The One You Fight For

by Roni Loren

  “That’s not necessary. We saw those in the document you submitted, Dr. Landry,” the president said, his voice loud and hollow in the microphone. He gave her a tight, brief, pat-her-on-the-head smile.

  Taryn forced her own smile to stay in place even though she felt dismissed. “Right. Well, are there any questions? I’m prepared to have this roll out quickly, so as soon as I get the go-ahead, I could have this in a few area schools by the fall, and then bring more on by next spring. Or we could—”

  “Dr. Landry,” the president said, slipping into what she thought of as his politician voice—a slick tone that matched all the gel in his salt-and-pepper hair, “we really appreciate you presenting all of this information to us. You’ve obviously worked very hard and have done thorough research. The issue of school violence is a top priority for us, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, some of the restriction in her chest easing. It was okay. This was important to them. She was freaking out over nothing.

  “But—” he continued.

  Her world came to a halt at the one word.

  “We’ve evaluated the cost of your program, and with our budgetary restrictions, this is just not going to be feasible,” he finished.

  Taryn’s hands gripped the sides of the podium, her fingers going bloodless, but she forced herself to keep her voice steady. “Sir, I understand where you’re coming from, but I was very aware of the funds allocated for this type of program, and I made sure to work it so it would fit within those parameters.”

  “Well, that’s probably our fault,” the vice president said, speaking up, her voice apologetic. She finally made eye contact with Taryn. “The figures you were sent have since been updated to reflect…other measures we’re instituting to address this issue.”

  “Other measures?” Taryn asked woodenly.

  “Yes,” the president said, sitting up taller in his chair. “We’ve decided to place armed guards in each of the area high schools, and that has a pretty high price tag. After what happened at Blue Heights High up north, we don’t want to take any chances.”

  Taryn’s lips parted, all the words wanting to come out, but none forming. They were saying no. They were saying no. She fought to gather her composure. “Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think this needs to be an either-or situation. However, we need to go further back to solve this problem—a systematic approach—not a stopgap measure. We need to help kids before they turn into killers. Trying to stop them after is important, too, but…then we still have killers. The research shows—”

  The president lifted a hand, cutting her off. “You’ve explained what the research shows, Dr. Landry. And believe me, I find it very commendable that you’re working on this, considering what you’ve been through. I think your program has a lot of merit, but I’m responsible for using citizens’ tax dollars in the most efficient and effective way possible. I’ve talked to a number of our community members, and they feel better about armed guards. That’s a visible action and presence. This program is…complicated to explain and expensive. I’m sorry, but we can’t implement it at this time.”

  “We are really sorry,” the vice president added, looking sympathetic but obviously unable to change anything.

  “An armed guard wouldn’t have saved us,” Taryn blurted. “That wouldn’t have saved any of us. We had a security guy at prom. He was killed because those boys didn’t care if they died. I know why they didn’t care. They could’ve been helped. We need to intervene before these kids get to that point, or this is going to keep happening.”

  One of the trustees frowned and looked away. “Shall we vote?”

  “No,” Taryn protested. “You can’t… No.” She knew she was out of order, but she couldn’t help her reaction. She wanted to run up there and plead for them to listen, to clap her hands in front of their faces and tell them to wake the hell up and hear her. But her feet were rooted to the floor, her entire body trembling.

  Taryn felt a presence behind her. She looked back and found her three friends standing there. They stepped up next to her. She expected them to gather her up and lead her away before she embarrassed herself further, but instead, they surrounded her, a united front facing the board. Kincaid put her arm around Taryn’s waist and said loud enough for the microphone to pick it up, “Let them say no to us all. My name is Kincaid Breslin. Survivor. Long Acre.”

  Liv shifted, tipping her chin up. “My name is Olivia Arias. Survivor. Long Acre.”

  Rebecca moved to Taryn’s other side and took her hand, squeezing it. “My name is Rebecca Lindt. Wounded survivor. Long Acre.”

  Taryn’s vision went cloudy with tears. The board members shifted their gazes downward or away. The vice president was the only one left watching the four of them. After a moment, she looked down in defeat. She couldn’t help.

  The vote started. It was like a tiny stab to Taryn’s gut every time a vote was cast.

  Taryn got one yes vote from the VP. Everyone else was a nay.

  Her program, a decade of work, was dead on arrival.

  She closed her eyes.

  I’m sorry, Nia. I’m so sorry.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  Shaw sat in his office Friday after a session, drinking water and staring at his open laptop, debating. He didn’t need to look. It wasn’t his business. His fingers hovered over the trackpad. Shut it down. Instead, he clicked onto the local school-board site.

  Rivers had moved Taryn’s next session to one of the female trainers they’d recently hired and had an excuse all lined up for when she arrived tonight. Shaw now had the night off and would be leaving before Taryn arrived, but he couldn’t stop wondering how things had turned out for Taryn with her presentation. He found his way to the recordings of the school-board meetings and clicked. The first part of the meeting was pretty dry, and he skimmed past all of that until he saw Taryn’s face on the screen.

