Ask your father what he paid for, Sophie.
The room tilts.
Legend sees my face change.
“Soph?”
I look at him, at my dangerous, loyal, almost-husband standing in the middle of our wedding plans, and the secret I have been carrying finally stops being mine alone.
My voice barely works.
“I need to tell you something.”
Chapter Eleven
Legend
Secrets have weight.
I know that better than most men.
A secret can sit light in a pocket for years, nothing but folded paper and old ink, until one day someone says the right name and it turns into a stone around your neck. A secret can keep a man alive. It can bury a girl. It can turn family into leverage, love into suspicion, and a wedding table into a war room before the cornbread gets cold.
Sophie stands across from me in the Lockup with her phone in her hand and guilt on her face.
Not fear.
That would almost be easier.
Fear I can handle. Fear has direction. Fear points at a threat and tells me where to put my hands.
Guilt is uglier. Guilt means the knife might already be inside the house.
The old jail holds the silence around us like it was built for confession. Iron bars over the front windows. Old cell doors along the back wall. Scarred brick and a long table covered in wedding ribbons, bourbon glasses, cornbread crumbs, andevidence of every way a man’s past can crawl up through the floor.
“I need to tell you something,” she says.
The room goes still around us.
Not quiet. Cornbread is near the clubhouse bar breathing like a bull with sinus problems. Becki shifts in her chair with one hand on her belly. Cider has the old Pearly Gates photo clutched in both hands. Derby stands near Amelia with his phone still lit, the picture of them dancing at the Fire Pit burning on the screen like evidence from a crime scene.
That caption alone is enough to make me want to find whoever posted it and feed their fingers into a garbage disposal one by one.
But the text on Sophie’s phone is worse.
Ask your father what he paid for, Sophie.
My eyes move from the words to her face.
“What does that mean?”
She swallows.
That is all she does.
One small swallow, but I feel the floor drop under it.
“Soph.”