on my own.”

He doesn’t move for a second. Then he nods, slow, a man taking a verdict he’s been braced for, and says what hits me worse than kindness would have.

“I know, m’ija. I’ve been waiting for you to come and tell me.”

So I sit in the other chair, the one that’s been empty since my mother stopped coming out here in the evenings, and I tell him.

All of it. Not the managed shape I handed him at my counter weeks ago, the one with the center cut out. The whole thing. Sebastian. The review. The part where I thought I could carry it alone and quiet. The part where somewhere in the post-holes I fell for the placement, the hockey player, the felony, the whole beautiful disaster of him, and cut him loose five days ago to save this ranch.

I don’t dress up my share of it. My father put that in me before I could walk. You do not duck it. I took the bet. I raised the stakes. I bet his table and Diaz’s without telling either of them, then made the cowardly choice to cover it. Every bad piece of it has my name on it.

I lay it all out on a retired judge’s porch the way you’d lay out a case you know you’re going to lose, and I wait for the sentence.

He’s quiet a long time. Long enough that the light goes and the first bat comes out over the yard.

“You want to know what I’d tell you,” he says finally, “if I were a better father and a worse judge.” He turns the cold coffee in his hands and doesn’t drink it. “I’d tell you this is mine. That you learned it here. You spent your whole childhood watching me carry the county home in my head every night and never set one piece of it down where your mother could reach it, and you took a look at that and decided it was what strong was.” A beat. “I taught you to stand between everything you love and the weather. Taught it so well you did it to me.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say to a thing that lands that square.

“So I’m not going to sit here and tell you what you did wrong. You ran that ledger harder than I ever could.” He sets the cup down. And here’s my father, sixty-eight, bad hip, his robes a few years behind him now, and something comes into his face I haven’t seen since I was a girl watching him leave for a trial that mattered. “You want to keep telling me what you did wrong. Or you want to help me take that son of a bitch apart.”

Then my dad asks what I should have asked before I removed Finn.

“The full tape from the lot. Did his lawyer ever get it?”

“I don’t know.” The answer tastes like another failure. I made a decision about Finn’s freedom without asking what Finn was doing to protect it.

My father reaches for his phone, then stops. “Call him first. It’s his case.”

So I do.

Finn answers on the second ring. Neither of us says hello.

“I know how Sebastian used the review,” I say. “And I think his firm has the rest of the tape.”

“Marcus is already on it.” His voice is rough, controlled. “The preservation demand went out before I packed. The civil case is still open, so they have to produce the file or explain where it went.”

He didn’t wait for me to rescue him. He didn’t swing at the man who hurt us. He hired the right fight and stayed in it.