Chapter One Ana #2
It’s the youth that strikes me. And this is good. It’s what adults are meant to see. Children should stand out to us. They should be easily recognizable so we’ll remember that they’re vulnerable and do what we can to protect them. Except for the monsters among us who spy an opportunity.
Jolene used to hover over me at the bathroom mirror, teaching me to cover my face with eyeliner and lipstick. Youth didn’t serve us here.
Grace stares at the lights—and I wonder which ones are pulling her in. The Palace? Avery Hall? The fifth house on the access road—the one belonging to Dawn Sumner?
I feel the words and lock them in my head. What I really want to know.
What happened to you here, Grace?
I think about my speech at the conference. I never would have accepted an invitation to come here—to Colorado, just five hours from Echo—had I not been given the main stage and a chance to reach other professionals who treat children. To teach them what I know. Not a chance in hell.
Christ, I’d felt the memories begin to stir as the plane descended five days ago, cutting through the clouds. Exposing the snow-covered mountains.
Over three hundred people heard my talk about the specialty of criminal defense work with minors.
How it recognizes their developing brains and gives them defenses that don’t always play as well with adult offenders.
The so-called excuse defenses, meaning they are excused, for sound reason, from criminal culpability for the crimes they commit.
Acting in self-defense, or in the defense of others.
Trauma response from prior abuse. Insanity, both temporary and chronic.
Intoxication. And the mere fact of being a child—the defense appropriately called infancy.
Building these defenses, I told them, requires two things. The what. And the why.
I’m the youngest attorney in our practice of six, but I’m the best at connecting the dots.
The firm’s founder, Jill Kirk, hired me to do just that, and I’ve proved myself.
The facts, the circumstances—no two cases are the same.
What has been done? Why has this child done it? There’s always a reason.
Because children are not born evil. We still don’t understand exactly how empathy, morality, and compassion develop—except that a child’s environment plays a major role. The damage begins the moment we get our hands on them. Some believe it starts in the womb.
I stood on that stage and told them what I know to be true.
“Children become what we do to them,” I said.
My eyes linger now on this child, the one in front of me. The stillness of her face as she stares out the window. The murder and the precipitating events, trapped behind it.
“Let’s sit down,” I tell her. I go first, leaving the window and the night sky I had nearly forgotten.
I find the chair and the file on the table, right beside the cold tea and the pale ring around the bottom of the cup. I sit, again on the edge, elbows on knees, hands clasped together, and wait impatiently. My knuckles turn white as I press them into the backs of my hands.
Finally, Grace turns and walks to the couch across from me. She carefully moves an orange throw pillow to the floor and climbs deep into the corner so she can cross her legs. And it is only then, when her pants move, that I see the black plastic bracelet locked around her ankle.
Patience, Ana.
She’s told the same story since Emile Dresiér was found murdered in the field. That she left him at The Palace and walked home. That she didn’t kill him and doesn’t know who did.
But her story can’t explain the blood found on her skate and the dress that went missing. Or the vicious fight she had with another skater the same day he disappeared, caught on video.
I hear the words again. I feel them inside me.
What happened to you?
There’s no doubt she was well trained. She had been set to peak for next year’s Olympic cycle. Dawn was strategic—from the timing of a career to the placement of jumps in a program to maximize points. But that’s not what she was known for.
It was the other bullshit. The subject of her book and her methods to combat fear. It was fear that had cost her an Olympic bid, and so it was fear that had become her obsession when she retired to coach.
Performance psychology was deeply embedded in sports when I trained at The Palace, but Dawn had claimed it as her own, like she’d invented it.
Everyone knew that controlling fear in competition was essential.
But she went beyond that, to the kind of fear that kept a skater from attaining new jumps.
The fear of falling that held them back.
Jumps got points—and Dawn was determined to make The Palace a jump factory.
She called her methods Fear Training.
A wave of electricity runs down both my arms, a nervous condition I’ve had for years. Pathways in my mind that are connected to this place. To being on the ice. To the fear. To the training. To Dawn.
Her hands on my shoulders, pushing me away from the boards.
Away from her, like a bird being shoved from the nest. But then came the first stroke, the way the skating itself flipped a switch inside me.
It’s a feeling that had been there from the very first time my body responded to a blade, gathering speed through an edge.
It had become as innate as walking, as breath.
Like it was nothing. And yet it was everything.
Speed, yes, but also control—such divine control.
The slightest move of one muscle and the edge got deeper, or changed direction, gravity bending to my will.
It was how I’d spent six hours a day moving through my life. It’s how I sometimes still move in my dreams.
But skating wasn’t about that with Dawn. We didn’t earn points for rejoicing in the freedom, the control. No—we earned them when we left the ice, flew into the air, made the rotations, and landed on one edge of a blade.
Fight the fear.
I can hear her voice, smell her thick makeup, perfume, hair spray—like walking past the cosmetics counter at a cheap department store.
I can feel her jagged collarbones when she pulled me close, the cold air on my chest when she pushed me away.
Euphoria to despair, neither reaction there to stay.
Always a longing left hungry, a little, or a lot. Starving.
Fear Training. I hadn’t thought about that part of my experience for years either, and it elicits another little shock down my arms.
I tell myself to do the fucking job already. This isn’t about you.
I look at Grace on the couch, her arms and legs crossed, feet tucked beneath her thighs. How she steadies her gaze. Fearless at a time when she should be nothing but afraid. So I cut to the chase.
“Do you have any idea why they found blood on your skate?” I ask her. “In the stitches of your right boot? The nylon absorbed the proteins, so even though they were cleaned, it still tested positive.” She sees the file. She knows what’s inside. She shakes her head back and forth. No.
“What about the dress you were wearing that night? The one from The Palace—blue with yellow butterflies? It’s still missing.” I wait to see if this gets a different response, but it’s the same. A head shake. A no.
I pick up the file.
“You left Avery Hall with Coach Emile. You were the last person to see him.”
This gets her attention, but only a look. Like she’s pissed off this is in the file, recorded as a fact. Suddenly, I know what to ask next.
“Before you left with Coach Emile, did you attack another skater?”
She shakes her head and looks down. “No! That’s a lie.”
“Someone recorded it on their phone. You looked angry. Like you wanted to hurt her. You pinned her on the ground, between your legs, and held her by the hair.”
I wait until her eyes find mine. Until she can see that this doesn’t faze me. That nothing she does or says will keep me from defending her. Some people have trouble bridging the mental chasm that forms when innocence collides with violence. But this is what I do best.
And this place is where I learned it.
“Grace,” I say in a calm, steady voice. “You have to tell me what happened that night so I can protect you.” I’m about to explain how it’s crucial for me to understand so I can paint the picture for those who will judge her.
But before I can say another word, she starts to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
She unfolds her legs and her arms and leans forward on the edge of the couch, motioning for me to do the same. Our faces meet over the coffee table, where I’ve returned the file that holds the horrific facts of the murder. She’s so close, I can smell her bubble gum lip gloss.
Then she says, in a whisper, what she wants me to know.
“It’s not safe here.”
And before I can make sense of this, she speaks again.
“It’s not safe here, and it’s all your fault.”