She never would have answered if it weren’t for the detectives, their starchy blue shirts and thick-soled shoes. The squinting of their eyes and the leaning closer. She needed some space, some time. To think.
“Katie,” Gwen was saying, already mid-harangue, “I’d like you to reconsider your position here. Even if you want Devon home that doesn’t mean she can’t continue her sessions at EmPower—”
“That’s not going to happen. And I can’t talk.”
“—because in a month, your daughter will step out onto that competition floor and have what could be her last chance at qualifying for Elite after the catastrophe of two years ago.”
“I’m not discussing this with you,” Katie said, her hands on the sink, sticky from something—soap, last night’s noxious whiskey. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Well, that’s just false. I’m the treasurer of this entire operation. Devon’s success or failure will have a major impact on the finances of this gym.”
“I don’t care about the gym’s goddamn finances.” Trying to keep her voice low. The silence from downstairs—those detectives, could they hear?
“The boosters have invested a great deal in Devon,” Gwen continued. “And her fate affects our daughters too. Do you see what I’m saying?”
Leaning against the peeling vanity, Katie turned on the water so they couldn’t hear. The old mold-thick vents might just muffle the telltale heart. Those detectives down there, surely Hailey had told them about Devon and Ryan? And if she hadn’t told before, what would stop her from telling now? And then they would talk to Eric. And want to see Eric’s car. And—
“Katie, do you see? Are you there? I can hear your anxious little breaths.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“Katie, were you an athlete?”
“No,” she said, wanting to scream at Gwen and fearing the detectives could hear, imagining them both leaning forward, craning necks. Who is she talking to? Is it her daughter? Her husband?
“Of course you weren’t. I don’t know what you wanted at Devon’s age, Katie, but I’d bet my daughter’s college fund you couldn’t name it then or now. But Devon is different. She knows what she wants. She’s not like the rest of us, Katie.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Katie whispered, her mouth pressed against the phone. “Slinking into our lives with your snakeskin shoes and your big checkbook and your—”
“You wanted that checkbook, didn’t you?” she said icily.
Downstairs, Katie thought she heard footsteps. She thought about the door to the garage. About what else might be in there. Glass fragments, the microscopic residue of paint—flakes and chips too small for the eye to see. But they would see.
“This isn’t about your maternal vanity,” Gwen was saying. “It’s about your daughter.”
In her head, Katie was screaming.
The water running, she leaned down as close to the rush of it as she could and said through gritted teeth, “Go to hell. You go to hell.”
But nothing ever touched Gwen.
“Because, Katie, there’s nothing on God’s green earth I wouldn’t do for my child,” Gwen said, the bastioned fortress in the center of an impassable moat. “That is something Eric and I agree on. Don’t you? What kind of mother wouldn’t?”
What kind of mother. To say that to Katie, who had given every waking hour and every sleeping hour to her daughter. Who sat in that gym every day, spent hundreds of hours in backless bleachers, elbows perpetually rubbed raw from all the bleacher leaning. Who drove as many as thirty hours a week, who spent hours hunting for lost grips or a favorite leotard, every leotard costing more than any item of clothing Katie had. Who hadn’t had a professional haircut in four years, who’d never been on a trip alone with her husband at all, her only vacations consisting of free hours torn from tournament weekends, her shoulder bag filled with water bottles and ibuprofen and gluey hair gel and sharp bobby pins and lucky grips and the right kind of energy bars you could only get online and the right kind of athletic tape and the lucky socks and the lucky hairbrush and Devon’s inhaler and her backup inhaler, her hands resting on Devon’s weary shoulders as they tromped through the museum, the science center, the amusement park in the forty-five minutes they had before prac—
“I refuse to deprive my daughter of the opportunity to achieve her dreams,” Gwen continued, unrelenting. “I will not give up on her. Will you give up on Devon?”
“You’re lucky I didn’t call the goddamned police,” Katie said instead, jaw grinding. “You took my daughter.”
“The police?” There was a brief pause, then Gwen’s voice returned, grim and precise. “You don’t want to call the police.”
Something in her tone. Something with portent. Whatever it meant, Katie could not hear it now.
“I’ll do whatever I need to do to protect my daughter,” Katie said, and hung up.
Walking down the stairs, she dragged down the hems of the capris, smoothed her hair.