28. Maddox
Maddox
“I feel awful. I never should’ve said anything to her.” Mom cups her face in her hands, shaking her head.
The door opens behind us.
“Said what to who?” Katie drops her bag on the chair and unwraps her scarf.
Mom and I answer at the same time. “Grace.”
“Oh.” Katie’s face shifts into something between understanding and amusement. “I passed her outside. She said she’s going to Romeo’s.” She pats her stomach. “Now I want pizza.”
I laugh despite myself. “Yeah, I know.”
“You two.” Mom waves us off, moving to pull Katie into a hug. “We have food. Now come, sit.”
We eat first, the three of us falling into an easy rhythm. Mom refills our glasses without being asked, and Katie steals the last of the bread without apology.
But as the plates clear, Mom folds her hands on the table, and my sister quiets. They don’t look at each other, but they don’t have to. I’ve made them wait long enough.
“I wanted to tell you both about what happened with Erica.”
Katie’s eyes widen, and she slaps the table. “Finally—”
Mom’s hand covers hers, and Katie presses her lips together as I stifle the urge to laugh. Thank goodness for my sister to lighten the mood.
Shaking my head, I rest my elbows on the table and tell them. Not all of it, just the important parts. They don’t need the ugliest parts, the stealing, the lies that compounded on themselves until I couldn’t recognize the person I’d agreed to marry.
They love Erica, and this isn’t about dismantling that. It’s about making sure the people who love me understand what happened, so that if Erica does find her way back to Winslow Grove, they’re not walking in blind.
When I finish, Mom reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers.
“Mads.” Her thumb moves in a slow arc across my knuckles the way it did when I was small and the world felt too large. “Thank you for telling us.”
“You shouldn’t have carried this alone.” Katie leans forward, her fingers brushing my other hand, her voice stripped of its usual snark.
“Katie’s right.” Mom dips her head until she catches my eyes. “And I know you probably don’t need to hear this, but I’m going to say it anyway.” She tightens her grip. “None of this is your fault.”
“Mom—”
She holds up one finger in a warning. The same one that used to stop me cold at twelve and apparently still works.
“You’re going to listen to me.” She straightens, her voice soft but immovable. “Like what happened to your father. That wasn’t on you either. Erica made her own choices. As much as we want to carry it for the people we love, we can’t. Only she can decide to get help.”
The mention of Dad slides in—the way it always does—somewhere behind my sternum, a dull pressure that doesn’t quite let up. I pull my hand back slowly and wrap it around my glass.
“I asked him to wait.” I don’t recognize how quiet and shaky my voice sounds. “Dad wanted help with the engine that morning, and he thought I’d be there. I had somewhere to be and blew him off.” I set the glass down. “He did it himself, and—” I stop, jaw tightening. “What happened is on me.”
Neither of them speaks, but Katie’s eyes fill, and Mom doesn’t look away from me.
“The part that hit him.” I shake my head. “If I’d just shown up when he asked me to, I would’ve caught it. I know engines. I would’ve caught it, and none of the rest of it would’ve happened. The pain meds, the morning he didn’t wake up. None of it.”
I push back from the table and stand, not because I want to leave but because I don’t know what to do with my hands, with the familiar weight of it sitting so openly in the room between us for the first time.
After Dad died, I left for Europe one month later. I couldn’t get out of here fast enough, and I needed to step up, fix the financial mess we’d found ourselves in.
“I know what the ruling said.” I move to the window, the dark yard beyond the glass. “Accidental.” I release a disbelieving huff. “But I failed him.”
“Mads.” Katie’s on her feet, arms crossed tight over her chest like she’s holding herself together. “You can’t still think you’re to blame for what happened to Dad.”
I don’t look at her. She can’t possibly understand the guilt and grief and the countless times I’ve tortured myself with the what ifs.
“No.” Her voice firms. “You were a teenager, under a lot of pressure. You were in a highly competitive training program, and you knew what Dad had sacrificed to make that possible.”
