Mack’s silence was just…open. Space for her to get where she was going on her own terms.
“I was sixteen,” she said. “Blake was eighteen. It was the summer after his senior year, and we were at our grandparents’ place in Whitefish. The same mountains.” She gestured toward the window. “He wanted to hike to a ridge he’d heard about from local kids—off-trail, steep, the kind of scramble that required ropes and experience we didn’t have. No way I was doing that. Blake called me a baby. Told me to stop being such a buzzkill. He went off-trail anyway.”
“And you followed.”
She nodded, still staring at the passing scenery. “That’s what I always did—protested, then capitulated. He’s my older brother, and I adored him. I was always in his shadow, trying to prove I was a good little sister.”
Mack reached over and squeezed her arm. It was brief—just an acknowledgment.
She blew out a breath. “The ridge was loose shale over a fifteen-foot drop.” Her voice had gone flat—the controlled, careful tone she used when something was too big to let herself feel. “Blake went first. He was showing off, moving fast, not checking his footing. I was behind him, trying to keep up, and the whole shelf gave way.”
The rest poured out, unfiltered. “We both fell. I tumbled fifteen feet down the slope, hit a rock outcropping, and broke my left arm in two places.” She touched her brow. “I split my head open on a jagged edge of granite. Blake fell a shorter distance and only had a few minor cuts and bruises. He carried me down the mountain,” she said. “I’ll give him that. He was scared—that was real. My arm was?—”
She paused, remembering the angle of it. The white-hot pain. Blake’s face above her, pale and panicked. “It was bad,” she said softly. “And he carried me all the way back to the trailhead where someone had cell service and called an ambulance.”
“And?” Mack said, knowing in his voice.
She glanced down at the sketchbook. The draw to escape inside it was strong. Anything to avoid this hollow feeling of betrayal. “When our parents got to the hospital, Blake told them I was the one who’d wanted to go off-trail.” Her voice was so flat now it sounded mechanical, even to her own ears. Like she was reading from a script she’d memorized years ago. “He said I’d insisted. That he’d tried to talk me out of it, and I wouldn’t listen. That he’d only gone with me to keep me safe.”
She could still see her father’s face. Colonel James Bennett, standing at the foot of her hospital bed with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at her with that combination of disappointment and authority that had governed her entire childhood. Well, Alyssa. I hope you’ve learned something from this.
She hadn’t argued. She’d been sixteen, in pain, doped up on whatever the ER had given her, and her brother was standing behind their father with an expression she couldn’t read. Guilt? Relief? She still didn’t know. She’d said yes, sir, and closed her eyes, and that was the end of it.
“Dad believed him,” she said. “Mom was more skeptical, but she didn’t contradict Dad—she never did. My grandparents believed me, but Grandpa Edward wasn’t going to overrule his son. Not about something like this.” She paused. “So Blake’s version became the family truth. And mine just…didn’t matter.”
The only noise was the hum of the engine and the hiss of tires on the mostly cleared road. She waited for Mack to say something, but he didn’t.
She sat for a long moment, remembering that she wasn’t that girl anymore. “That was the first time,” she admitted. “But it set the pattern. Blake lies. The family believes him. My version of events gets filed under Alyssa being dramatic.” She made air quotes. “Alyssa being difficult, or Alyssa not supporting her brother. Take your pick.” Her throat tightened. She swallowed past it. “I learned that challenging Blake’s version of reality would cost me more than going along with it.”
“That wasn’t right,” Mack said.
No, it wasn’t. “Then you came along. You gave me strength and courage that I never had. For the first time in my life, someone actually asked what I thought and listened to the answer. When that mission happened, and Blake told us you were the one who gave the order, and that you were trying to destroy him to cover your own failure—I had thirteen years of training telling me to believe him. Dad believed him. Mom stayed quiet. The whole family closed ranks, and I?—”
She stopped. Pressed her lips together hard enough to feel her teeth.
“You chose the pattern,” Mack said. His voice was low, quiet, and completely without accusation.
“I chose the pattern.” The words burned coming out. “I had everything I needed to see the truth, and I looked at Blake instead. I saw my brother, and I—” She shook her head. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t be the one to break the family. So I broke us instead.”
The pencil snapped in her fingers. She stared down at the two halves, charcoal dust on her skin.
Mack pulled the SUV to the shoulder of the road and stopped. Put it in park.
She looked at him, startled. “What?”
His dark eyes were steady on hers, and she saw something in them she hadn’t expected. Not anger, though she’d earned it. Not pity, though the story warranted it.
“I need you to hear something,” he said. “And I need you to hear it from me, not from a therapist or a self-help book or your own head at three in the morning.”
She nodded.
“You were sixteen when Blake taught you that your truth didn’t count. You were twenty-seven when he used that same playbook to take me away from you.” His voice was even, measured, but angry. “That’s not weakness, Lyssa. That’s conditioning. And the fact that you’re sitting in this truck right now, holding a sketchbook full of evidence against him, driving toward a federal building to put him on the record—that’s you breaking that programming in less than twenty-four hours.”
Her vision blurred. She blinked hard. She was done crying—she’d decided that in the cabin—but her eyes apparently hadn’t gotten the message. “That doesn’t make it okay,” she said.
“No. It doesn’t make it okay.” He didn’t soften it, and she was glad. A lie would have been worse. “But it makes it something I can understand. And that’s—” He paused. Looked out the windshield at the mountain road ahead of them, then back at her. “That’s more than I had yesterday.”
She reached across the console and touched his hand. The scarred one, resting on the gearshift. Her fingertips found the raised ridge of damaged skin—Blake’s mark on him, the mirror of Blake’s mark on her.