Chapter Fourteen
By the time Mandy stumbled up to bed after the poker game, the sky was lit up with stars, the Milky Way draped like a sheer
scarf across their shoulders. Part of her hoped Liv would still be awake so she could regale her with stories of how she’d
won them beers from Thor’s secret stash for happy hour the next day, plus a promise from Stefan to introduce them to a bona
fide duke the next time they found themselves in Amsterdam. But Liv was already curled up on her sleeping pad, her back to
Mandy like a silent rebuke.
Mandy unzipped her backpack, rooting around for a headlamp and warmer clothes.
From a nearby bush, she heard the scuffle and chitter of small mammals—ringtails, maybe?
—and high above, a great horned owl, calling the nocturnal predators of the canyon to the hunt.
She pulled a sweatshirt over her head and gazed out at the pinpricked night.
This week, the limits were finite: North Rim and South, guides and guests, river and sky.
But what wasn’t possible within that container?
She looked down at her sleeping sister, half covered by her unzipped sleeping bag, a parenthesis of blankets and staccato breath.
Maybe this would be the trip where they fully saw each other, where they escaped the well-worn grooves of their skipping record and broke into a new song.
Mandy had been gnawing at that hope for a while now, and something about this being the tenth year, their tenth sister trip, felt ripe with opportunity.
She’d been only twenty-one when they’d started, Liv twenty-four.
She was a different person now. They both were.
Maybe here in the canyon, in its mesquite-scented air, they could be different together.
Mandy felt a flutter of contrition. While she’d been playing cards, had Liv gone to bed alone, before it was fully dark? She
crouched down to straighten Liv’s sleeping bag, but when she did so, her sister’s hand bolted up and grabbed her wrist.
“You came back,” Liv whispered.
“Of course,” Mandy said.
“I was worried.”
Worried? About what? From far off, Mandy heard the bright, whistling howls of coyotes, their yips refracting against the canyon
walls.
“Something is wrong,” Liv mumbled.
“With the campsite? I should have helped you set up.” Mandy reached out again to smooth out her sister’s sleeping bag, but
this time, Liv sat up and shook herself fully awake.
“No. Listen to me.”
“What?” Mandy couldn’t help the petulance that snuck into her voice. Her sister was looking at her with the urgency she reserved
for situations when Mandy had violated the invisible rule book Liv lugged around in her head. “What did I do wrong this time?”
Liv narrowed her eyes, and Mandy squirmed. She hated how this only seemed to get worse as they got older. When they were kids,
Liv hadn’t been this judgmental—at least, not openly—but when their mom died, her sister took up the reins of the moral high
ground and yanked them as tight as possible.
But when Liv opened her mouth again, it wasn’t to chastise Mandy. “What I’m about to tell you, you have to keep secret. Can
you promise me that?”
“Um . . . sure?”
“For real, Mand.”
There was something in her sister’s voice—not judgment, but something equally dark—that Mandy wasn’t going to mess with.
“Fine. I swear on the light of Venus’s moon.”
“Venus doesn’t have a—” Liv shook her head. “Do you remember how scared Charlie was after he fell into the water at Horn Creek?”
“When he lost his river virginity?”
“Right. He told me he thought Babette was targeting him. I thought he was just stressed from the whitewater and Babette not
showing up. But then, tonight, he showed me his hat. It has a message inside it from Babette.”
“Something inspirational?”
“Not exactly.” Liv looked up at the endless night. “Cross me and you’re dead too. That’s what it said.”
“Inside his hat?”
Liv nodded. “It was embroidered on the inner crown in white stitches. We could only see it because his hat was muddy from
when he fell in the river. I checked mine, too, but there was nothing. Only Charlie got the threat.”
A threat. Mandy remembered the excitement she’d felt when she’d claimed her own hat from the cardboard box, and the odd texture
of its inner brim above the tea tree crystals. Now, she wondered.
She pulled her cap from where she’d stuffed it in her waistband. “Check mine.”
Liv looked confused.
“Just check it, okay?”
Liv scooped a handful of sand from the cold ground and started rubbing it on the inside crown. “There’s something here.”
Mandy nodded grimly. She leaned in close to her sister, letting a strand of Liv’s hair brush her shoulder. Even in the harsh
light of her headlamp, she could see the stitches come alive, faint embroidered words inside her hat, barely perceptible in
the grainy darkness.
MONEY CAN’T PROTECT YOU