A Sister to Honor by Lucy Ferriss

Author:Lucy Ferriss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lissy had always been competitive. It was one of the first things Ethan noticed about her, on their third or fourth date after they’d met on the PATH train, he headed to Northern State Prison, she headed to her assistant A.D. job at Rutgers. She had just finished telling him about the injury that had ended her squash career at the Cleveland Classic. She was one competitive lady, Ethan had remarked with a lopsided grin.

Well, she competed, didn’t she? To compete without being competitive—that would be like painting without being artistic.

Like talking without speaking, he’d said. Like hearing without listening. And then he’d launched into Simon & Garfunkel. He had a good tenor, even though he was just being silly. She’d thrown a napkin at him.

Still, outside sports, competitive was a dirty word. Like ambitious. If she’d grown up with a mother, maybe she would have softened her edge, learned to deny herself the thrill of clutching the trophy high over her head. If she had grown up in the world her American players inhabited, full of country clubs and etiquette, maybe she’d have sated her hunger to train harder, practice longer, nail the shots her opponents missed. Maybe, if she’d been introduced early on to pure beauty, or pure affection, she wouldn’t have relished the purity of competition—same rules for all, same starting spot, same ineluctable goal—as much as she did. But she had grown up on the scrappy north side of St. Louis, with five brothers and a dad working nights, and one of her last memories of her mother was the glow on her face, her bald head obscured by a blue scarf, as Lissy tore past the hundred-yard finish line ten paces ahead of the closest boy.

Even her choice of sport—squash, claustrophobic and un-American—was etched with ambition. Squash was what they didn’t play, on the north side. There were a couple of old courts at the back of the community center and a retired pro who let kids hit for free. But what she wanted was to beat the kids at the private schools, with their clean lines and vaulted ceilings—and when she did, her brothers exploded in whoops and her dad’s face came as close to a grin as he could ever manage.

So yes, she told Ethan, she was competitive. Insatiable, rivalrous. She’d come by her ambition honestly, and she wasn’t going to be ashamed of it, no matter how crude or unladylike she appeared. But she never cheated, she never lied. And when she came home, she left the competition outside. Those had been her promises.

But now. As she exited the Pike toward Devon she felt the messiness of what she was doing, the impurity of it. The police—she ought to go to the police, tell them where the girl was, help them discover what the hell had happened. Whatever Afia had claimed, Lissy knew what she thought: that Shahid had set a trap for her, had tried to kill her with a bomb at her boyfriend’s place.

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