Page 4 of The Grandest Game
Lyra offered up three words in response. “Single. Petty. Armed.”
Her mother laughed. “You are not.”
“Not petty or not armed?” Lyra asked. She didn’t even touch onsingle.
“Petty,” her mom replied. “You are a kind and generous soul, Lyra Catalina Kane, and we both know that anything can be a weapon if you believe in your heart that you can maim or kill someone with it.”
The conversation felt so normal, sothem, that Lyra could hardly bear it. “Mom? I got an email from the Bursar’s Office.”
Silence fell like a thousand-year-old tree.
“It’s possible my last check from my publisher was late,” her mom said finally. “And lower than I expected. But I’ll figure this out, baby. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Everything is fine.That was Lyra’s line, had been her line for three years, ever since the nameHawthornehad started dominating the news cycle and memories she’d repressed with good reason had come flooding back. One in particular.
“Forget about tuition, Mom.” Lyra needed to get off the phone. It was easier to projectnormalat a distance, but it still came with a cost. “I can take next semester off, get a job, apply for loans for the fall.”
“Absolutely not.” The voice that issued those words wasn’t her mom’s.
“Hi, Dad.”
Keith Kane had married her mother when she was three and adopted her when she was five. He was the onlydadshe’d ever known. Until the dreams had started, she hadn’t even remembered her biological father.
“Your mom and I will handle this, Lyra.” There was no arguing with her dad’s tone.
The old Lyra wouldn’t have even tried. “Handle it how?” she pressed.
“We have options.”
Lyra knew, just from the way he said the wordoptions, what he was thinking. “Mile’s End,” she said. He couldn’t mean it. Mile’s End was more than just a house. It was the attic gables and the front porch swing and the woods and the creek and generations of Kanes carving their names into the same tree.
Lyra had grown up at Mile’s End. She’d carved her name into that tree when she was nine years old. Her baby brother deserved to do the same.I can’t be the reason they sell.
“We’ve been talking about downsizing for a while now.” Her dad was calm, matter-of-fact. “The upkeep on this old place is killingus. If I let Mile’s End go, we could get a little house in town, put you through school, start a college fund for your brother. There’s a developer—”
“There’s always a developer.” Lyra didn’t even let him finish. “And you always tell them to go to hell.”
This time, the silence on the other end of the line spoke volumes.
Chapter 3
LYRA
Running hurt. Maybe that was why she liked it. The old Lyra had hated running. Now, she could go distances. The problem was that, over time, it started hurting a little less. So every day, she pushed herself further.
And further.
And further.
Her parents and friends had been bewildered when she’d given up dancing for this. She’d held out until November of her senior year of high school, a year ago, nearly to the day. She’d faked it as long as she could. But even she wasn’t a good enough actress to fake the kind of dancer she’d been.Before.
It seemed wrong that her whole life had been derailed by a dream. A single memory. Lyra had known that her biological father was dead—but not that he’d committed suicide, not that she’dbeen there. She’d repressed the trauma so thoroughly, it hadn’t evenexisted for her. One day she’d been a normal, happy teenager, and the next—literally overnight—she wasn’t.
Wasn’t normal. Wasn’t okay, let alonehappy.
Her parents knew—not what had changed but that something had. She’d fled to a faraway college, but look where that had gotten her. Scholarships only covered so much. Her parents had told her that the remainder of her out-of-state tuition wasn’t an issue, but clearly, they’d lied, which probably meant Lyra hadn’t done nearly as good a job at pretending to be normal as she’d thought.
As she ran—no matter how far she ran—Lyra’s brain kept cycling back to the same conclusion:I have to drop out.That would buy some time at least, take one bill off her parents’ plate. The prospect of quitting college shouldn’t have hurt. It wasn’t like Lyra had made friends this semester or even tried to. She’d coasted through her classes like an academically inclined zombie. She was just treading water.
