Chapter 34 The Play

Chapter 34 The Play
Liam

"That forty-two play in the fourth." Jace shook his head with the appreciation of someone who had been on the receiving end of that play in practice enough times to understand the precision of it.

"Clean."

"Clean," I agreed.

Caspian materialized at my left shoulder. "The nerd girl was in the stands tonight."

I drank from the cup. "I know."

"Family section. With your sister." He said it with the casual interest of someone dropping information and watching where it landed.

"Looked comfortable up there."

"She's been to games before," I said, sipping the drink from my cup.

"Not in the family section," Caspian said.

I looked at him. He held his hands up in the easy gesture of someone who was observing rather than challenging.

"Just noting,"

"Note something else."

He grinned and drifted back into the party. Jace watched him go and then looked at me sideways.

"He's not wrong," Jace said. "The family section is a statement."

"Chloe invited her," I said. "Chloe invited her and sat next to her, and I had no part in that decision."

"Okay,"

"It's true."

"I know it's true," Jace said easily. "Doesn't mean it's not also a statement." He finished his drink. "How's the bet sitting?"

I leaned against the kitchen counter and looked at the party moving in the next room: team members and their people, music, and the specific looseness of a post-win Friday. Everyone is easy and celebrating.

"She's exactly where I need her," I said. "Suspicious enough to stay interesting, invested enough that the suspicion isn't winning."

"Invested how?"

"She came to the game," I said. "She didn't come to the game for Chloe. Chloe was the reason she stayed, but it wasn't the reason she came. "I turned the cup in my hand.

"She came because she wanted to see if Tiffany would try something. Which means she cares enough about the situation to show up and watch it."

Jace processed this. "And that's good for the bet."

"Caring is always good for the bet," I said. "You can't lose what you don't care about."

Jace nodded slowly. "Cold."

"Accurate," I said.

Tiffany appeared from the direction of the back door, still in a jacket over her cheer uniform, her hair now down from the game styling.

She crossed the kitchen, picked up a drink from the counter, and stopped beside me with the ease of someone who had been moving through the same social spaces as me for three years and knew exactly where to stand.

"You made it," she said, holding her cup.

"I said I would."

She looked at me over her drink with an expression that was pleasant and opaque. "How did the drop-off go?"

"Fine," I said. "Chloe went inside. Daisy went inside. I left."

"And the session?"

"Canceled for tonight." I finished my drink and set the cup down.

"She took it fine."

Tiffany was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "She's not what you thought she was."

I looked at her. "What does that mean?"

"It means she's not the easy mark from the diary." Tiffany said it without accusation, with the clinical interest of someone who had been watching a situation develop and was updating her assessment.

"She argued back in the cafeteria. She held my stare. She waited at school tonight not because Chloe needed her, although she did, but because she's building information." Her eyes stayed on mine.

"She's running something, Liam. You said it yourself."

"I know she is," I agreed, nodding.

"And you're not worried."

I shook my head.

"Nope, I'm not worried. Because I'm further ahead of it than she knows."

I straightened up the counter.

"She's looking for a secret. She's going to keep looking and not find it the way she expects to find it.

And every day she spends looking is another day she's spending time with me instead of building a case against me. I looked at Tiffany directly. "That's not a problem. That's the play."

Tiffany held my gaze for a long moment. Something moved behind her eyes, the same thing I had caught in the corridor after the game, and then she put her drink down and looked at the party.

"You're very good at this."

"I know," I said, smiling.

"That's not entirely a compliment."

I picked up someone else's abandoned drink from the counter, checked that it was unopened, and cracked it.

"It doesn't need to be."

The music shifted to something louder, and the party absorbed it, and around me, twenty people celebrated a Friday night win, and I stood in the middle of it feeling exactly like what I was, someone running a play so clean that the other team hadn't even identified the formation yet.

Daisy Henrico was smart. She was the most observant person I had spent significant time with.

But she was looking for a secret in notebooks and pauses and circled words.

She wasn't looking in the right place.

And that, I thought, finishing the drink, was exactly where I needed her.