“I know.” Mom’s smile turns watery as she pats Brie’s cheek. “You girls… so eager to be out on your own.” Shifting her attention to me, she drops her chin to look me in the eye. “But I don’t have to remind you what’s at stake this summer, do I?”
“Mom.” I groan.
“Smith & Boone didn’t have to give you another shot. You turned down their offer to start as a first-year associate last fall—”
“Yeah, because I was still recovering from the accident.”
Mom shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. Smith & Boone is a prestigious firm with no shortage of talented young lawyers clamoring to join their ranks. They didn’t have to consider you again, but they were willing to bring you on temporarily this summer as a trial run—to give you a second chance. If you want them to honor their original offer for a permanent position in the fall, you’ll need to show them you’re as sharp as you were before the accident. You’ll have to wow them.”
“I know, I know. I don’t plan to mess this up, okay? I’m ready.”
Her blue-gray eyes search my face. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
Something relaxes in her features, and for the first time, I think she actually believes me.
Crash.
“Liam!” my brother Jackson wails from the other room.
Mom launches toward the commotion. I follow. In the dining room, the twins are squabbling. A cardboard box is on the floor, one side open as though it exploded on impact. All the blood drains from my face. Oh shit. It’s my “Cassidy Closet” box. “I got it.” I stumble forward, but Mom is already kneeling among my scattered belongings.
“What happened?” she asks the boys.
“Jackson didn’t catch the football,” says Liam.
Jackson punches him in the arm. “Liam didn’t throw it good.”
“Enough.” Mom’s voice cuts through the commotion like a gavel. “Timeout. Couch. Now.”
Brie bustles into the room as the boys shuffle out. Xerxes is no longer on her shoulder and she’s holding a dustpan and broom. Marcus has disappeared; he must have taken the opportunity to gracefully remove himself from our family bickering.
“Shoot,” Mom mutters, gathering up a handful of loose greeting cards.
I edge around her, heart thundering. “Don’t worry about it. Here, let me—” But before I can even finish, her gaze snags on the edge of a worn green sketchbook peeking out from under a scarf. Recognition registers and her jaw tightens. I close my eyes briefly, and when I open them again, she’s flipping through the book while Brie peers over her shoulder. My stomach plummets to the cellar.
Devin’s face stares back from every page, rendered in painstaking graphite detail.
After the accident, my hand-eye coordination was shot, so the earliest sketches look like something my brothers would have drawn—loopy, disjointed messes. But as I worked my way through rehabilitation and as more Devin “memories” surfaced, the sketches became more detailed. More vibrant. I hadn’t drawn in years, not since my last studio art class sophomore year of college, but I couldn’t stop. It was as if the only way I could get him out of my head was to get his likeness on the page. It went on for months. I hate to admit it, but I cried over those sketches. Slept with them under my pillow. And since Christmas, I’d kept them tucked away in a dark, dusty corner of the guest room at my mom’s house and tried to forget about them.
Confusion flickers behind Brie’s eyes. “I thought you said you got rid of it,” she says softly.
“That’s… I don’t even… how did…？ Weird,” I stammer.
Mom stands and shuts the sketchbook with a snap. “I knew it. This move was a bad idea. Clearly, you’re not ready. Not with your struggles.”
The word “struggles” hangs in the air like a guilty verdict.
How could I explain that nearly dying in a car accident and being forced to put my life on hold was the struggle? It had been almost a year since my law school friends moved on and found jobs and Brie finished her master’s at Purdue and started her career at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Meanwhile, I was stuck like a pin in my hamster-wheel life full of hospital rooms, therapy, and an omnipresent, overbearing mother.
I couldn’t live like that anymore. I wouldn’t.
I step forward. “I am ready. More than ready. I can’t let the accident make me a prisoner in my own life. You want proof I’m ready to be on my own?” Snatching the sketchbook out of my mom’s hands, I march straight through the open front door. I nearly run into Mr. Cat Daddy, but he hastily sidesteps me. Blood pounds in my ears as I walk over to the trash can I spotted earlier. Flipping open the heavy plastic lid, I hesitate for several heartbeats.