7. Grace
Grace
The ride back is quiet, the kind of worn-out hush after the adrenaline fades. When cell signal strengthens, Hartley instructs the boys to call or text home, if they haven’t already.
Once back at the school, the parking lot lights burn bright and sterile against the night. The boys scatter toward waiting parents, voices echoing across the asphalt.
Near the school entrance, a woman stands with her arms folded tight in a long wool coat and a dark bun so precise it looks military. She isn’t angry, exactly, more like vibrating with anxiety. The principal, maybe?
Her gaze locks on Hartley as she approaches, but she hangs back while he chats with a few lingering parents.
With the boys home safe and a win under their belts, the bus mishap is already fading for the families.
All they want to hear about are the highlights of the game, with a few dads wishing they’d made the trek.
The second we’re alone, she pounces. “Maddox.”
He wedges the clipboard under his arm, and a nervous swallow works its way down his throat. “Amy.”
“I got several calls from parents tonight when the bus didn’t arrive on time. Then Sissy Beckett called. She got a message from Kevin about being late and wanted more details on why a private charter brought my basketball team home after midnight.”
There’s a bite to her voice, the emphasis on “my” a quiet, jagged claim to power. It slips under my skin, prickly and unwelcome.
He shifts his weight. “The bus broke down. I—”
“You should have called me.” Irritation fuels her words, cutting him off. “Do you have any idea what kind of liability this creates? If anything had happened to those students—”
“It didn’t.” The words jump out of my mouth before I can reel them back in. “He got them home safe.”
She studies me for a slow, measuring beat. “And you are…?”
“Grace Buchanan.”
“Ah, the reporter.” She gives me a small nod, neither welcoming nor dismissive. “Ms. Buchanan, I appreciate your involvement tonight. Truly. But Coach Hartley is accountable.”
He clears his throat, a red wave of heat washing up his neck. “It won’t happen again.”
Her gaze flicks to the few remaining cars in the lot. Relief washes her features, and her posture softens along with her tone. “I’m sure it won’t. But… if you don’t have the contact numbers, you need them.”
I can’t tell if her pause is deliberate—a way to highlight we all know he’s flying blind without contacts, or a way to let the weight of the moment sink in.
“Come to the office, and we’ll get them programmed into your phone. It’s important. You’re responsible for these kids.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Her frown relaxes. “We’ll talk Monday… Only to make sure you’re set up to succeed. You’re good at your job, Coach. I want you to feel prepared, not stranded.”
Some of the tension bleeds from his shoulders, and he nods.
The principal tugs her coat tighter against the cold. “Congrats on the win.” The briefest of smiles skates over her lips. “Now, go home.”
Her heels tap across the blacktop as she heads for her car. For a long moment, Hartley doesn’t move. He doesn’t say a word. The charter bus rumbles out of the lot, and the second we’re truly alone, the air between us thickens.
He stands beside me, broad and still, his shoulders set like stone. It’s as if he’s afraid if he releases all that pent-up tension, he might come apart.
I blow into my hands, trying to spark some warmth into my fingers. “Well. That could’ve been worse,” I say, trying to break the silence.
Something in him shifts—immediate and unsettled. It’s as if the sound of my words hit a bruise. “You’re kidding, right?”
I’m taken aback by his tone. My instinct is to shield myself, but I remind myself he’s had a rough night. This is his job. “I mean, she didn’t yell or lecture you.”
Almost instantly, I know I’ve missed the mark. He might have gotten off easy, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He isn’t a man used to falling short or comfortable with failure of any kind.
He shakes his head, a frustrated exhale clouding the air. “It’s my job to have a plan. The contacts, the protocols. Everything. I should’ve—”
“Sure, a couple of phone numbers would’ve been helpful, but the night didn’t end any differently than it would’ve if you’d had them. The boys are home. Safe.”
His voice tears through the night, low and rough, spiked with barbed wire. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
The breath catches in my throat, and my shoulders snap back, ready to strike. “You’re welcome.”
He turns fully, his eyes flinty under the sterile parking lot lights. “You can’t throw money around and expect everything to be fine.”
“That’s not what I—”
He steps closer, cutting me off. “I’m the one responsible for them. Not you. And now Crandall thinks I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”
There it is—the bruise. It’s his pride, and I’ve trampled right over it.
“Maddox, I wasn’t trying to embarrass you.”
He snorts. “Do you even realize what could’ve happened if anything went wrong?”
“Oh, come on. You did everything right. I just helped.”
“I don’t need help.”
“Clearly,” slips out before I can smother it. “That’s why you were stranded with a dozen teenagers in the middle of nowhere.”
