He hadn’t mentioned it. Instead, he started watching.
Before Leo, before Dad, before the white picket fence—Claire “The Knave” Marshall was the best underground poker player on the Eastern seaboard. She’d won her first tournament at nineteen, using psychology and a perfect memory for cards. She’d once bluffed a Russian mobster out of his watch. The flip phone belonged to her “handler,” a man she owed a favor to. The night runs? She was training for a charity triathlon—a secret life she’d started six months ago because she was bored out of her skull.
Not a gentle jog. A feral, reckless sprint into the dark woods along the old quarry trail. Leo crept to the tree line and watched his mother vanish into the shadows, her blonde ponytail a ghost in the moonlight. An hour later, she returned, soaked in sweat, her face lit with a wild, triumphant grin he’d never seen before. She was winning something out there. A race against a ghost, maybe.
A pause.
“Before what?” Leo demanded.