Invincible. Joan Johnston
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together. A considerate word of encouragement. A stray curl tucked behind her ear. A wink as he walked off the court. She’d loved him from that moment on.
Kristin grunted with disgust, then realized she was standing in an airport waiting area full of people who might wonder what she found so disgusting. She grimaced and crossed to stare out the windows at the traffic crawling by. What a fool she’d been all those years ago. She’d been well aware her feelings of love weren’t mutual. To Max, she’d been a substitute for the little sister he apparently missed while traveling on the tour.
He’d often come to hit with her on the practice court during that summer at Wimbledon, at times when her father wasn’t around.
Max made her believe in herself. He made her believe she could have fun on the tennis court. He made her believe she could win.
She became invincible.
She won the Girls’ Singles Championship that summer at Wimbledon and the next two years, as well. She won at Roland Garros in Paris. And she was the Girls’ Singles U.S. Open Champion at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. She was the bright future of American tennis. The public was fascinated by the tall, honey-blonde phenom, a killer without mercy on the tennis court—who looked like an angel off of it.
Her tennis career ended abruptly at age sixteen, when she lost in the Wimbledon Girls’ Singles Championship match to the rival she’d beaten the previous two years. When she’d discovered, with frightening, daunting clarity, that she wasn’t so invincible after all.
Kristin heard a commotion and turned around.
“Mom?” Felicity burst into tears as she bolted out of the doorway from customs.
Kristin barely had time to take two steps and open her arms before her daughter threw herself into them. She could feel Flick trembling and felt her insides clench at the sound of her daughter’s wrenching sobs. She tightened her grip to offer comfort. Why was Flick so distraught? What was going on?
“Mrs. Lassiter?” the chaperon who’d accompanied Flick through customs inquired. The elderly woman was small and compact and wore a tailored wool suit that might have been comfortable in Switzerland but looked out of place in Miami.
“I’m Special Agent Lassiter,” Kristin said, to avoid having to explain that it was Ms. not Mrs., since she’d never been married.
“There was an incident on the plane—”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Flick protested. “I told them I didn’t want anything to eat, but they wouldn’t believe me.” Flick was tall for her age, and because her vocabulary was so grandiloquent—Flick’s own description of her extravagantly colorful speech—she was often mistaken for a child far older than she was.
Kristin could imagine the rest. “I’ll be glad to pay for any damages.”
“The flight attendant had some difficulty calming the woman sitting next to Felicity,” the chaperon said. “She wants her silk blouse replaced.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Kristin said.
The chaperon handed her a card. “Here’s her personal information. You might want to be gone when she exits customs,” she said with a sympathetic smile.
“Thanks. And thanks for bringing my daughter home.”
Kristin put her arm around Flick’s narrow shoulders, looked around and said, “Where’s your luggage, Flick?”
“She didn’t check any bags,” the chaperon said. “I have a flight home to catch, so I’ll leave you two to sort this out.”
Kristin frowned as she watched the chaperon hurry away, then turned to her daughter and said, “Why didn’t you bring anything with you?”
“The headmistress is packing everything up. She’s going to ship it to me,” Flick explained. “She said she didn’t trust me in the dormitory.”
Good lord! She’d wondered why Flick was still wearing her school uniform. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a spot of blood on the collar of Flick’s white blouse, above the red V-neck wool sweater she wore with a blue red-and-green-plaid wool pleated skirt. “All right. Let’s go home.”
Flick stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at Kristin, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t want to go home, Mom. I want to go see Gramps in the hospital.”
Kristin stared at her daughter in shock. “How did you know—? How could you possibly—? Who told you Gramps is in the hospital?”
“I’m not stupid, Mom. Gramps emailed me every day—until last Wednesday. Nothing Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. I knew something was wrong. So I tried calling him. Which got me in trouble with Mrs. Fortin. But he didn’t call me back. So I knew something was wrong.
“Then I called you and asked why Gramps didn’t call me back and you said—”
“I said he wasn’t feeling well. But that doesn’t mean he’s in the hospital, Flick.”
“But he is, isn’t he?” her daughter challenged. “Because if he wasn’t, Gramps would have called me back, no matter how sick he was. What’s wrong with him, Mom? How bad is he hurt? Was he in a car accident, or what?”
Kristin felt trapped. She’d hoped to shield Flick from the truth for long enough to let her father regain more of his faculties. But that obviously wasn’t possible now. “He’s had a stroke, Flick.”
“A stroke? What’s that?”
“A blood vessel broke in his brain.”
“Is he dying?” Flick cried.
“No, but the stroke caused some of his brain not to work right. That’s why Gramps hasn’t called you back. The stroke affected his speech, so he can’t talk very well yet.”
“Yet?” Flick said, looking, as she always did, for the loophole that allowed her to escape anything she found unpleasant.
“With therapy, he should get much better. But, Flick…”
Kristin cupped her hands gently on either side of her daughter’s anxious face and said, “His right side is paralyzed. He can’t walk or write—”
“Or type,” Flick interjected, pulling free. “So he couldn’t email me back.”
“That’s right.”
“Then it’s a good thing I got myself kicked out of that ludicrous school,” Flick said, her eyes narrowed in fierce determination. “Gramps is going to need my help to get better.”
Ludicrous: Worthy of scorn as absurdly inept, false or foolish.
It was the first time Kristin had heard Flick use the word. It seemed her daughter’s vocabulary had grown in the four months since she’d seen her at Christmas. It wasn’t always an advantage having a child who was so smart. Like now, when her daughter had manipulated her world to arrive home, instead of being at school where she belonged.
Kristin put an arm around Flick and walked toward the airport garage where she’d left her car, listening attentively as her daughter talked a mile a minute about everything that had happened since she’d last seen her mother.
Kristin heard a word—superfluous—that she didn’t know and realized she was going to have to look it up when she got home. She’d spent more time practicing on the tennis courts as a child than she had studying. She’d been homeschooled and had done the least work she could to get a high school diploma.
It was only after Flick was born that she’d realized she was going to need a college degree. She’d gone to the University of Miami and received a B.A. in Communications, figuring she could use the public relations and promotional writing courses to help Harry promote his tennis academy. After 9/11 everything changed, and she decided to join the FBI.
Flick, on the other