“He’s helping me.”Her jaw tightens.“He said he understood what happened with Beto.That he overreacted because he loved the kid and was grieving.”Her eyes fill, and it almost looks genuine.“I feel like shit about Beto.You know that.”
“This has nothing to do with Marcos forgiving you.”I take a step toward her, and my voice stays level because I need her to hear this.“He’s using you, Rickie.You’re not going to see a single dime of whatever he promised you.It’s all smoke.He wanted you here, in this town, close to me, so you could do his dirty work for him.He wants you to expose yourself and take us both down with his version of the truth.”
She shakes her head, tears now spilling.
“He wants you to pay for Beto.And as much as that kid’s death gutted me, he made his own choices.He knew what he was getting into.He may not have known the fentanyl was in the supply, but?—”
“Don’t.”Her voice cracks at the edges.“Don’t start dredging all of this up again.”
“Then why did you admit to bringing the drugs when Beto was the one who—” I stop and press my hand against my mouth for a second because the frustration of it is as fresh as the day it happened.“I don’t understand that, Erica.I’ve never understood why you put that on yourself.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”She crosses her arms over her chest.“It is what it is.And I think you’re wrong about Marcos.”
We stand there, neither talking until her expression shifts into something close to hope.“He told me he’d give me ten thousand dollars.”
Her admission drives a roundhouse straight to the heart.“Ten thousand dollars.”
She meets my eyes, and underneath all the armor and angles and everything, she believes him, and that terrifies me more than anything else.
“Why would he give you that kind of money?”
She tries to brush past me, heading for the door, but I grab her arm.“Erica, this isn’t a fucking game.What did he ask you to do?”
And there it is.She flinches for the briefest of moments, and if I weren’t looking, I’d have missed it.He did ask her to do something.
“Let go of me.”She kicks and claws, and I release her.
She doesn’t have to tell me what he exactly told her, I already know.He wants her to blow up my life.
Chapter34
Grace
Iread over the paragraph and delete two sentences, groaning quietly at my own transparency.The warmth is bleeding through the page in ways it shouldn’t, too personal, too revealing, Maddox written between every line whether his name is there or not.I get up and refill my coffee, then come back and rewrite the section the way I’d write about anyone else—clean, observational, no fingerprints.
Thank goodness the deadline is a week out.It will be brutal getting everything pulled together in time, but once it’s done, I can put the professional tangle of this behind me.No more wrestling with my conscience over impartiality, no more second-guessing every word choice.
As I expected, Toby’s email arrived a few days after our call the night of the memorial, and it carried news I would have once found devastating.Another reporter has been put on the Trintol story.It had nothing to do with Blane—he kept his mouth shut, to his credit—and everything to do with Vitale.
They’d been using it as a negotiation tactic, refusing to play ball with the paper unless they were assured I’d have nothing to do with the story going forward.Apparently, I’d done such a thorough job of making them nervous that removing me was a condition of their cooperation.
I waited for the outrage to arrive.I was the one who found the story, who built it from nothing, who fought for it until they took it from me.I braced for the familiar burn of that injustice, but it never came, or at least it didn’t stay.
What settled in its place was something quieter and more surprising: the understanding that the truth would come out regardless.It didn’t need my byline to matter.The story was always bigger than me, and that was the whole point.
I realized somewhere between reading Toby’s email and closing my laptop that I’d spent the years after Cary’s death trying to exact justice and make sense of something that had none.I no longer needed to do any of that.
Buffy was right; Cary wouldn’t want me living my life that way or measuring my worth against that story or any other.My work was done.Someone else would carry the Trintol story to the finish line, and I found I could live with that more easily than I expected.
That shift feels like the other side of something I’ve been climbing for a long time.
What comes after it is a question I haven’t let myself sit with too long, mostly because Maddox and I haven’t talked about it either, and I’m not entirely sure which one of us is more committed to not being the first to go there.
Part of me hoped to find him here when I got back from spending the day with Zoe.She has things well under control.So much so, we even had time for the landlord to show me available office space in the same building.I don’t know what comes next, for me, for us, but I’m letting myself consider the options in a way I haven’t before.That feels like progress, too.
The house is quiet, which makes sense given the time of day.Maddox is likely still at practice or working out with Eddie and Oliver.
It’s just as well.I need to write these articles, and I’m getting nowhere fast.If it isn’t Zoe pulling my attention, it’s Maddox—or rather, the thought of him, which proves just as distracting.