34. Grace
Grace
I read 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.
I crave him in the quietest ways and the loudest ones, in flashes of memory that refuse to stay. His mouth at my ear. His hands braced on either side of me, caging me in without touching, letting the anticipation do all the damage.
Our nights together help, but keeping my hands to myself during daylight hours has been its own kind of discipline. We’re like two teenagers sneaking around behind Meri’s back, and I’d find it funnier if it weren’t also the most alive I’ve felt in years.
Just yesterday, he came home to find me alone in the house, and the moment the front door clicked shut behind him, his hand snagged my wrist, tugging me, my name rough and low in his mouth.
My back met the wall, and his body was there immediately, heat and want pressing in with a patience that didn’t last long.
His mouth found mine, both of us starving, both of us finally done pretending otherwise.
I kissed him back with everything I’d been sitting on all day, my fingers curling into the belt loop of his jeans and dragging him closer, closer, until there was nowhere left to go.
His thigh slid between mine, my breath fractured, my pulse scattered everywhere at once.
We didn’t talk. There was no time for it and no interest in it either. Just mouths and hands and the sound I made when he dragged his lips down my jaw, when his forehead dropped to mine like he was trying to memorize me with his whole body.
Then a car door slammed outside, cleaving through the moment like a gunshot, and we sprang apart with ragged breath and too much reality rushing in all at once.
A low, protesting groan—the kind a floorboard makes when someone’s walking— smashes clean through the memory. I pause, coffee cup halfway to my mouth, and then another sound follows, sharper, heavier.
Someone is in this house.
I set the mug down and leave the laptop where it is, moving for the stairs. Halfway up, my pulse trips and doubles because those sounds are coming from my room.
At the landing, my bedroom door stands wide open, unlike how it was when I left this morning. I reach for the candlestick on the small hallway table and step into the doorway.
The room has been turned inside out. My toiletries are scattered across the bed like toppled Jenga pieces, moisturizer abandoned by the pillow, powders cracked open on the floor, brushes tangled in a blanket. Clothes spill from the dresser in uneven piles, some of them mine, some of them not.
A backpack gapes on the floor like a mouth that hasn’t eaten enough, and Erica crouches near the nightstand, rifling through a canvas tote I recognize from the grocery store. Receipts flutter, and a paperback hits the floor with a flat, heavy slap.
The smell hits next, stale smoke, sweat, something chemical that makes my throat burn. She stands, hair limp, skin stretched too tight over her cheekbones. Her eyes snap to me, feral and furious, not because she’s been caught, but because she’s run out of time.
“Fuck.” She shoves a drawer closed.
I stay by the door, pulse climbing.
“No cash, and who doesn’t have drugs?” She huffs out a disappointed laugh. “Figures. You’re rich, so where’s all your money, Miss California?”
My heart hammers painfully in my chest, though I force a bored expression. She’s done her homework. “What do you need?”
Her gaze flicks to the door, then back, pupils blown, but there’s a sharpness there too. Calculation riding shotgun with panic.
“Who says I need anything.” She leans back against the dresser and crosses her arms over her chest. “You journalists, always so sure you’ve got the story.”
My hands curl at my sides, nails pressing into my palms. “Then tell me the story.”
She halts, like I’ve knocked her clean off whatever script she walked in here with. Her movements are jerky and uncontained, her whole body vibrating at a frequency just slightly too high.
I take a cautious step closer, palms open, careful not to corner her. “How can I help?”
Her mouth twists with irritation, hot and quick, and then, just as abruptly, something shifts in her expression. “If you’re writing about Maddox, you should interview me.”
I nod, not about to argue the point. She’s already in the piece—a line or two, the way anyone from his youth might be—but this story was never about her, and I would never write about her that way.
Exploit her circumstances, her unraveling, for the sake of a more compelling narrative. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, Maddox and Meri and this entire town would never forgive me for it. More importantly, I wouldn’t forgive myself.
She tilts her head and studies me the way someone does when prey has become more interesting than expected. “What’s in it for me?”
