“I think maybe you’ve got one more left,” he says, patting my knee twice with his heavy hand. I have no idea how he does such delicate work—his fingers are fat and his palms enormous. I guess the Hollister men have a habit of doing things they aren’t supposed to.
The sound of the crowd begins to even out, becoming a hum in my head while my eyes scan slowly around the room. I wore a royal-blue polo shirt because I wanted to look patriotic—I wanted to look ready and irresistible, ripe for the team. The collar is tight and now I wish I’d worn the green one. I glance down the row I’m sitting in, nothing but khaki pants and pretty skirts and dresses covering honed muscles. I recognize almost every single swimmer, and my mouth starts to curl. Everyone here is an example of discipline until you get to me. I’m in suit pants desperate to be laundered and a scratchy polo shirt that I had to iron the hanger indents out of this morning, and discipline is the last word that will get tossed around in any of my headlines.
Disaster-in-the-making.
Embarrassment.
The Wrong Hollister Brother.
My mouth frowns at that last thought. More than any of it—more than the questions I know are coming about my drinking, about my fall from grace, about the tragedy that is my life—the fact that I know everyone in this room, including myself, wishes it were Evan sitting in this chair instead of me is what burns the most.
And then there’s her.
Maybe deep down, a small part of her wishes Evan were sitting here, too, but still…
Maddy takes the last seat on the end of our row, the farthest chair away from mine. She tucks the pink skirt of her dress under her knees, crossing her ankles under her body as she laughs at something the guy sitting next to her says. He’s a much better suitor for her. Yet even knowing that…
Her dark brown hair slides down her arm and obstructs her face from my view. I watch her anyway. I wait.
She is why I’m sitting here. She’s why I keep going. Maybe she’s why I picked myself up from bottom in the first place.
She is the last person I should be swimming for, but she’s the only one I want to.
None of that matters the second her brown eyes open on mine.
One more miracle, my uncle says. He has no idea that I used that last one up, too—and she’s sitting two-dozen feet away from me.
Chapter One
Six weeks earlier
Maddy Woodsen
I don’t think anyone has sat up here since the last time I waited for the Hollisters to drive through the trees and pull into the gravel parking lot outside. There’s a layer of dust on the windowsill thick enough that it practically looks like fur, and the window has a yellow film permanently burnt on the outside from where the sun hits it all day long.
A spot on the glass looks like a handprint, and I reach up to press my fingertips along the matching marks. The fit is exact. The print is mine. Four years old, but still my hands are the same.
I’ve known the Hollister boys since I could swim, which in a family like mine pretty much means birth. My father, Curtis Woodsen, won the gold in the fifteen-hundred freestyle in back-to-back Olympics two decades ago. It was the same Games my mother, Susan Shephard, won the gold in the one hundred and two hundred. My parents were made for each other. They wanted me desperately. After two lost pregnancies, I was their third and final attempt at having a baby. I wasn’t supposed to survive. My mom’s uterus was “hostile” according to the nine different doctors she sought care and help from to conceive me. But her insides weren’t hostile—they were…competitive. Like her. Like me.
I took to the water fast. I won young. I broke records, and I made them proud. This place—they built it for me…and it brought me Evan.
We were both sixth graders when we officially met, though I’d known of them from school. My parents had just opened the Shore Swim Club here in Knox, and the Hollisters were the first family to join. I remember my dad shaking hands with Mr. Hollister, their forearms flexing with their grips, competing even in this. It didn’t take long for their pissing match to send me and the two Hollister boys into the pool for a sprint. I lost to Evan by two strokes, and Will beat us both by a full body and a half. He should have; he’s two years older.
Every weekday evening began this way—the Hollister boys came to practice early, and we raced. I won twice over the seven years we sprinted in that water, and when Evan’s body caught up with Will’s in size, the race between the two of them was always close and could go either way. We trained hard; we laughed harder. We were close, more than family maybe. The three of us wanted things—wanted to win, to push ourselves.
We pushed each other.