Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sloane
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I turned my phone back on at noon the next day, because you can only hide from the world for so long when you're the one who set it on fire, and the first thing it did was buzz forty-one times in a row.
You left me out. You had everything and you left me out. I'm in your parking lot. I've been here all night. I know you turned it off. I know you think I chose them. I didn't. I'll wait. However long. I owe you that and about a thousand other things.
I sat on Brielle's kitchen floor and read it nine times.
He was still down there. I checked the window.
His truck was in the satellite row, the bad parking, the far spot, where a person leaves their car when they don't matter enough to park close, and he was sitting on the tailgate in yesterday's clothes with his elbows on his knees, in the cold, where he'd been, apparently, for thirteen hours.
I almost ran down. That's the thing I have to be honest about. Every soft part of me wanted to run down those stairs and into the thing we'd been before it broke, because I'd spent a night believing he was one of them and here was proof he wasn't, and relief is a current, it wants to carry you.
I made myself walk.
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He stood up when he saw me coming across the lot. He didn't move toward me. He'd learned that much, at least—that I was a person you let close on her own terms, not one you crossed a parking lot to manage.
"Hi," he said.
"You called me Voss." I stopped six feet away.
I would not close the six feet. The six feet were mine and I was keeping them.
"You stood in my newsroom, the day I was publishing the truest thing I'll ever write, and you told me the only difference between me and the man who broke Theo's leg was which one of us you were dumb enough to love.
So before you say anything else—before the apology, before whatever you sat out here all night rehearsing—I need you to say that part back to me.
Out loud. I need to know you know what you actually did. "
I watched it cost him. He didn't flinch from it, though, didn't reach for the excuse, and I'll give him that, I'll give him that he stood in the cold and took it the way he took everything, except this time he wasn't taking it to be useful. He was taking it because he'd earned it.
"I took the one true thing I had," he said, "and I made it a weapon.
You let me all the way in—the back, the kid, my dad, all of it—the most undefended I've ever been with a human being, and the second Voss told me you might use it against me, I believed him over you.
Over everything you'd shown me. I let a man who'd known me for four years convince me that the person who'd loved me for one season was the liar.
And then I said the cruelest thing I could think of, the thing I knew would hurt worst, on purpose, because hurting you was the fastest way to make you push me away, and pushing you away felt safer than standing next to you while you were in danger.
I dressed cowardice as protection. Same as Voss.
Same as my dad. You were right. I'd become the exact thing.
" His voice didn't break, which somehow made it worse.
"I'm not going to ask you to forgive that today.
I don't think you should. I just needed you to know that I know. "
The six feet between us felt very small and very large at the same time.
"Tell me about Voss," I said. "The deal. Tell me what you actually did that night, because I went to sleep thinking you took it."
So he told me. The office. The folder. The statement Voss wanted him to make—the one that was happening anyway, through Weller's people, the objectivity and the personal ties.
He told me he'd considered it, and he didn't soften that part, didn't pretend he'd been noble the whole time.
He told me what stopped him: Voss calling Theo your boy who turned on the family, and something in him finally setting instead of breaking.
He told me he'd refused, taken the photos off the desk, threatened to go on the record if they ever surfaced.
He told me he'd driven straight to me to say all of it and found my windows dark.
"So I didn't choose them," he said quietly. "I want that part clear, even if it doesn't change the rest. I chose wrong at four o'clock—I chose the wall, I chose cruelty—but I didn't choose them. I have never been further from them in my life. I just got there too late to catch you before it broke."
And the relief tried to carry me again, and I let it, a little—I let my shoulders come down an inch, I let myself believe him, because it was true and I could feel that it was true—but I held the six feet, because relief that he wasn't a villain is not the same as forgiveness for the wound, and I'd spent a whole book learning the difference between things that feel the same and aren't.
"Okay," I said. "I believe you. I'm—" My voice did a thing.
"I'm glad. You have no idea how glad. But Cade, refusing Voss isn't the same as not hurting me, and I need you to not let those two get blurry just because one of them lets you off easier.