For a beat, my heart stops, and I wonder if she knows all of it—the near insurmountable debt Dad left behind, the risky investments he’d undertaken, all so I had a shot at racing on the world stage.
She continues, more than likely unaware. “It was the summer, and you wanted to be with your friends. That’s what kids do—”
Mom nods along, a low mm-hmm punctuating every few words like a hymn she knows by heart.
“But he asked for my help.” My hand curls into a fist against the table.
“Honey.” Mom stands behind me, her hands settling warm and steady on my shoulders. “Do not carry guilt for this. Your father didn’t blame you.”
“How do you know?” The words rush out rough. “He wouldn’t talk to me about it. When I tried to apologize—” I stop, unable to push past it.
The memory surfaces the way it always does—uninvited, sharp-edged. The antiseptic smell of the hospital room, and my father’s face turned toward the wall.
The way he said get out in a voice I didn’t recognize, flat and final, like I was a stranger who had wandered into the wrong room. I’ve replayed that moment endlessly, and it still lands the same way every time. I fucking failed him, and he blamed me.
“Because he told me.” Her hands tighten. “He was in so much pain when you tried to apologize. He didn’t want you to see him like that. Some of it may have been pride, but he was protecting you, Mads. That’s what he was doing.”
I shake my head, unwilling to accept it. I’ve worked hard to find peace with what happened to Erica and understand, rationally, she’s the only one who can save herself. I’ve turned that truth over enough times that it’s started to feel like something I can live with.
But my dad is different. My dad I can’t logic my way out of.
“Listen to me.” Mom now faces me. “If your father needed two people for that job, he wouldn’t have gone into the garage alone.
” Her voice is soft, but it lands with the quiet certainty of someone who’s carried this a long time and made peace with it.
“It was mechanical failure. It had nothing to do with you.” Her eyes glisten. “Do you know what he told me?”
I shake my head, my throat too tight for words.
“He was grateful you weren’t there.” A tear slips free, and she doesn’t wipe it away. “He said if it hadn’t been him… if you’d been there—” Her voice cracks, and a lone tear slips from the corner of her eye. “It could’ve been you struck by that part; it could’ve killed you.”
Katie makes a sound—half sob, half something wordless—and then she’s at our sides, arms thrown wide, pulling us both in. Mom reaches up, and I bow my head.
And the three of us just hold on.
I stand on the porch for a moment, hands in my pockets, letting the cold night air settle around me. Something feels different, though lighter isn’t quite the right word.
The grief is still there, the guilt still has its edges, but my part in my father’s accident sits differently now. It’s a weight I’ve been carrying in the wrong position for years, and someone finally showed me how to shift it.
Mom’s words move through me on a loop. He was grateful you weren’t there.
I’ve spent so long holding the shape of our conversation in the hospital room, my father’s face turned to the wall, and the harsh finality of get out that I never stopped to consider he might have been protecting me then, too.
I’m not ready to call it peace or self-forgiveness, but it’s something. A start.
I slide my hand in my jacket pocket and reach for my truck keys before I’ve made a conscious decision to go anywhere.
The center of town is quiet for a Monday night. Romeo’s glows warm on the corner, garlic and woodsmoke drifting out onto the sidewalk, and I spot her before she sees me.
Grace is outside, hands slipping into her pockets, talking to a woman with a sleek black bob. Lara Crandall. I stop walking for half a second, surprised to see those two together.
Lara is Principal Amy Crandall’s younger sister, about eight years older than me, and the self-appointed crusader working to defund the Volunteer Fire Department. She kept her maiden name after marrying Dale Hutchins, a state trooper, and one of the most decent men in this county.
Lara sees Winslow Grove as hers. Yet if anyone has any claim, it’s Eddie and Oliver Winslow, seeing as their ancestors founded this town. Even still, Lara does carry real clout with a fair number of people, and whatever she says, some people follow, and she knows it.
