Trial by Power

Chapter 2: Terms and Conditions

My father moved first.

He pushed his chair back and stood, and for a moment he just looked at me the way he looked at a term sheet — running the numbers, deciding whether the position was real. Then he nodded, once, short.

"Good," he said. "That's the right call."

Nobody else at the table said anything.

I stood up. "Dad — the application materials. They're in the study?"

"Everything's in the folder. Passport copy, transcript, the letter from the program office."

"I'll go this afternoon. Get the transfer started, file the paperwork."

"Good." He was already reaching for his phone. "I'll have Marcus drive you. Take the afternoon."

I left them sitting there — Vivian with her nails flat on the tablecloth, Hunter's face doing something complicated, Elliot watching me like a card he'd already counted and come up wrong.

Nobody tried to stop me on the stairs.

---

The study smelled like old paper and my father's coffee. The folder was on the corner of the desk, where he left the things he wanted people to see him handle. I opened it and went through every page, because checking is cheaper than fixing.

Passport copy. Transcript. Program letter. A typed list of names, and a phone number in Boston belonging to somebody's assistant.

I had the folder against my chest when the door banged open behind me.

Hunter came in and shut it. I heard the lock turn.

Four strides and he was close enough to take the light off the desk. It was a lot of him, suddenly, in a small room.

"What is this." His voice was low and pressed down. "What are you doing."

"Packing paperwork."

"You know what I'm asking." He was holding himself very still, which was worse than if he hadn't been. "You take the spot. Just like that. In front of everyone. To get at me. To get at her."

I moved the folder up and stepped back until the shelf was between us.

"You're reading too much into it." I looked at him. "I want a different room. Watching the two of you do your act every day is tiring."

He blinked.

For a year he'd had a girl who talked to her shoes. He was looking at somebody else's face now and didn't have a move for it.

Then the salesman came back. His jaw set, and his voice went soft the way it did when he'd decided he was being generous. "Don't be like this. You don't know anybody over there. Nobody's going to make allowances for you." A pause. "Go downstairs and give the spot back. I'll forget last night. All of it. Whatever kind of cake you want, I'll buy it for you."

I laughed.

It came out of me before I could stop it, a real one, and it sat in the room, and his face changed because he had no idea what to do with the sound.

"Hunter." I said it flat. "I'm not your consolation prize and I'm not taking your leftovers."

I walked for the door. He reached for my wrist, and the grab closed on air.

He stood there with his hand still out. Then he turned and kicked the bookshelf, hard enough that the whole thing jumped, and yanked the door open, and was gone.

His footsteps went down the stairs.

The lines drifted up over the folder in my arms.

*He's panicking. If Avery leaves, he runs out of excuses to be in this house.*

*He never wanted her. He just liked the version of her that did what she was told.*

I stood in the study another minute and read the list again, and then I went downstairs.

---

Elliot was leaning against the column at the bottom of the stairs.

He had a silver lighter out, turning it over in his fingers with the lazy flick people use when they want you watching their hands. The top button of his shirt was undone. He didn't move when he saw me.

"So it's real," he said, smiling. "You're going."

I kept walking. He didn't step aside.

"Boston." He said it like he was tasting it. "Cold. Big. Not a lot of family around. And you know how you get." His voice dropped into the register he used when he wanted something and didn't want to look like he did. "I'm serious, Avery. I'd hate to think of you over there by yourself. Some guy pushing you around, nobody around to—"

"Save the sweet talk for my sister."

He stopped.

"She's the one who needs it, isn't she." I looked at him, and I didn't raise my voice. "The attention. The feelings. She's got all the room in the world for it." I shifted the folder to my hip. "You've spent a year standing next to me to get to her. Go stand next to her."

The smile didn't drop. It stayed exactly where it was, which is how I knew it was over.

He stepped aside.

"Good luck, Avery," he said, pleasant as anything, and clicked the lighter shut.

I went out the front door and didn't look back.

---

The car was waiting. The afternoon was paperwork: one office, then another, then a line, then a form I filled out wrong and had to do over, then a second line, then a stamp.

Four hours. My father texted twice. I answered both times with one word.

The folder came home with me stamped and copied and finally mine.

---

Vivian took it badly, and she did it the way she did everything — without once admitting she cared.

That first night back: "You know you'll just be the dumb one in the room, right? They'll eat you alive and you won't even notice it happening."

Fork in her hand. Not looking up.

"Probably," I said. "I'll deal with it."

On the day of my appointment, every car in the garage was gone. All of them out for service, she said when my mother mentioned it — they were overdue, it was on the calendar. Marcus had the day off. The other one had the day off. Nobody knew when the third would be back.

I called a car from my phone. It came. I stood outside in the rain with the folder inside my jacket because the plastic sleeve had split, and the driver took a wrong turn and turned around in a parking lot, and I still walked in with six minutes to spare.

My signature came out smeared at the bottom because my hand was wet.

My father looked at the stamped copies when I got home and said, "That's my girl," and went back to his email. Later that night I heard him on the phone and stopped in the hall without meaning to.

"She wants to go," he said. "Let her go." A pause. "Might do this house some good. Get one of them out of it."

He didn't say my name. He didn't need to.

He transferred the money the next morning. It was more than I needed. There was no note.

---

The night before the flight, I packed.

Slowly, folding everything flat, because I wanted to watch the suitcase empty the room out. The room had been mine for twenty years. It had a wall the color of the inside of a mint, and a hair tie on the floor by the bed that had been there since the summer, and I didn't pick it up.

The hallway door wasn't shut all the way. I heard them before I heard the words — Vivian's heels in the corridor, then the flat heavy sound of two people who have stopped walking toward each other.

"—I don't need a medal for showing up." Hunter, tired, and the tiredness was new. "I moved two meetings. For an art opening I didn't want to go to."

"Nobody asked you to."

"You did. Two days ago. Three days ago. I've lost count of the—"

"You know what this is?" Her voice went up. "You've figured out you're about to lose one more person to push around, and now you're taking it out on me."

"Vivian."

"Get out of my hallway."

The door slammed hard enough that something on my wall rattled.

I stood in the middle of the floor with a shirt still in my hand.

The lines slid up across the wall.

*There it is. The middle one's gone, so there's nothing left to stand between them.*

*They barely liked her. They just needed somewhere to put the worst of it.*

*And Elliot's got a bar tab in the city tonight. Tomorrow's going to be a show.*

I looked at the lines for a long moment, and then I looked away.

None of that was mine now.

I laid the last shirt flat, closed the lid, and pulled the zipper all the way around until it stopped.