She looked at me, her eyes bright. "When I turn eighteen," she said. "I'll be able to finally stop moving."
Tempest leaned in close and kissed me, her lips soft. A small moan escaped her lips, and her tongue found mine. I pulled her tight against me.
For the next three days, at the state championship tournament, she was right there, cheering me on from the side. My parents weren't present, and neither were hers, but she and Elias were there, and that's what mattered to me. I was seventeen, and Tempest and Elias were the closest people in my world.
When I won, Tempest ran for me, jumping into my arms and clinging to my neck as she wrapped her legs around my waist. She buried her head in the side of my neck and kissed me. "I knew you would win."
"It's because of you," I told her. "You're my lucky charm. Now you have to come to all of my matches."
"I'll be at every one of them," she promised.
***
Two weeks later, Tempest was gone. It was only after she left that I found out what her parents had done. They were con artists who'd run a Ponzi scheme on a couple of the wealthy families in town. It was all rumor, of course - none of the families were admitting to having been conned. I guess it didn't look that great when you were a business person who was involved in some kind of dubious get-rich-quick scheme and lost your money.
But people talked. I didn't know what the hell the term Ponzi scheme even meant at the time. It wasn't until a few years ago, when I heard mention of that kind of thing in the news, that I realized the magnitude of what happened in West Bend. That Tempest's parents were actual, real life con artists. And Tempest was a part of it.
Tempest had gone without leaving so much as a note. Her grandmother, supposedly the reason for Tempest and her parents' visit to West Bend, had a black mark on her reputation, the kind my family had on ours when I was growing up. From what I’d heard, she moved outside of town, and I wasn't sure what happened to her, or if she even lived there anymore.
Hell, I wasn't even sure that she was Tempest's grandmother to begin with. She could have been part of the scam. But she just faded away.
The same way Tempest had done.
Except that Tempest hadn’t really faded away, not from my memory at least. I couldn't quite erase her from my past, no matter how hard I tried. I spent every spare minute of my senior year in high school wrestling, angry at her. Angry at the damn world. And the time I didn't spend wrestling, I was at my coach's place. He knew my father was working as a janitor at our high school, drunk off his ass most of the time. So my coach took me under his wing.
He was the one who got me started doing wood-working stuff in his garage. He spent his spare time building furniture and carving stuff out of aspen. He showed me how to use the lathe, and how to judge a good piece of wood. When the arthritis in his hands started making it too painful for him to continue, he'd told me the space was mine.
Tempest had blown into West Bend, and stirred up everything. She had breathed life into me. And then breezed out of town, taking everything that was good in my life with her. I was convinced that she was my good luck charm, and that she'd taken that away with her when she left.
But my coach had set me on the right track, told me there was no such thing as luck. You make your own way in life, he said.
Even so, it still took a long time for me to realize that luck was something for suckers.
Kind of like love.
***
CHAPTER FOUR
TEMPEST
I tucked my bare feet up underneath me in the oversized arm chair, turning the medal over and over in my fingers, the repetition of the movement combined with the sensation of the cool metal against my skin soothing.
Iver handed me a flute filled with champagne, and I took it, despite the fact that it was at odds with where we were at in the con.
“Champagne?" I asked. "It doesn’t seem like we have anything to celebrate. Am I wrong?”
“There’s always reason for champagne, darling." Iver sipped from his glass. "You and that coin. Are you going to ever tell me what - or who - it's from?"
"It's not a coin," I said, distracted by my thoughts. "It's just for luck." Embarrassingly, my thoughts weren't even focused on the grift, the way they should have been. Instead, all I could think about was the unexpected appearance of Silas in my life.
I looked down at the medal in my hands. The sight brought back the painful memory of the day I'd left West Bend.
***
"I'm not leaving!" I protested. But I continued to throw my clothes into the suitcase, preparing for the inevitable.
Of course I was leaving. I couldn't possibly stay.
"What?" My mother stood in front of me, her hands on her hips, shaking her head. "You think you'd last a minute in this town after we left? Your father and I are running a con. The bottom is about to fall out on that. Do you really think you think you could stay here and escape the aftermath?"