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  “Look at me,” John said intensely. “All eyes right here. This is exactly where we were last game with them, chasing them from behind. Remember what happened? They’re scared we’re gonna do it again.”

  “Let’s do it again, Coach,” Ty Jones said.

  The team attacked the court with fire in their eyes. Ethan scored quickly, then stole the ball and put it in the basket. With less than a minute left, the score was 84–80. John yelled for full-court pressure and forced the Knights to call their final time-out.

  “Come here, come here, come here!” John yelled, pulling his team together, the crowd going wild. The boys gathered around him, sweaty, lungs burning, fatigued. But he saw players hungry for his words. They knew they had a coach who believed in them.

  “Okay, listen, they’re going to try to hold the ball and run out the clock. You gotta keep the pressure up. Get in their face! When we get the ball back, run a double flex and look for Ethan or Jeff for a three. Then crash the boards. Stay in full-court press till it’s over. Cougars on three.”

  John counted them down and their hands went into the air with a shout of “Cougars!”

  John saw it in their faces. He had given them confidence by saying, “When we get the ball back . . .” There was no question or doubt in his voice.

  The Cougars were built around three players: Ty, Ethan, and Jeff. John joked that they’d played together since they were in diapers. Other teams feared the Ty/Ethan/Jeff juggernaut because they worked with one mind, one heart. An opposing coach called them the “velociraptors” for their ability to coordinate.

  John glanced at his wife, Amy, who sat in the stands with their younger son, Will. She’d been to every game this season, cheering him on but cheering twice as loud for Ethan, their older son. She looked his way, and he smiled, knowing she had his back.

  Ty intercepted an inbound pass and the ball went to Jeff Baker, who drained a three-pointer. With only seventeen seconds left, the Cougars were in business.

  No time to celebrate. John waved and yelled for a full-court press. They needed one more steal and one basket to pull ahead.

  Instead of trying to run out the clock, the Knights drove to the basket but missed a layup. Another Knight rebounded and dunked the ball. The Knights went ahead 86–83.

  As long as there was time on the clock, there was a chance.

  “Ethan!” he yelled.

  The ball came to his son. Three seconds left. Ethan dribbled twice, lunging toward half-court.

  “Shoot it! Shoot it! Shoot it!”

  Ethan launched a high, arcing shot. As the ball descended, the buzzer sounded, but instead of swishing through the net, the ball caromed off the rim and bounced harmlessly away.

  The Knights celebrated. Ethan put his hands behind his head and knelt, totally spent. A hush fell over the gym and John looked at the scoreboard. He wanted to sink to his knees like a few of his players. But he couldn’t. Instead, he clapped and urged Ethan from the floor as the home crowd chanted, “We are proud of you! We are proud of you!”

  John shook hands with the Knights’ coach and congratulated him.

  “You’ve got a great team, Harrison,” the man reciprocated. “We were lucky tonight.”

  “Luck didn’t have anything to do with it. You fought hard. Good job.”

  As he walked from the court, he glanced at Amy and Will, locked in a hug, clearly crushed by the loss. They’d been sure this was the year. Instead, John was a runner-up yet again.

  John found Ethan outside the locker room and he pulled his son in for a hug. He was almost as tall as John now. When they walked inside, they heard the chatter of defeated boys.

  “We had ’em,” Jeff said. “The refs gave them that game.”

  “I got hacked all night and the refs didn’t call nothin’,” Ty said.

  John got their attention and took a deep breath, looking for words he hoped he could believe himself. What was supposed to be a celebration felt like a funeral. He had to help them see something they couldn’t.

  “All right, everybody, look at me,” he began. “I wanted this one, too.”

  He looked at Ethan, then the others. Joining his voice with that great cloud of past coaches, he said, “I am proud of you.”

  The boys stared at him, believing. He saw it on their faces. And he knew the next words were not just for them, but also for his own heart.

  “And here’s the good news. That team is the biggest hurdle we’ll face next year. They’re graduating four of their starters while all of you are coming back. We’ll also be that much stronger. Which means next season we take everything.”

  His words washed over them. Though devastated by the loss, they nodded and accepted the challenge. He had given them hope in the midst of defeat. Too bad that hope for next season didn’t come alongside this year’s trophy.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hannah Scott waited in the principal’s office at Franklin High School. She’d seen those TV shows where the police left a suspect alone in a room to stew, to think about the crime. When detectives returned and pushed the suspect, the story flew from the lips of the accused. She vowed she wouldn’t admit anything. Being left alone helped her think, gave her time to figure out some plausible way to explain. It was like those puzzles she had done when she was little where you trace your way through the maze until you come to the end. But every time Hannah came up with a reason why she had a full envelope of cash in her backpack—money gathered by her Spanish teacher for food and even a piñata for a class party—she hit a solid line. There was no believable explanation.

  Hannah closed her eyes and a Spanish word appeared in her mind: ladrón. She doubted the teacher would be impressed with her expanding vocabulary.

  What would her grandmother say? How would she react? Had they called her at work? Was she on her way? This would send her over the edge. Her grandmother became angry so quickly, fire dancing in her eyes. She never struck Hannah or physically hurt her. She didn’t have to. All it took was a word or a look. And those came all too often.