“Pardon?”
She scoffs, shifting her weight. “Why should I talk to you? You just want to hear how amazing Mad is, and I’m sure you already know plenty.” Her gaze drops the length of me, then lifts again, cruel and deliberate. “You two are fucking. I can smell him on you.”
The words land exactly as she intends. My body reacts before my face does, spine straightening, breath pulled in and locked down. I tamp down any emotion because, if she’s hunting for confirmation, she isn’t going to get it from me.
“You’d talk to me because you want to.”
Her smile is thin and transactional. “You’d need to pay me.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Everything works that way.” She tilts her head. “Did he tell you why he really retired?”
“That’s a matter of public record.” My heart thumps hard against my ribs.
I shouldn’t trust a word out of her mouth, but she’s just said the one thing I’ve quietly suspected since the beginning.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, I realize I don’t want to hear it from her. Whatever the real story is, I want it to come from Maddox, if he decides I’m someone he wants to tell.
“It’s bullshit.” Something lights up behind her eyes, bright and a little feverish. “I know the real story. I’ll tell you for five thousand dollars.”
“Erica.”
She leers at my use of her name. Her eyes are wild, her posture menacing, but beneath it, I catch a flicker of the little girl she used to be. The one who never learned how to feel safe. Always reaching, always steeling for a battle, always looking for something solid to hold onto.
I should be on high alert and afraid, but I’m not. The ache in my chest is heavier than fear because I can only imagine how bad she’s hurting and how helpless the people around her must feel.
She slumps onto the edge of the bed, and the moment stretches long between us. “Maddox didn’t retire.”
The air shifts, and the room closes in. I want her to stop talking, but the words are already loose in the air between us.
“He didn’t choose it.” Her voice drops, raw at the edges. “He didn’t get tired. He didn’t decide small-town life sounded cute.” She drags a hand down her face, smearing mascara in dark streaks. “They made him choose.”
My stomach flips. There’s a relief in her voice underneath the grief—the relief of someone who’s held something too long and finally, finally found a place to set it down.
“Fucking Marcos Madrigal and his battalion of lawyers. That asshole smiles at you while cutting your throat.” Her laugh comes out wrong. “One of the guys on his pit team ODed. It was my fault. All of it.”
Her eyes find mine, and for a beat, there’s no angle, no game—only unadulterated guilt and shame.
I vaguely recall coming across a small news item about a pit member dying. The story existed, floated out there in the world, but no one made the connection to Maddox Hartley. No one thought to look, and why would they?
“I was a disaster.” She snorts, resigned. “Still am, and Mad kept fixing it. Kept thinking he could fix me.” She paces. “Beto died, and they were going to hand me over to the cops.”
My stomach rolls. “Who? Madrigal?”
This shed a new light on Maddox’s call with Marcos all those weeks ago.
She nods. “He told Maddox to walk away from me. Clean break, no contact—or they’d burn him down, too.” Her jaw trembles. “Sponsors. Contracts. His whole future.”
Erica presses her palm to her chest like she’s trying to hold herself together. “They expected him to feed me to the sharks, but they never knew him. He begged them. He said I needed help—rehab, not jail.”
I can see it, Maddox standing there, broad shoulders squared, taking the hit like he always does.
“They gave him an ultimatum: me or racing.” Her voice breaks. “And he chose me.”
The words land one by one, each heavier than the last.
“He gave it up.” Erica swipes at her face, breathing hard. “Everything—the money, the career, the thing that saved his family. He let them spin it as a retirement so I wouldn’t go to prison.”
Silence swells, and my ears ring with the truth of it.
“He did that for a girl who couldn’t stop fucking up.
” She shakes her head slowly, like she’s still turning it over after all this time.
“I still can’t understand how he can stand to look at me.
” For a moment, she looks undone—eyes glassy, guilt stripping her down to something raw and exposed, too aware of the damage she’s caused.
“So, yeah.” She laughs, but it’s brittle now, defensive. “That’s the truth. Congratulations. You got it for free.”