You can be a man who refused a corrupt coach and a man who broke me in a newsroom.
Both. At once. Don't you dare use the brave thing to wallpaper over the cruel thing. "
"I won't," he said. "I'm not. They're both true. I'll hold both as long as you need me to."
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Then he told me the rest. The plan. Going on the record—his name, his face, the relationship, all of it—to clear my name, to take the girl who slept with a player out of Weller's mouth by putting it in his own first. He told me it would end his draft.
The real one. Not Voss's threat. The thing his whole life had been built to reach.
And I felt something go cold and careful in me, because I know a grand gesture when I see one, I've watched men try to buy back women with spectacle my whole life, and I was not going to be bought, not even by him, not even by this.
"No," I said.
He blinked. "Sloane—"
"Listen to me." I closed two of the six feet, because this mattered enough to get close for.
"If you are doing this to win me back—if you are walking in front of those cameras and lighting your future on fire so that I'll forgive you, so that the size of the sacrifice does the apology for you—then it is just the wall again, Cade.
It's the same move in reverse. Look how much I can absorb.
Look how big a hit I'll take. Now do you love me?
That's your dad's whole religion. That's you being worth what you can suffer.
And I will not be the prize at the end of you proving you can suffer the most. I'd rather lose you clean than get you back as a man who set himself on fire to earn me. "
He went very still.
"So I need to know," I said, and my voice was shaking now, all the work-voice gone, just the realest thing I had.
"Are you doing this for me? Or would you do it anyway—if I shut this door right now, if I never spoke to you again, if there was no version where you got me back at the end of it—would you still walk in front of those cameras tomorrow for Theo, and Jaxon, and Reyes, and the freshmen learning to hide their concussions, and the kid you used to be?
Tell me the truth. I'll know if you're lying. I always know."
He looked at me for a long moment, in the cold, in the bad parking spot, thirteen hours of waiting on him.
"I'd do it anyway," he said. "I decided to do it before I knew if you'd ever see me again.
I called Jaxon from this parking lot with your windows dark, thinking I'd lost you for good, and I said get the guys, I'm going first. It's not for you.
It can't be for you—you're right, that'd just be the wall wearing a cape.
It's because you spent your name to keep me private, and the only honest thing to do with that gift is spend my privacy to give you your name back.
And because a dozen scared kids are waiting for one guy they can't call a liar to go first. And because somewhere in there is a kid who got told he was only worth what he could take without making a sound, and I'm going to walk up to a microphone and make a sound, finally, the loudest one I've got, and it's going to be the truth.
" His jaw did the thing, the clench, and then—on purpose, for me—it unclenched.
"I'd do it if you never forgave me. I'm telling you that so you'll know that forgiving me and me doing the right thing are two separate things, and you don't owe me the first one for the second. "
And that—
That was the answer. The only one that could have begun to fix it. Because he'd just refused to let his courage be a transaction, refused to make me the price, refused to do the one thing every other man in my life would have done, which is make the brave gesture a bill I had to pay in forgiveness.
I didn't fall into his arms. I want that on the record, for every reader who wanted me to. I didn't.
I closed the last four feet, and I reached up, and I straightened the collar of his jacket the way I had a hundred years ago against my apartment wall, smoothing him into himself, and I said:
"Go make your sound. Not for me. For all of it.
And then—" I made myself say it, the honest version, the one with the door open just a crack and no further.
"And then come find me, and we'll see. I'm not promising you the end of the story, Cade.
I'm too hurt to promise you anything. But I'm not closing the door.
That's all I've got today. An open door and a we'll see. "
"That's more than I deserve," he said.
"It is," I agreed. "Don't waste it."
He almost smiled. Then he got in his truck, in the bad parking spot, and drove off to go set fire to the only future anyone had ever let him want, and I went back upstairs and watched from the window until his taillights were gone, and Brielle handed me a coffee and said, "Well?"
"He's going to go first," I said.
And I cried, finally, the good kind, the kind you do when there might be a next move you're not afraid of after all.
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