Those Who Wish Me Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

best-case scenarios and the worst-case. There seemed to be many more options in the latter category.
    “Tell me what you think, Allison. What you think.”
    She was quiet for a time. They were facing each other in the bed and he had one arm wrapped around her back, her lean muscles rising and falling under his hand as she breathed. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow and touched his cheek.
    “You can’t say no,” she said at last.
    “You think we have to do it, then?”
    “That’s not what I said.”
    “Clarify.”
    She took a deep breath. “You won’t be able to say no. You’ll be watching every news story, searching for some kid who was killed or who disappeared. You’ll be calling Jamie asking for updates she won’t be able to give you. Your entire summer will be lost to wondering if you put him in harm’s way when you could have taken him out of it. Am I wrong?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “You also believe it,” she said. “And that’s a good thing.”
    “Believe her story? Of course I do.”
    “No,” Allison said, “you believe that this can help him. That when he goes back to the world to face it all down, he’ll be more ready than he was before he got here. Before he got to you.”
    “I think it works,” Ethan said. “Some of the time, I think it works.”
    “I know it does,” she said softly.
    Allison had understood from the beginning. Or understood how it mattered to him, at least, and believed that he believed it worked. That was a critical starting point. Many people he spoke to about it got the theory of the program without the soul. Maybe that was on him. Maybe he’d not been able to explain it properly, or maybe it wasn’t something you could explain but, rather, something that had to be felt. Maybe you needed to be sixteen years old with a hard-ass, impossible-to-please father and facing a long stretch in juvie and knowing that longer stretches in worse places waited and then arrive in a beautiful but terrifying mountain range, clueless and clumsy, and find something out there to hold inside yourself when you got sent back. When the mountains were gone and the air blew exhaust smoke instead of glacier chill and the pressures that were on you couldn’t be solved with a length of parachute cord and an ability to tie the right knot with your eyes closed. If you could find that and hold it there within yourself, a candle of self-confidence against the darkness, you could accomplish great things. He knew this. He’d been through it.
    So you learned to build a fire, his old man had said when Ethan explained the experience, unable to transfer the feeling to him. Yes, he’d learned to build a fire. What it had done for him, though, the sense of confidence the skills gave and the sense of awe that the mountains gave…those were impacts he could not describe. All he could do was show everyone: No trouble with the law since he was sixteen, a distinguished Air Force career, a collection of ribbons and medals and commendations. All of those things had been within the flame of that first fire he’d started, but how could you explain that?
    “So you’ll do it,” Allison said. “You’ll agree to it in the morning.”
    He offered a question instead of confirmation. “What don’t you like about her?”
    “I never said I didn’t like her.”
    “I’ll repeat the question. Hopeful for an answer this time.”
    Allison sighed and leaned her head on his chest. “She drove her car off the road in a snowstorm.”
    “You’re bothered by the fact that she’s a bad driver?”
    “No,” Allison said. “I’m bothered by the fact that she rushes, and she makes mistakes.”
    He was silent. Intrigued by the observation. It seemed unfair on the surface, critical and harsh, but she was only commenting on the very things he’d taught for so many years. Good decision-making was a pattern. So was bad decision-making.
    “Just keep that in mind,” Allison said, “when you tell her that you’re