I’m fighting back now. It isn’t what I want, but I don’t let people steamroll me. Not even men with eyes like stormy seas.
A muscle jumps in his jaw. His gaze skims over me, bordering on disgust, and I fight the urge to flinch.
“You think this is funny?”
“No. I think you’re frustrating.” I place my hands on my hips. “You’re so obsessed with being the guy who fixes everything that you can’t recognize when someone’s trying to make it easier for you.”
A rough, humorless laugh escapes him. “You don’t get it. You don’t have to. You can buy your way out of any problem. Must be nice, huh? Call a bus company and poof.” He snaps his fingers. “Crisis solved.”
“You think I did this because it’s easy? Because it makes me better than you?”
“Don’t tell me it doesn’t.”
I step closer, pulse thudding in my throat. “I did it because I can’t stand watching people struggle when I can do something about it. Maybe that makes you uncomfortable, but it’s called helping, not showing off.”
His breathing turns shallow, tight, and something shifts in his hard stare as if he’s really seeing me for the first time. “You don’t even need to work, do you?”
Straight for the jugular.
“That’s none of your business.”
“Figures.” He shakes his head, a weary kind of frustration bleeding out of him. “A reporter who doesn’t need a paycheck, writing stories about people who actually live in the real world.”
His words land somewhere tender—an old wound I haven’t buried deep enough. My parents may be bigwig movie producers, and I may have an obscene trust fund, but money doesn’t solve everything.
“You have no idea what my real world looks like.”
He looks at me for a long, heavy beat, the anger in his eyes fading into a cold, distant exhaustion, then turns away, his boots grinding into the gravel.
“Go back to the inn, Buchanan. We’re done for tonight.”
I stand in the parking lot with my fists bunched at my sides. His words loop in my head, each replay cutting a little deeper.
He’s wrong. What I did wasn’t about me and I don’t care what he thinks. Big surprise, he’s another man too proud to accept a helping hand. But the deep ache inside me says that’s not the whole truth. Not even close.
Hartley climbs into his truck, and the engine revs, a low growl in the silence, but he doesn’t drive off. He stays idling across the lot, his silhouette dark against the glow of the dashboard. He’s staring—no, glaring—at me.
Why isn’t he leaving? Then it clicks. He’s waiting for me.
Oh, no. He’ll tear strips off me, slice me open with his pride, and yet he refuses to leave me standing alone in a dark parking lot.
He’s a jerk. A stubborn, wounded jerk, and he doesn’t get to be a gentleman. Not after that. I don’t want his chivalry, and I certainly don’t need it.
My fiery stubbornness is a living thing, urging me to stay planted here to make him sit in his truck all night. But the cold is winning, seeping through my clothes and into my joints, and I give in, my legs heavy as I jog to the rental.
Inside the car, the air feels like blocks of ice in my lungs, and my breath fogs the windshield in quick, jagged bursts. I hit the start button, and the engine turns over with a reluctant groan.
My headlights carve a sharp tunnel through the dark, and the second my lights hit the asphalt, he pulls out. His red taillights flare once, a final warning, then vanish as he reaches the main road.
Back in my room at the bed and breakfast, the quiet is deafening. I sit on the bed, phone gripped in my hand, thumb hovering over Toby’s name. The urge to call, to quit, to break down—it all pulses in my throat at once.
I pull my laptop onto my lap and rub at my chest, trying to shake the unease lodged there. This isn’t professional frustration. It’s personal in a way I don’t yet understand, and the realization scares me more than being stranded on a dark highway.
Distance from the parking lot clears the fog in my head. Hartley wasn’t angry at me. He was angry at himself and the weight of the situation. At the idea of needing anyone else to fix what he considers his responsibility.
And the worst part? I understand that impulse far too well.
I stare at the floral wallpaper, and my reporter’s instinct—the one I thought had been stifled by this exile—begins to hum.
This isn’t the Trintol investigation, but my gut tells me there’s a story here I can sink my teeth into.
Something real, buried under the pride and that thick, small-town protective shell.
If I’m going to be stuck here, I’m going to make this exile worth my while.
No longer filled with the foolish need to call Toby or cry, my fingers move over the keys with a sudden, sharp purpose.
Self-reliance is easy to confuse with strength when needing help is seen as a failure of character.
I read it back and consider deleting it. The sentence is too piercing, too honest—too much like it might apply to more than Maddox Hartley—but I click save anyway. I’m going to peel back his layers, one jagged piece of pride at a time, whether Maddox Hartley likes it or not.