Page 73 of Fearless

From the corner of her eye, she saw Maggie watching her, her expression thoughtful.

“Your mom’s smart,”Mercy had said.

Yes. Yes, she was.

Seventeen

Five Years Ago

The thing to do, Ava decided, was to be an adult about it. She had nine more days of OSS, and she had plenty of schoolwork to keep her busy, and plenty of work to do at the nursery, and she would just put on her big girl panties and tackle the situation with the aplomb and disinterest of someone who’d been around the block a few times. It was Saturday; not like she had a lot of opportunity to be home alone, anyway. She could handle this. She totally could.

That plan lasted about an hour.

Because the moment she pulled onto the Dartmoor grounds, her heart squeezed and her eyes burned and she dissolved into this hormonal bundle ofgirl.

But she greeted Mina with a cheery hello, unrolled the long garden hose and began misting the indoor flats, intent on exhausting herself with work.

It wasn’t Leah who popped by at lunch this time, but Carter, to her massive shock.

“Hi,” she greeted, dumbfounded, as he stood in front of the baby koi tubs and studied her with his hands shoved in his pockets. “You’re here.”

“I ran into your brother over at the clubhouse, and he said you were working over here.”

“Yeah. Wait – you were at the clubhouse?”

“I tried yesterday, but that big guy ran me off. Today, Aidan said I should come look in the nursery.”

“He…did?”

Carter nodded.

“Okay…don’t take this the wrong way…”

He grinned.

“But why would you come to see me? After…” She twirled her hand. “Your friend’s in the hospital.”

His smile pulled to the side until it was more of a grimace. “Can we go outside?” Gesture to the relative privacy of the mulch piles through the open door. “Maybe talk?”

She was too surprised to tell him no. She glanced up and caught Mina’s gaze, earning a nod of permission. So off came the gloves and out she went into the sunlight with a boy she was fast learning she didn’t understand at all.

“I haven’t been to see Mason,” Carter said as they strolled toward the railroad tie walls framing the mulch pits. He studied his shoes as he walked. They were a neon blue and white pair of crisp new Nikes. “His dad called me, the morning after it happened, and wanted me to go to the school and pitch them a story about you forcing Mason to take that shit. He wanted to put the whole thing on you.” He glanced at her sideways, his mouth tucked up in the corners with obvious sympathy. “He said, ‘We’ll blame it on the Dog girl – he didn’t say girl. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged.

“But he figured the school and the cops would be willing to believe it had been your fault, if I’d just join Beau and the girls and say you did it.”

Ava formed her words carefully. “That would be the logical thing to do. Going against Mason Stephens – either of them – never got me anywhere. And Iamthe biker slut. Everyone would believe you.”

Carter winced. “I didn’t go along with him. And when he started to chew my ass about it, I…kind of hung up on him.”

Personally, Ava thought Carter should have taken a plastic cafeteria fork to his friend’s eye in the fifth grade, but beggars couldn’t be choosers in situations like this. “Impressive.” She spun and sat down on one of the staggered ends of a railroad tie, somewhere in the middle of the wall around the pine bark chips. Plucked one up from the pile and needled its edge with her index fingernail, half-watching Carter as he scuffed his toe through stray chips and gave a facial shrug.

“Yeah, not really.”

The weight of what he wanted to say pressed down at his shoulders, gave their normally wide, straight frame a rounded-edged look.

Ava sat and waited, stripping off the top layer of the bark chip.

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