35. Grace
Grace
I stare at Erica, heart pounding, the ache inside me gathering weight and speed, impossible to ignore. We stand there for a beat, the two of us tethered—one to Maddox’s past, the other to his present—until a door slams downstairs. We both jump.
“Grace?” Maddox’s voice carries up the stairs.
Erica bolts out of the room, and another door slams somewhere down the hall. I force my legs to move, but I take my time. The stairs feel too steep, my body too heavy. I need to talk to him, but not with Erica here.
He’s in the living room, keys still in hand, jacket half off, brows pulling together the second he sees me.
“What happened?” He scans past me toward the stairs. “Is someone else here?”
“Erica.” I barely get her name out before she flashes through the entryway behind me, backpack slung over one shoulder, already moving for the door.
She doesn’t slow, but Maddox is faster. He runs, lunges, and wraps a hand around her arm. “What the hell are you doing here? I told you not to come back.”
Something clicks. She must have waited for him to leave before breaking in, then made her way to my room. Or did she search other rooms, too? I wasn’t home long before I heard her, but long enough, apparently.
“Let me go.” She struggles in his hold, but she doesn’t stand a chance.
He looks to me. “What’s she doing here?”
“I found her in my room.” I weigh how much to say. Erica should be held accountable, but I doubt she’ll feel any remorse for it either way.
He reads my hesitation, narrows his eyes, and cuts back to her. “Did you toss her room? Looking for drugs? Cash?”
When he mentioned Erica stealing before, this is what he meant. I’m sure of it now.
“So what if I did.” She glares up at him, defiant.
“Did she take anything? Break anything?”
“I don’t know. I dou—”
Erica screeches and cuts me off. “No, she ain’t got shit. Now, let me go.”
He walks her to the front door, pushes her outside, and shuts it behind her like he’s disposed of something savage and unwanted. Then he locks it and turns to face me.
“I’m sor—”
“Don’t.” I step toward him and take his hand. “Don’t apologize for her. Or any of this. It isn’t your fault.”
“Fuck.” He threads his free hand through his hair. “She came by earlier with some lie about seeing my mom. I got her to leave. I didn’t think she’d come back, but I should’ve.”
“It’s okay. I doubt she took anything. When I found her, she wasn’t too happy to discover I had no cash, no drugs, and nothing worth taking.”
“Grace.” Slinging both arms around my neck, he pulls me in, pressing his lips to the top of my head. We walk into the living room like that, still tangled together. “I wish I’d been here.”
“Seriously, I was freaked out for a minute, but I’m fine.” I rest my head against his chest and breathe him in, letting his scent, his steadiness center me.
Then I pull away to face him. “Erica told me.”
“About?” His confusion reads wrong—there’s a flicker underneath of something more careful, and I think he already knows what I mean.
“Your retirement.”
His gaze drops to the floor, and he releases a quiet “fuck” under his breath. He stays like that longer than I expect, like he’s at a loss, or worse, still deciding something.
“She shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I know. I would’ve preferred it to come from you.” I hold his eyes when he finally looks up. “But I understand why you didn’t tell me.”
He blinks, brow creasing, head tilting just slightly like he genuinely can’t figure out how that’s possible. “You do?”
“Yes.” I search his face. “This is Erica’s story, not yours. You were protecting her.” The rest sits heavy between us, unspoken.
You gave up everything.
As he holds my gaze, something moves through him—relief, maybe, or the edge of it. His shoulders drop a fraction, he looks away, and then he lets go of me.
“Maddox, I’m not angry at you. What you did for her—” I stop because the words feel too small. “You walked away from everything you’d built. Your career. Your family’s security. Everything.” I shake my head slowly. “That’s not a small thing. I need you to know I understand the size of it.”
His stares intently, and for a moment, I think he’s going to close both the proverbial and literal gap between us. But something shifts in his expression, and then the warmth in him pulls back by degrees as he takes a few more steps away from me.
“Grace.” He heads for the window, the distance between us growing. “What are you going to do with this?”
The question hits me somewhere tender. “What do you mean?”
“The feature.” He turns back, and his expression is plain to read, like the answer should have been obvious, like it should have been my first thought, too.
“That’s not—Is that seriously where your head went?”
“You’re a journalist.” He crosses his arms. “A good one. You don’t walk away from a story. You said so yourself, and you recently lost the big one.”
And there it is. He’s not wrong about who I am or the recent loss, but he’s using it against me, and the distinction matters enormously.
“Sure, you know why I’m here, how I got this assignment, that I lost the story.” Though my voice stays quiet, there’s a sharpness to it now. “But that story… This is different.”
He stays silent, but his jaw tightens.
“Yes, I’m driven and determined, but that story was about my brother.” I hold his eyes, willing him to stay with me. “This has nothing to do with that. This is about you, but not really.”
My entire body aches, muscles tense, needing him to understand the distinction.
“I’m not someone who uses people, Maddox.
This isn’t your story. And there’s the right thing to do, the truth, and then there’s avarice and cruelty.
People have already been hurt, damaged, lost because of Erica’s addiction and all that came with it. There isn’t—”
I pause, running a hand through my hair as if to clear my head, make my words get through to him. “I thought you understood that about me.”
“I do.” His back is now to me. “And that’s the problem.”
He might as well have stabbed me for how the cold truth of his words carve into me. “Excuse me?”
“You go after the truth. It’s who you are.” Still looking out the window, shoulders tense, his voice drops. “It’s why I—” He stops for a beat. “Erica didn’t even supply the drugs that killed Beto. Beto did. And Marcos knows that and still—”
He cuts himself off hard, jaw snapping shut, and the silence stretches.
“Marcos still what?” I keep my voice careful, level, needing him to explain this to me. Not for some story but to know how I can reach him, show him I’m not a threat.
He shakes his head and spins to face me, and that’s when I see he’s shutting down.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” He spreads his hands, frustration and wariness moving across his face. “I can’t say anything without you asking more questions. Without you—”
“Without me what?” The hurt narrows into something exacting.
“Maddox, I’m standing here, in your home, having just found out you sacrificed your entire career to keep a woman out of prison, and your first instinct is to assume I’ll weaponize it?
” I don’t raise my voice. I don’t need to. “Who do you think I am?”
He meets my eyes, and something in his expression breaks open slightly before closing again. “I think you’re someone who doesn’t know when to stop when it comes to truth and justice. You mean well, and you want to make things right.”
It comes out quiet, almost gentle, and I think that might be the most honest thing he’s said in the last ten minutes.
“And you lost the story of a lifetime that mattered so much to you. And this one, it has teeth that go deeper than Erica, and I can’t—” He exhales hard.
“I can’t be the reason any of it comes apart. ”
I grapple for another way to come at this, to get through to him, putting aside how every word out of his mouth makes me bleed.
But none of it matters with the next words out of his mouth. “I’m not doing this.”
“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.