Blindsided (Roman Holiday 3)

She looked at the trees instead, and heard the broken bugling calls of a group of sandhill cranes overhead.

On her first visit to this swamp, when she was fourteen, Kirk had told her these were Seminole canoe trails, dozens of pathways they’d cut through the floating vegetation so they could attack government soldiers and then melt away where the whites wouldn’t follow. He collected tales about Billy Bowlegs, the Alligator Chief—a Seminole who had organized a resistance movement from deep within the swamp, gathering displaced Indians and runaway slaves to his cause during the Seminole Wars.

Kirk loved the romance of those stories—the idea of Bowlegs’s ragtag band defending their patch of wilderness, refusing to give up or give in. But Ashley had always found them unsettling. She’d plagued him with questions. What did they eat? How did they survive? Did they like it here?

She’d never been able to think about Billy Bowlegs without remembering that in the end, the army had built forts all around Okefenokee and sent in wave after wave of soldiers until the Seminole were beaten, cleared out, their identity as a people nearly obliterated.

She could never forget that Billy Bowlegs had died in Arkansas, driven from his home, utterly defeated.

“What do you suppose Roman’s doing?” she asked.

“Calling half the tow services in Georgia, I expect,” Mitzi replied.

“He’ll find a way to get his car unstuck by the end of the day.”

Mitzi lifted her dripping paddle from the water and placed it inside the canoe. “That’s why we’ll have to act fast.” She turned around, maneuvering carefully to avoid capsizing the boat, and took a seat so close to Ashley, their knees touched. “So. Here’s what I’m thinking. You can’t hold him off forever just by threatening to get in his way. Honestly, I don’t know why he hasn’t sent his guys in to knock the place down already.”

“Because of the hurricane?”

On TV this morning, she’d seen pictures of the Keys, but not until the last few minutes of the newscast. The storm hadn’t hit as hard as expected.

Mitzi flapped a hand. “Sure, but that’s passed now. If I were him, I’d have had the bulldozers out there this morning.”

“He promised he wouldn’t.”

“Why should he care if he breaks a promise to you?”

Ashley frowned, because she couldn’t answer the question.

“He’s a good person,” she tried.

“Are you kidding? He’s a stiff-necked, anal-retentive corporate drone who wants to turn the Keys into a theme park. We need to break this guy.”

“Break him?”

“Destroy him. Otherwise, he’ll never give it up. You said yourself, this place is important to him. So we have to make it completely impossible.”

“I don’t want to break him,” Ashley said. “I just want Sunnyvale back.”

Mitzi grabbed her hand, pressing it between her own. “Look, honey. You’ve got a big heart. The biggest heart. But now’s not the time to make decisions with your heart. Not with your twat, either, if you’re having any of those kinds of ideas—and I’m guessing you are, because man alive, look at the guy. But you can’t be sweet to this one. You just can’t. Not if you want Sunnyvale.”

“I do.”

She wanted it more than anything, because when she tried to imagine the shape of her future without Sunnyvale—what would that even look like?

She couldn’t go back to Bolivia. It hadn’t been working out with H2O Global. They’d promised her a job in the mountains, a villa called Huaycaba where there were nearly two hundred people whose lives would be changed by the installation of a gravity-fed water pump. But when Ashley had arrived for duty in Cochabamba, travel-greasy and gawping at the crush of a million people gathered in the Andean valley, they’d told her, You need to work on your Spanish.

Her Spanish was fine. She’d traveled around Mexico for six months when she was twenty, and she’d spent another summer as a tour guide out of Baja. It was her they didn’t like.

They’d taken one look at her bare arms and her blond hair, her tan and freckles and impractical shoes, and they’d stuck her in the office writing press releases on an ancient computer. She’d overheard the director tell one of the field agents that they’d only taken her on in the first place because of who her father was.

Ashley didn’t know if it was true. It might have been. If it was, she couldn’t do anything about it. But she’d figured if they weren’t going to take her seriously, she wouldn’t take the job seriously. She’d started putting more energy into flirting with Chad than spreading the gospel of clean water, because they never sent out any of her press releases, and because that was what she did. The easy thing. The fun thing.

She looked wispy and frivolous, and that was how people treated her, so she went along with it. She drifted from job to job, hooked up with guys who weren’t worth the time she wasted on them, let her life slide through her fingers.

That was who she was.

But after Chad left, there had been mornings in Cochabamba when she could almost convince herself she would be able to make this work. That she could be a serious person if they just gave her a chance. If she stayed long enough, worked harder, they’d see that she really had something to contribute, and she’d see it, too.