Faith was diabetic. Of course she knew about sugar. The question was, how did Will not know? And wasn’t it commonly understood that eating the lettuce and tomato meant you could order the fries? She knew Will had been raised feral, but Faith had lived with two teenage boys, first her older brother and then her son. She hadn’t been able to leave a bottle of Jergens unmolested on the bathroom counter until she was in her thirties.
How the hell did Will not know about lotion?
“Thank you, Marshal.” Major Maggie Grant had taken the floor.
Faith sat up in her seat, trying to look like a good student. Maggie was her spirit animal, a woman who had worked her way up the Atlanta Police Department food chain from crossing guard to Commander of Special Operations without turning into a testicle-gnarling bitch.
Maggie said, “I’ll briefly run down the SWAT Bible on transport from the APD perspective. We’re all following the Active Shooter Doctrine. No negotiation. Just pop and drop. From a tactical standpoint, we’ll maintain a hollow square around the pris—the high-value prisoner—at all times.”
Only Faith and Amanda laughed. There were exactly three women in the room. The rest were men who had probably not let a woman speak uninterrupted for this long since elementary school.
“Ma’am?” a hand shot up. So much for uninterrupted. “Concerning emergency egress for the prisoner—”
Faith looked at the clock.
1:44 p.m.
She opened Notes on her laptop and tried to trim down the grocery list she’d dictated to Siri this morning: Eggs, bread, juice, peanut butter, diapers, no, Emma, no, for fuck sakes, Emma don’t, oh Christ please stop, candy.
Technology had finally caught up with her bad parenting.
Had she always been like this? By the time Jeremy was in the first grade, Faith was twenty-two years old and working out of a squad car. Her parenting skills fell somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and Lord of the Flies. Jeremy still teased her about the note she’d once left in his lunch box: The bread is stale. This is what happens when you don’t close the bag.
She had vowed to be a better mother to Emma, but what did that mean, exactly?
Not creating a Mount Vesuvius of unfolded laundry on the living room couch? Not letting carpet fuzz build up in the vacuum so that it smelled like burned rubber every time she turned it on? Not realizing until exactly three-twelve this morning that the reason the toy box smelled like rotten fruit roll-ups was because Emma had been hiding all of her fruit roll-ups in the bottom?
Toddlers were such fucking assholes.
“I’m Deputy Director Amanda Wagner with the GBI.”
Faith jerked back to attention. She had gone into a fugue state from the heat and boredom. She said a silent prayer thanking Jesus, because Amanda was the last speaker.
She leaned on the desk in the front of the room and waited for everyone’s undivided attention. “We’ve had six months to prepare for this transfer. Any failures to secure the prisoner are down to human error. You people in this room are the humans who could make that error. Put your hand down.”
The guy in the front put his hand down.
Amanda looked at her watch. “It’s five past two. We’ve got the room until three. Take a ten-minute break, then come back and review your books. No papers are allowed to leave the room. No files on your laptops. If you have any questions, submit them in writing to your immediate supervisor.” Amanda smiled at Faith, the only agent in the room that she was in charge of supervising. “Thank you, gentlemen.”
The door opened. Faith could see the hallway. She weighed the consequences of pretending to go to the bathroom and slipping out the back door.
“Faith.” Amanda was walking toward her. Trapping her. “Wait up a minute.”
Faith closed her laptop. “Are we going to talk about why no one is mentioning the fact that our high-value prisoner thinks he’s going to overthrow the deep state like Katniss from The Hunger Games?”
Amanda’s brow furrowed. “I thought Katniss was the hero?”
“I have a problem with women in authority.”
Amanda shook her head. “Look, Will needs his ego massaged.”
Faith was momentarily without a response. The request was surprising on two levels. First, Will bristled at any kind of handholding and second, Amanda lived to crush egos.
Amanda said, “He’s smarting over not being picked for this task force.”
“Picked?” Faith had lost half a dozen Sundays to this tedium. “I thought this was a punishment for—” She wasn’t stupid enough to make a list. “For punishing me.”
Amanda kept shaking her head. “Faith, these men in the room—they’re going to be in charge of everything one day. You need them to get used to your being part of the conversation. You know—network.”
“Network?” Faith tried not to say the word as an explicative. Her motto had always been Why go big when I can go home?
Amanda said, “These are your prime earning years. Have you thought about the fact that you’ll be eligible for Medicare by the time Emma’s in college?”
Faith felt a stabbing pain in her chest.
“You can’t stay in the field forever.”
“And Will can?” Faith was perplexed. Amanda was like a mother to Will. If you were worried that your mother was going to run you down with her car. “Where is this coming from? Will’s your favorite. Why are you holding him back?”
Instead of answering, Amanda flipped through the briefing book, pages and pages of single-spaced text.
Faith didn’t need an explanation. “He’s dyslexic. He’s not illiterate. He’s better with numbers than I am. He can read a briefing book. It just takes a little longer.”
“How do you know he’s dyslexic?”
“Because—” Faith didn’t know how she knew. “Because I work with him. I pay attention. I’m a detective.”
“But he’s never told you. And he’ll never tell anyone. Therefore, we can’t offer him accommodations. Therefore, he’ll never move up the food chain.”
“Christ,” Faith muttered. Just like that, she was closing down Will’s future.
“Mandy.” Maggie Grant walked into the room. She had a bottle of cold water for each of them. “Why on earth are you both still in here? It’s cooler in the hallway.”
Faith angrily twisted the cap off the bottle. She couldn’t believe this Will bullshit. It wasn’t Amanda’s job to decide what he was capable of doing or not doing.
“How’s your mother?” Maggie asked Faith.
“Good.”