  Hannah hated putting her through this. Her grandmother had enough hurt in her life. Hannah needed to find a way out of this herself.

  The door opened and the principal walked in, not making eye contact, and right behind him was her Spanish teacher, who did. Hannah didn’t know which was worse, the man who looked at the floor or the woman who caught her eyes and held them.

  Mrs. Reyes had dark hair and a kind smile and bright-red lipstick. She taught most of the class in Spanish, getting students to repeat what she had said so they could experience the language rather than just read it on a page. She was a good teacher. She seemed to enjoy what she did, even though some students didn’t try. Hannah liked having a teacher who was her height. She didn’t have to look up. The woman had taken extra time after class, helping Hannah understand assignments. Some of the class seemed to learn the language easily, and Hannah wondered if they had siblings or a parent who helped. She was alone with her questions.

  The principal, an older man with skin that hung from his neck in folds, placed his pudgy hands on the desk in front of him like he was about to get a manicure. “Hannah, we’ve called your grandmother and left a message, but so far—”

  “She’s at work,” Hannah interrupted.

  “Yes. We called her cell phone and her work line.”

  Great, Hannah thought.

  Mrs. Reyes sat forward. “There must be a reason why that envelope ended up in your backpack.”

  Hannah looked at her hands.

  “Do you need money for something? If you need help, you can tell us.”

  Hannah knew opening her mouth would only lead to more trouble. Her grandmother had taught her from early on to always tell the truth because when you lied, you had to remember all the things you’d said to keep the story straight. The truth was a better way to live. But for Hannah, the truth could also lead to a lot of trouble.

  “Did you take the envelope from Mrs. Reyes’s drawer?”r />
  “No, sir.”

  That part was true. If she’d taken a lie detector test, she would have passed that question, because the envelope wasn’t in Mrs. Reyes’s drawer—it was in the side of her purse on the floor behind the desk.

  “Hannah, look at me,” the principal said.

  She sat up straight like her grandmother taught her. There was something in his eyes that made her want to look away, so she concentrated on the crease between his eyes that deepened as he furrowed his brow. Did he always have that or did it come from his years of being a principal? Did it come from dealing with students like her?

  “How did the envelope get into your backpack?” he said.

  She swallowed hard. Tears came to her eyes and she felt her chin quiver. She hated that. It made her feel . . . what was the word? Culpable. It was a word in both Spanish and English that meant “guilty.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, bending to reach into her backpack.

  “Hannah, Mrs. Reyes left you alone in the room for a few minutes, and when she came back, you were gone and so was the envelope.”

  “Somebody else took it.”

  “Hannah, tell the truth,” Mrs. Reyes said. “It’s better than trying to make something up.”

  Hannah thought of her grandmother’s face and brought her inhaler to her mouth and took a puff. She wasn’t doing it for sympathy—she really felt like her lungs were contracting, but that could have been because of her nerves. She’d learned in health class what happened in your brain when feelings and hormones mixed. She didn’t understand it, but she felt it.

  “Somebody else must have put it in there,” Hannah said, her voice thin. “I don’t need money. My grandmother works hard. She . . .”

  She trailed off as she heard a voice in the other room. Then came a knock at the door. Her grandmother walked inside and glanced at her.

  “What have you done now, baby?”

  She said it sweetly, with compassion, but Hannah could see the fire in her grandmother’s eyes. She would talk about this for weeks. All the trouble Hannah caused. The last time she was here, the principal had used the word expulsion for the next infraction.

  She could hear her grandmother’s questions.

  Where are you going to go to school now? I can’t enroll you in some private school. I don’t have that kind of money. Do you think it grows on trees? Hannah, what were you thinking?

  She closed her eyes and imagined herself with a word tattooed on her forehead. Ladrón.

  Thief.

  CHAPTER 3

  John Harrison sat in his wife’s classroom, playing back the championship game on his iPad. He’d always been able to keep stats and totals in his head, his mind a statistical vault, and this game was no exception. Each missed foul, missed call, and missed opportunity of his team was a thorn on the season’s rose.

  “I thought you told the guys to put that game behind them,” Amy said, a twinkle in her eye. “You said to not obsess over the loss.”

  “Easier to say than do. Plus, you have to learn from your mistakes, right? I’m telling you, next season . . .” He shook his head and pointed at the screen. “Look at that. His feet were moving. No way that was a charge.”

  Amy was John’s biggest cheerleader. His success was hers and her successes were his. Sadly, the same went for his failures. In fact, she had taken some losses harder than he had.

  Their marriage had always been a for-better-or-worse-no-matter-what union, both of them committed to working out the rough spots whenever they came up. Theirs was the kind of love that said, “If you ever leave, I’m going with you.”

  He remembered one long night of the soul after they’d been married only a couple of months. Tears and a whole box of tissues and staring at Amy’s shoulders shaking. It would have been easier to withdraw and chalk it up to “emotions,” but he didn’t. He moved toward her, and when she moved away, he didn’t give up. Once he finally peeled the onion of her emotions, he realized fear was at the core. She was scared about the future. Something he had said, some offhand comment had put a pinprick in their marital balloon. The clock said 3:12 when he finally found the leak and patched it.

