And that wasn’t the half of it. But the law kept her from saying more.
Instead, she turned to Ollie. “What you call hypocrisy is me saying ‘learn from your elders.’ Gage Watson is right—freeriding is dangerous, and you could get someone killed out there. So yeah, you’re done, bro. Time to go home.”
Ollie’s mouth closed, but Ella wasn’t moving.
“I’ll grab our cheesy fries,” Brette said quietly.
Ollie’s jaw tightened. Ella glanced at the girls in the booth.
Okay, so maybe she shouldn’t just grab him by the ear and march him home like she once had.
“I’ll see you back at the condo, Ollie,” Ella said finally. She left him there and headed over to the booth. Brette was boxing up the fries. She glanced up at Ella, eyes narrowed, then looked back to the fries.
“What?”
“I’m digging through my memories, but . . . didn’t you have a poster of Gage Watson once upon a time in your room at college?”
“Let’s go.” She reached for her jacket and helmet.
“You did!”
“I did. It was just a crush.”
“Wait a second. I remember—”
“Brette, don’t—”
“That’s why you went to Outlaw. You were hoping to meet him.”
“I went because of Dylan. To stop him from skiing Terminator Wall.”
“Did you actually end up meeting Watson?”
Ella sifted her way through the crowd, Brette hot on her trail. They emerged into the lobby. Thankfully, no ski patrol jackets to be seen.
“Wait—didn’t you work on Dylan’s lawsuit? I thought that name sounded familiar.”
“Yeah. Sort of. I was an associate, and his case came to us.”
“Right.” Brette fell into step with her as they pushed through the doors to the outside. The lights gleamed on their snowboards propped in the snow. “It was one of your first big cases.”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Brette.” Ella pulled her board from the snow.
“Why?”
Ella rounded on her. “Because I’m the reason Gage Watson lost everything, okay? It’s my fault he’s a has-been, working ski patrol, chasing down hooligans like my brother instead of winning national championships.” Her voice dropped. “I wrecked his life.”
She turned and headed toward the bridge that led to their on-slope condos. The floodlights lit the night an eerie yellow.
Brette caught up, her boots crunching through the snow. “Hardly. If I remember correctly, he took a novice snowboarder up on one of the most dangerous runs in the world with the promise he’d get him down safely.”
“Dylan wasn’t a novice by any stretch of the imagination.” And she wasn’t giving anything away—anyone who watched the tapes could plainly see that Dylan knew how to cut, carve, shred, and follow Gage’s line. “He just shouldn’t have been out there that day.”
But see, now she was treading too close to the border.
“Why?”
Especially with Brette.
Ella sighed, came out to the path that led to the back door to their condo, and found an easy truth. “Dylan was a party animal. I’d seen him out a couple nights before that, good and soused, bragging about the double flip he was going to do off a cliff on Terminator Wall.”
The cliff that got him killed.
“If he was drunk, Watson shouldn’t have taken him out.”
“He wasn’t drunk. Listen, all I know is that maybe we shouldn’t point fingers at an accident in a sport that has a painfully high mortality rate. If not from jumps and cliffs, then avalanches.”
They reached the condo, and Ella set her board on the rack and unlocked the door. Brette followed her into the warmth of the entryway and sat beside Ella, taking off her boots.
“Sounds like you’re on his side.”
“I’m not on anyone’s side.”
“Not even Dylan’s family?”
Ella got up and walked in her stocking feet to the stairway to the main floor. “Not anymore. Now I’m a politician.” She flashed her a wan smile.
Brette beat her to the stairs and braced her arm on the railing, cutting her off. “Ella, what aren’t you telling me?”
Ella closed her eyes.
But Brette was like a bulldog when she sniffed out a story.
“Fine. But you can’t tell anyone. Promise me.”
Brette held up three fingers, Girl-Scout style.
“Okay. C’mon.” She headed up the stairs, to the kitchen for some warm milk.
“I’ll order some pizza,” Brette said. “You talk.”
Ella opened the refrigerator. “It all started when I heard that Gage was going to attempt Terminator Wall, and I mentioned it at our family’s annual New Year’s Eve party. Dylan and his family were there, of course, and I knew he was a snowboarder, so I thought he’d be interested. I never dreamed that three weeks later he’d call me from British Columbia with his crazy plan to get Gage to take him with him. I felt like it was my fault, and that someone had to talk him out of it, so . . . I hopped on a plane . . .”