  He hated how his body instantly responded to the sight of her—like a crackle of static electricity over his nerve endings. She looked so different from how she’d looked in his arms the other night when she was sweaty and undone and hungry with need. Now she was back to being the proper professor—pale-gray suit with a dark-blue blouse, black-rimmed glasses, and confident eyes. Dr. Landry. A woman on a mission. Hot as hell, still. His fingers ached to undo every button on that blouse and work his way down her body nice and slow until he made her toes curl.

  Fuck.

  Stop.

  When it came to Taryn, his mind was like a determined dog who kept breaking off leash and running into traffic, completely oblivious to the danger. He reeled in his baser thoughts and shoved them down. He needed to remember who this woman was, what she’d suffered because of his family, and why he was watching this in the first place. Because he would never see her again and wouldn’t get to ask.

  Taryn was talking, so he turned up the volume. He could barely watch her presentation, the grim statistics, and the references to Long Acre. He almost stopped the video when his brother’s face flashed on the screen along with a row of other killers. Seeing Joseph’s photo, particularly the yearbook one all the news outlets had latched on to, was like having two knives stab him at once—the pain of losing the brother he once knew and loved and the devastation of knowing what Joseph had become. The only thing that kept Shaw watching was the compelling way Taryn was presenting her program. He’d already sensed it from being around her, but this confirmed his impression. The woman was brilliant. And driven. And fucking brave.

  He couldn’t see the members of the board because the camera was trained on Taryn, but he could only imagine the intent expressions they had to be wearing. However, when the presentation ended, Shaw didn’t hear the applause he expected.

  Instead, there was silence in the room and growing tension in Taryn’s stance. Shaw watched in shock as Taryn was shut down with just a f
ew words. Watched the disbelief in her gaze. Then her anger came out, her voice like a flaming arrow shot across the bow.

  “That wouldn’t have saved any of us. We had a security guy at prom. He was killed because those boys didn’t care if they died. I know why they didn’t care. They could’ve been helped.”

  Shaw’s heartbeat picked up speed at the words. I know why. I know why.

  No.

  Taryn thought she knew why Joseph had done what he’d done, but that was impossible. Shaw had never talked to anyone. He’d only talked to the police. She couldn’t know the real truth. No one did. No one could.

  Shaw lifted his hand to slam the laptop closed, but he stilled, watching Taryn’s eyes go shiny but not spill over with tears as the votes came in one by one. She’d told him she’d dedicated her whole life to developing the program. The board had taken five minutes to crumple it up and toss it in the trash. They’d dismissed her.

  Her expertise. Her work. Her pain.

  They’d broken her damn heart.

  Shaw hissed out a breath, and a surge of anger rushed through him like lightning across a dark sky—a powerful, destructive force that filled his veins and squashed his self-control, making his muscles twitch and burn. He wanted to punch that smarmy school-board president, tell him he had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. Shaw tried to breathe through the urge, but before he knew it, he’d picked up his metal water bottle and had thrown it hard enough against the wall to leave a dent in the new drywall.

  The bottle clattered loudly to the floor, cracking. The second he saw the water puddling on the floor, reality crashed back in and he put his head in his hands, his heart pounding in his ears, the anger inside him like a caged lion trying to break free. “Shit.”

  Dangerous.

  The word whispered through him with warning. That was what his brother had been. That was what Shaw was, too. He needed to remember that and stay far away from Taryn Landry, her friends, and anything having to do with his past.

  He couldn’t help.

  He’d only make things worse.

  * * *

  Taryn sat in front of the wall of names in the memorial garden at the high school, the setting sun throwing swaths of orange light over half the names carved into the stone. Millbourne High, the new name for Long Acre High, had let out hours ago, but somewhere in the distance, the sounds of a pickup baseball game drifted on the breeze and mixed in with the bubbling sound of the fountain in the corner of the garden. Taryn pulled her feet up onto the bench and set her chin on her knees, reading the long list of names, all those lost in the tragedy, with a hollow feeling in her stomach.

  She had rubbed her fingers over Nia’s name often enough to know exactly where her sister was on the list, but Taryn let her eyes linger on each of the other names, too—former classmates, friends, strangers. She’d let every one of them down last night at the school-board meeting. She’d blown it. Even though she’d been blindsided by the board’s reaction, she never should’ve lost her cool. Her outburst had undermined her authority and knowledge of her subject and had turned her into a victim in other people’s eyes yet again, someone to feel sorry for and then dismiss as being too fill-in-the-blank—affected, emotional, involved, damaged. She was sure those words and many more had been murmured among the board members after she’d stormed out.

  Taryn closed her eyes, gravity feeling heavier today. She hadn’t been able to tell her parents yet. Her research was the rope her mom held on to, giving all this grief some glimmer of hope and purpose. She couldn’t bear to tell her mother she’d failed. Spectacularly. And she had no idea how to fix it.

  Even if she could figure out how to further shave the budget or water down some of the components of the program, how was she supposed to go back in front of the board and be taken seriously? They’d made up their minds. Without research, without years of data behind them, without a working knowledge of the brain, they’d made a decision. Based on gut feel, on politics, on whim. Based on bullshit as far as she was concerned.

