“Doing what?”My heart rate spikes.
“Letting this blow back on everyone.”His voice clips short and hard, each word bitten off clean.“My family.My students.Me.”
I nod slowly, the weight of it settling into my chest.“So, you’ll shut me out instead.Not trust me.”
A beat passes, then another, but he doesn’t deny it.Without another word, he turns for the door, keys already in his hand, and something cold moves through me.
He stops at the door.“I need you to swear you won’t use any of this.”
My mind whirs, and my heart throbs.I open my mouth to reassure him, but nothing comes.My silence isn’t the answer he wants, and the door closes behind him with a soft, decisive click.
I stand there longer than makes sense, staring at the closed door like it might swing open and he might walk back through it and say something different.
Something real.
Something that doesn’t leave me gutted for not being able to reach him.
I press my fingers to my sternum and breathe through it.He knows me.He has to know me well enough by now to know I would never.The thought loops and tightens, equal parts grief and indignation.
I trusted him with things I don’t give easily—my brother, the truth, the quiet admission I haven’t even fully made to myself that the Vitale story stopped mattering the moment he started to.And he looked at all of it and still saw a journalist first.
Fine.
I collect my things from the kitchen, and when I go upstairs, my room is exactly as Erica left it, the evidence of her frantic search scattered across the floor.I can’t deal with it yet, can’t put anything back where it belongs.
On the edge of the bed, I open my laptop, and my fingers hover over the keys, heart still racing, mind still buzzing.I type about everything Erica said, every piece she spilled between pacing and rage and guilt.I don’t edit or organize, only get it down before it disappears.The way everything else already has.
Chapter36
Maddox
Idrove for most of the night.
No destination, no music, just the road, the dark, and the silence of a truck cab.I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and I couldn’t go home, so I drove until the roads ran out.And I ended up where I always end up.
The speedway.
When I first got there, it was too late to justify going to sleep and too early to make the call I have to make.So I sit with the fallout of the day, and let the night finish itself out.
My thoughts are all over the place, but most of all, I keep coming back to Grace.My throat constricts at how she flinched and the agony behind her glassy gaze as if she was being stabbed by a thousand knives at my words.Even still, she held her ground while I tore everything out from under her.
I know what I did.
I treated her like a threat, like a journalist first and everything else second.Even when she’d spent weeks showing me exactly who she was—and it wasn’t that.
She told me about her brother and why the truth matters to her in a way that has nothing to do with ambition and everything to do with grief.She told me about losing the story she’d worked the better part of a year on.She handed me all of that, and I looked her dead in the eye and asked her to swear.
I’m a fucking idiot.
At the time of Beto’s death, Marcos wanted nothing touching the team, and Erica made a convenient scapegoat—troubled history, everyone tried their best.Clean and containable.He would’ve buried my connection to her just as fast.
But if this got out, there’s no telling what direction it would go or what it could take down with it.And for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why Marcos would want that—unless destroying me is the point.
A growl tears out of me.That would be enough for him.
This cannot come out.
The media would descend on Winslow Grove like vultures.My family.My kids at the school.Everything I’ve spent quietly rebuilding since returning home.That fear is real, even if I aimed it at the wrong person.