Why is Grace talking to her?
I watch them for a moment longer than I probably should.
Grace tucks her hair back and tilts her face toward Lara, and something moves through me that I don’t have a clean word for yet.
Only that it feels like recognition, like arriving somewhere after a long drive and realizing only when you stop how tired you’ve been, and now you feel safe, ready to rest.
I cross the street.
“—don’t see how this is any of your business.” Lara’s voice is sharp as I step in beside Grace, close enough to make things clear. I’ve got Grace’s back.
“Good evening, Lara.” I dip my chin.
“Oh, hello, Maddox.” Her red lips curve into the kind of smile she gives when manners require it.
Grace’s eyes find mine, and something moves across her face—surprise first, then warmth, before settling into something quieter beneath both.
“Hey.”
She emits only a word, just one, and it does something to the weight of the past—loosens it, or maybe just reminds me it doesn’t have to be permanent. I smile down at her, Lara briefly forgotten.
Grace pulls her gaze back. “Ms. Crandall—”
“Surely you can call her Lara.” I can’t help cutting in, if only to watch color climb Lara’s neck.
“Yes. Of course.” Lara’s arm crosses over her chest. “You were saying.”
“I’m genuinely interested in hearing more about your plans.” Grace’s pause is deliberate, and Lara leans into the silence without realizing it. “I might have a solution where everyone wins.”
Lara sniffs. “I can’t see how. Mayor Malone’s office has the budget for one town grant, and it’s currently allocated to the VFD. Tax dollars only stretch so far.”
She talks down to Grace like the concept might be a little much for her to wrap her head around, and I want to chuckle. Lara Crandall couldn’t be more wrong. She doesn’t know it yet—Grace may look like a movie star, but she’s a barracuda.
“I understand.” Grace’s tone is warm and patient. “That’s exactly why I’d love to take you to Beyond the Cake, Pop’s, wherever you’re comfortable—and talk through your plans and what I have in mind. I may be wrong, but I hope I’m not.”
Lara relents and takes Grace’s phone to put her number in, then she leaves in heeled boots, spine straight, her head held high like she’s doing everyone a favor.
Once she’s gone, Grace turns to me. “You came to find me.”
It isn’t a question, simply a fact she’s placing between us. Maybe to see what I’ll do with it. We haven’t talked after our night together, not for lack of trying. At times, I sense she’s as conflicted as I am, and then there’s time when it feels like we’re both all in.
“Yeah.” I turn toward her, close enough that whatever comes next belongs only to us. “I did.”
She searches my face the way she does when she’s weighing how much to ask. The thought did cross my mind that she’d press for details of my conversation with my mom and sister.
Her eyes are soft in the low light, patient in a way that undoes me, a little. “You okay?”
“Getting there.” I reach out and tuck back the strand of hair the wind has already stolen loose again, my fingers grazing her jaw. “Better now.”
The corner of her mouth shifts upward.
I let my smile rise in greeting, just slightly, and nod in the direction Lara disappeared. “What was that all about?”
“Hearing about the VFD situation got me thinking.” Her hands find her pockets again as the wind gusts between us. “Depending on what Lara wants, there might be a way for the town grant to stay with the VFD while still getting Lara what she’s after. I meant what I said; I might have a solution.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
As I look at her, the low light catches the side of her face, and something about her expression—open, certain, completely unbothered by the effort this would take—pulls at me.
“Why do you care?”
She tilts her head, a small line forming between her brows like the question genuinely puzzles her. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I don’t answer as the night the bus broke down flashes in my mind, the way she waded in and helped without once looking around to see who was watching. No angle. No ask. She’d just done it and moved on like it was nothing, like that was simply who she was.
Yet she’s leaving, has been since the moment she got here. This is a job, a deadline, and she has a life waiting elsewhere. I know this.
So why does she keep acting like she’s here to stay?