  She took a deep breath, letting the anger and grief rumble through her, a herd of buffalo destroying the path she’d laid out for herself. Trampled. That was exactly how she felt. As if she’d built a very intricate house, piece by piece over the last four years, and then in one stampede, all of it had been crushed and deemed useless. So sorry, dear. Ditch that years-long research and start again on something new. On something different. This wasn’t good enough. You weren’t good enough.

  It didn’t matter that she knew in the deepest part of her that she was right. That not just her gut but a stack of studies and research and many professionals in a number of fields agreed her program could be a game changer. That lives could truly be saved. None of it mattered because she couldn’t do it alone. She’d gone as far as she could solo. Now she needed others to believe in the program, to put money into it, to care.

  Last night, she’d gone home and had stared at her wall of research—all the photos and data and connections she’d built into this complex matrix. Part of her had wanted to rip every bit of it off the wall. Throw it in the fireplace and light a match. What did it matter what she’d determined if no one would listen? But when she’d put her hands along the pages to tear them down, she hadn’t been able to do it. Instead, she’d sunk onto the floor and spent the night trying to figure out another way, another path to get the program off the ground.

  The most obvious option was to continue to apply for grants, but so far, her success with that had been slow going. The competition for grants in her area of study was fierce, and the private money was dwindling. It could take forever to get what she needed.

  Maybe she could apply to a new university in a different state, where other school districts would be an option, maybe somewhere that had a bigger budget or was open to a more comprehensive approach. She’d lose all the time she’d built toward tenure at her current university, though. She’d have to move away from her family, her friends. The losses would be big, and the idea made her stomach hurt, but she’d do it if it meant getting the program tested somewhere.

  Maybe private schools? But they were smaller with a more specific population, and results would be harder to generalize to the public school system. Maybe figure out a way to implement the program online? No, too much of the program was built on face-to-face connections. Maybe…

  She laced her fingers in her hair and gripped, a frustrated sound escaping her lips.

  “You know, you keep doing that, and it’s going to give you a headache and bald spots,” said a familiar voice from behind her.

  Taryn startled, her head popping up, and turned to find Kincaid standing at the edge of the memorial garden. She had her hands wrapped around her elbows, and she was studiously avoiding looking at the wall of names. Taryn put her feet to the ground and spun to face her fully. “Hey, what are you doing here?”

  Kincaid took a few steps closer and shrugged. “I called you, but you didn’t answer, so I stopped by your house to pick you up for your workout. When you weren’t there, I chatted up your neighbor, and he said he saw you leave with a bouquet of flowers. I figured you were headed to one of two places. I got it right on the first try.” She smirked. “Who said blonds are dumb?”

  Taryn sighed. “I’m sorry you went through all that trouble. I totally forgot about the gym session.”

  “No worries. We still have time to make it.”

  Taryn shook her head. “I can’t work out today. I won’t be able to concentrate on anything but figuring out how to get this program out of the trash can. This can’t be the end, right?”

  Kincaid frowned. “Knowing you? No. You’re stubborn in the best way possible.” She sat next to Taryn on the bench. “But maybe give yourself a minute to process this loss. Last night…sucked.”

  Taryn snorted. “Ya think?”

  “I know, but honestly, I was thinking about th
is on the way home last night. Any school district you go to is probably going to bring up similar issues. Tight budgets. Politics. They’ll make knee-jerk decisions based on minimal information, and they want to give people something they can see. Having a guard at school is immediate gratification. Your program works in a behind-the-scenes, get-to-the-root kind of way. People aren’t patient, and they’re angry. They want something now.”

  “So basically I’m screwed,” Taryn said flatly.

  “I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is that I understand how it happened. You know how hot-button this issue is.” She glanced around the garden and then looked back to Taryn. “To us, this is our history. Our lives. We saw horrors those board members can never truly imagine or understand. I know it’s small in comparison, but it’s like when I’m trying to negotiate a deal on a house. I see a house with a set of features that is worth a certain amount. Cut and dried. But the owners of that house see the hallway where their kids took their first steps and the backyard where they had barbecues with their dad who’s now passed. I can’t feel the house like they do, and I never will.

  “That’s how it is with this times a million,” she continued. “School violence is just another topic on a list of controversial issues the board has to make decisions on. It’s not something that has changed the course of their lives. It’s not this potent grief that lives inside them every day. So I think before you jump into the next phase, you need to take a step back and evaluate the game plan. Come up with a different strategy. I have no doubt you have brilliant ideas buried in there. But you can’t access them when you’re this stressed and upset. You’ll end up back in the hospital.”

  Kincaid was so rarely serious that it took Taryn a few moments to process all she’d said, but she heard the truth in her friend’s words. This felt so big and monumental to Taryn and her friends. It was impossible to imagine how the fact that kids were regularly shooting up schools and killing other children didn’t keep every single person up every damn night. But Kincaid was right. Those board members had a hundred other issues to tackle, many that were equally important, and this was just another one. Something they cared about but didn’t feel down to their marrow. They thought they’d figured out a quicker, cheaper solution, and now “address school violence” was one more item they could check off their to-do list.