Page 55 of Lessons in Power

The words dried up on her lips.

“I’ll talk to Matt,” I told Emilia.You can do this, I continued silently. I knew better than to say those words to her out loud.

“Fine.” Emilia turned her back on me. She didn’t want to do this, but she would—for Asher.

Matt Benning didn’t so much as glance my way when I took a seat behind him on the bleachers. He was sitting on the edge of a group of guys, close enough to give the appearance that he was part of their conversation, but making no move to actually joinit. He gave off an air of being present but not really a part of things.

I’d been that person, back in Montana.

“Not in the mood for a drink?” I asked him.

He didn’t turn around. “Not much of a drinker.”

I managed a small smile. “Me neither.”

I settled into silence then. I rested my forearms on my legs and waited. Before moving to DC, I’d spent my entire life on my grandpa’s ranch. I had a sixth sense for knowing when to approach and when to let a tetchy horse approach me.

Minutes crept by as Matt and I sat on the edge of the crowd, neither one of us saying a word.

“They’re going to catch us, you know.” Matt’s voice was naturally deep and even-keeled. My gut said that he would have been good with horses, too. “There are cameras everywhere on this campus.”

I slid down to sit beside him but kept my gaze focused straight ahead. “Not everywhere, apparently,” I said.

If there were footage of John Thomas’s murder, the police would have already made an arrest.I didn’t bother putting that into words. “Were you and John Thomas friends?” I asked Matt instead.

For several seconds, Matt said nothing. “I have a little sister,” he said finally. “Freshman. She asked me to take her picture the other day.”

It took me a moment to catch the implication—his little sister had been one of the girls to join the ISWE project.

“Did you take the picture?” I asked. If he’d agreed to help his sister with our protest, that told me something about the kind of guy he was.

“I did.”

I turned that over in my head for a second or two before I took a risk. “Do you know Asher Rhodes?” I asked. “Because if you know Asher at all, that means that youknowhe didn’t kill John Thomas.”

Matt neither agreed nor disagreed with that statement.

“If I asked you who on this campus could get around the security feeds,” I ventured, “would you tell me?”

Matt turned from me to direct his stare back out at the makeshift pool party going on below us. He picked a stray lei up off the bleachers and held it taut between his hands. “You’re assuming I know the answer to that question.”

Yes. I am.I let my silence speak for me.

“You’re also assuming,” Matt continued quietly, “that I’m the kind of guy who likes to talk.”

“You’re not?” I said.

He rubbed his thumb over one of the flowers on his lei. “I’m the kind of guy who likes to keep his head down.”

That was why he was here, sitting on the edge of things, just close enough to blend.

“If you were really the kind of guy who kept his head down,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be here.”

At a completely illegal party, where you know we’re going to get caught.

Matt responded to my comment by turning to look at a cluster of girls by the punch. It took me a moment to realize that one of them was his little sister, that he was probably here for the sole purpose of keeping an eye on her.

My gut said that Matt was a good guy. But it also said that he wasn’t going to make waves. There was a good chance he andhis sister attended Hardwicke on scholarship—scholarships they received because their father worked for the school.