Page 9 of Blade

Grace reaches her mother. She tries to walk past her to the bedroom down the hall—the one she’s been locked in all afternoon, since the moment she got back from the police station, where they took her fingerprints and installed the bracelet around her ankle.

Jolene grabs her arm. “Grace! Stop. Talk to us. Please!”

But Grace pulls away, her face showing the same anger that was captured on that video.

“I can’t skate with this thing on my leg!” she screams, bending down, taking hold of the thick plastic. Trying to rip it from her ankle.

Jolene takes a step closer, reaches out and grabs her daughter’s arm before she hurts herself. “Stop, sweetheart—please,” she says, her voice shaking. “You can skate again when this is sorted out.”

But Grace doesn’t seem to care about any of this—the charges that might be filed later this week. The evidence against her. The man who’s been murdered.

“Get away from me!” she screams. “I can’t miss Nationals!”

Jolene looks to me for help, but I shake my head. I know this kind of rage. It hijacks the brain. We won’t be able to reach her until she calms down.

“Sweetheart!” Jolene says, ignoring my cues. Her voice is steeped in desperation.

Grace walks down the hall, then stops and turns, looking at her mother and then to me. “You don’t understand. Neither of you even came close to what I have!”

And with that, she silences us and disappears into her room with a slam of the door.

Jolene covers her face with her hands and shakes in disbelief, staring at the empty hallway. I grab hold of the rail, close my eyes, and take a long breath.

Grace is not my child. She’s a client. And I haven’t seen Jolene for sixteen years. I think about what I know. What I just talked about in Aspen for five days, in endless seminars and workshops. I can’t be derailed by what Grace said. Kids say all kinds of things when I first meet them. Because as much as I tell them I’m here to help, I’m still part of the process connected to what is likely the greatest trauma they will ever experience.

This is normal,I remind myself.

There’s work to do. Focus on the work.

First and foremost, I tell myself, is making the list, the agenda for the defense—we need a psychological profile. An explanation for why she keeps telling the same story that doesn’t add up. Why she shows no emotion, then erupts into rage. Is it the shock of a trauma? A mentalbreak? Calculated manipulation? Antisocial personality disorder or another sociopathic illness?

Yes,I think, centering myself as I open my eyes and walk up the last few steps to stand beside Jolene. I fight the urge to take her in my arms, this woman who was once a girl I loved so much her unraveling became my own.

She glossed over their history when she first called me in Aspen, and earlier today while Grace hid in her room. A bitter divorce when Grace’s stepfather had an affair. His move to California from their home in Oklahoma. Even back then, Grace had been one of the most talented skaters in the country, something I might have known sooner if I still followed the sport. Jolene didn’t want her distracted or possibly derailed. So she sent Grace to The Palace twenty-two months ago, hoping to save her career from the domestic chaos.

I feel a jump in my chest, my pulse quickening as I remember my own mother driving away from Avery Hall, leaving me in this unimaginable place where nothing I’d learned in my thirteen years about life applied. I couldn’t see the dangers around me. The peers who were also my competitors. The mothers in the stands who weren’t like any mothers I’d ever known. Dawn and the Fear Training. The strangers in the field where we went to escape.

And Emile Dresiér.

Jolene said she’d given Grace a checklist, a survival guide, thinking that would be enough. But knowledge isn’t the same as experience. She had to know that.

I hear a breath labor inside her chest. Her hands fall to her sides as she turns her head to look at me.

“Did she say anything?” Jolene asks, wide eyed.

I lie by omission.

“More of the same—she says she doesn’t know anything about the murder.”

“God . . .”

I take her arm, lead her into the bedroom, and sit beside her on the edge of the mattress.

“I don’t understand any of this.”

“I know,” I tell her. And that’s the truth. She has no idea.

The first thing Jill taught me when I was hired was that parents, like their children, are not evil. They didn’t want this outcome, their child accused of committing a crime. They didn’t see where their parenting, their personal decisions, their own behavior setting an example—even just their benign neglect—might lead. How nurture (or its lack) was the predominant factor in children becoming criminals—and that nurturing was their job.