  Amy was a words person. She needed to hear things from him, and since that did not come naturally to John, he had to work harder to let her know what he was thinking. He could bark orders to kids on the team all day, but that wasn’t communicating when it came to his wife. Every time there was distance between them, words were the bridge, the path that drew their hearts closer.

  Today, something wasn’t right between them. Was it the loss of the game? Maybe it was something tied in with the hopes they both had for Ethan. They wanted him to attend a good college and get a good job and find a good wife and have a good life. Every parent had hopes and dreams. The next step for Ethan was college, but on two teacher salaries a scholarship was his best hope. That question hung over their family and John wondered if somehow Amy felt he hadn’t come through. He should have done more, become more successful, more financially secure.

  But that couldn’t be it. Amy never counted on money for her happiness or contentment. Still, he felt a little inadequate. If only they had more in the bank, a basketball scholarship lined up for Ethan, things would be better.

  Maybe it was a season they were in. They’d been married nineteen years and every marriage went through ups and downs. That was it. The distance, the unsettled feeling was normal. This was their reality. So he needed to go with the flow and stop thinking so much about it.

  John stared at the screen. A time-out he should have called one pass sooner, all coulda-shoulda-woulda. It was impossible not to replay the game and see a different outcome.

  “See, right there, that is eight calls they missed. And he just walked!”

  “You going to show the refs your video?” Amy said with a smirk. She was prepping for an experiment in her next chemistry class.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  They both groaned, knowing that wasn’t true. John wanted to talk about Ethan. What they might be able to do before his senior year to help him—a camp, strength training, anything to make scouts more interested. Before he could bring it up, Keith Wright, head coach of the football team, stepped into the room.

  “Hey, John, Amy, you might want to come see this.”

  The look on Keith’s face was unsettling. Was there some disturbance in the hall? Another news story of a school shooting?

  “You go,” Amy said. “I need to finish this up for fifth period.”

  “All right, I’ll be back.”

  John followed Keith to the teachers’ lounge, where a group of faculty and staff had gathered, grim-faced, staring at a television. A news reporter mentioned Tarsus Steel, the largest employer in Franklin. The company had decided to close the plant, which meant the loss of six thousand jobs.

  Immediately John thought of all the men in his church who worked for Tarsus. In a town of twenty-four thousand, the shuttering of the oldest and largest employer in the region would be an economic earthquake.

  As the news anchor switched to a live report on-scene, John saw Brookshire’s principal, Olivia Brooks, in the corner with her head down, a pained look on her face. The fallout of this would greatly affect the school.

  The reporter said families were given the option to move with the company and that the transition would be completed by July 1.

  “Unbelievable,” Cynthia Langdon said. She taught English and was a favorite of students. “And we just renovated the school.”

  Keith turned to John. His voice was low and resigned. “There goes the football program.”

  “You don’t know that,” John said.

  “John, most of my players have parents who work at the plant.” He shook his head and looked back at the screen. “This ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  Keith put a hand on John’s shoulder before he left the room. It felt like an omen, a good-bye of sorts. Was he overreacting?

  “The news is spreading
rapidly throughout the city of Franklin,” the reporter said. “Local businesses are also learning of the closure and bracing for what lies ahead.”

  When the room emptied, John went to Olivia. She was one of those rare administrators whose no-nonsense demeanor combined with deep compassion for students and faculty. Her parents had been teachers and had passed on a desire to help change the world one student at a time.

  “What do you make of all this?” John said.

  Olivia was near tears. “I’ve heard rumblings from a friend who’s on the school board. I knew the company was considering a move. But you know how rumors go. They’ve been talking about this for years. I heard they were consolidating—actually thinking about moving workers to Franklin. Instead, we’ve got this. John, it’s going to be devastating.”

  “Keith agrees. He thinks the football program is toast.”

  Olivia looked away.

  “Olivia, tell me he’s overreacting.”

  “I don’t know what to say. You know I’m not gloom and doom. I like to believe the best and see the silver lining. I honestly don’t see one.”

  John returned to Amy’s classroom and noticed the iPad on the desk. Suddenly the replay of the game didn’t seem quite as important. Funny how a crisis could reorient your world. Amy’s jaw dropped when he told her the news.

  “What’s this mean?” she said.

  “Keith thinks the football program is done. Olivia looked like she’d been tackled by a linebacker. I don’t think anybody really knows all the fallout. I sure don’t.”

  Amy stared at the experiment she had prepared. The fifth period bell rang and students filled the hallway. John wondered how empty that hallway would seem in the fall.

  CHAPTER 4

  Barbara Scott felt defeated every time she looked at Hannah. She didn’t want to, but she did. For weeks she had inquired about getting the girl into a new school, but doors closed. Hannah had a reputation she couldn’t shake. Barbara inquired at private schools in the area, but when she heard the cost per semester, she politely thanked them and hung up the phone.