“I would watch her on the swings and think about how you used to try to go high enough to flip around the bar.” Leigh swung by, legs pushing out. “You almost did a few times.”
“I almost fell flat on my ass.”
“Maddy’s so beautiful, Cal.” Leigh went silent as she disappeared, then picked back up when she was facing Callie. “I don’t know why I got something so perfect in my life, but I’m grateful every single day. So grateful.”
Callie closed her eyes, feeling the cold rush of wind in her face, listening to the swish every time Leigh soared past.
“She loves sports,” Leigh said. “Tennis, volleyball, soccer, the usual stuff kids do.”
Callie marveled at the idea that this was usual. The playground they were swinging in had been her only outlet for fun. At ten, she’d been pushed into finding an after-school job. By the time she’d turned fourteen, she was either obsessing about how to keep Buddy in her life or obsessing about how to handle his death. She would’ve killed to run up and down a field kicking around a ball.
Leigh said, “She’s not passionate about competing. Not like you were. It’s just fun for her. This generation—they are all incredibly, boringly, sportsmanlike.”
Callie opened her eyes. She couldn’t dive any deeper into this conversation. “I guess there’s something to be said for Phil’s style of parenting. Neither one of us has ever been sportsmanlike.”
Leigh slowed her swing, turning to watch Callie. She wasn’t going to drop the subject. “Walter hates soccer, but he’s at every practice and every game.”
That sounded like a very Walter kind of thing to do.
“Maddy hates hiking,” Leigh said. “But the last weekend of every month, they hike up Kennesaw Mountain because she loves spending time with him.”
Callie leaned back in the leather seat, pushing herself to go higher. She liked the idea of Walter in a comically tall red and brown ball cap with matching pantsuit, but she understood he probably did not go on hikes dressed like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits.
“She loves to read,” Leigh said. “She reminds me of you when you were a kid. Phil used to get furious when you had your nose in a book. She didn’t understand what the stories meant to you.”
Callie swung past, her sneakers turning into white fangs biting into the dark sky. She wanted to stay suspended in the air like that forever, to never drop down into reality.
“She loves animals. Rabbits, gerbils, cats, dogs.”
Callie swung back, passing Leigh one more time before she let her feet drag the ground. The swing came to a slow standstill. She twisted the chains to face her sister.
She asked, “What happened, Leigh? Why are you here?”
“To—” Leigh laughed, because she seemed to realize that what she was about to say was stupid, but she said it anyway. “To see my sister.”
Callie wanted to keep twisting the chains the way she used to, spinning up in one direction, then down in another, until she got so dizzy that she had to stagger to the seesaw to find her bearings.
She asked Leigh, “Do you think the word seesaw is because you see someone when they’re up, and then you saw them when—”
“Cal,” Leigh said. “Andrew knows how I killed Buddy.”
Callie gripped the cold chains tight in her hands.
“We were in the conference room going over his case,” Leigh said. “He told me that his mask made it hard to breathe. He said it was like someone wrapped cling film around his head six times.”
Callie felt shock freeze its way through her body. “Is that how many—”
“Yes.”
“But—” Callie ran back through the tiny snippets she could remember from the night Buddy had died. “Andrew was asleep, Harleigh. We kept going back into his room. He was drugged out of his mind.”
“I missed something,” Leigh said, always eager to take the blame. “I don’t know how he knows, or what else he knows, but it gives him power over every single part of my life. I control nothing right now. He can do what he likes, force me to do whatever he wants.”
Callie saw the point of her misery. “What does he want you to do?”
Leigh looked down at the ground. Callie was used to seeing her sister angry or annoyed, but never ashamed.
“Harleigh?”
“Tammy Karlsen, the victim. Reggie stole her patient chart from Tech’s student mental health services. She attended one session a week for almost two years. There’s all kinds of personal details in it. Stuff that she wouldn’t want anyone to know.” Leigh let out a long, pained breath. “Andrew wants me to use the personal information to break her on the stand.”