36. Maddox
Maddox
I drove for most of the night.
No destination, no music, just the road, the dark, and the silence of a truck cab. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and I couldn’t go home, so I drove until the roads ran out. And I ended up where I always end up.
The speedway.
When I first got there, it was too late to justify going to sleep and too early to make the call I have to make. So I sit with the fallout of the day, and let the night finish itself out.
My thoughts are all over the place, but most of all, I keep coming back to Grace. My throat constricts at how she flinched and the agony behind her glassy gaze as if she was being stabbed by a thousand knives at my words. Even still, she held her ground while I tore everything out from under her.
I know what I did.
I treated her like a threat, like a journalist first and everything else second. Even when she’d spent weeks showing me exactly who she was—and it wasn’t that.
She told me about her brother and why the truth matters to her in a way that has nothing to do with ambition and everything to do with grief.
She told me about losing the story she’d worked the better part of a year on.
She handed me all of that, and I looked her dead in the eye and asked her to swear.
I’m a fucking idiot.
At the time of Beto’s death, Marcos wanted nothing touching the team, and Erica made a convenient scapegoat—troubled history, everyone tried their best. Clean and containable. He would’ve buried my connection to her just as fast.
But if this got out, there’s no telling what direction it would go or what it could take down with it. And for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why Marcos would want that—unless destroying me is the point.
A growl tears out of me. That would be enough for him.
This cannot come out.
The media would descend on Winslow Grove like vultures. My family. My kids at the school. Everything I’ve spent quietly rebuilding since returning home. That fear is real, even if I aimed it at the wrong person.
As the sky shifts from black to a deep bruised blue, I saunter back to the truck. I lean against the hood, arms crossed as I take one more look before I do what is long overdue.
Phone in hand, I dial. Marcos picks up on the second ring.
“Maddox.” He sounds smooth as usual. The voice of a man who has never been caught off guard in his life, or at the very least, he hides it well. “I was wondering when you’d call.”
“You sent her to do your dirty work.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know what you—”
“Don’t.” I stare at the empty track. “Erica. You promised her ten thousand dollars to walk into my house and unload everything in front of the journalist.”
My jaw tightens and mouth sours at talking about Grace as if she means nothing to me. “You want to tell me that wasn’t deliberate, considering you paid her airfare to get here?”
“I wanted the truth out. That’s all.”
“Your version of it.” I push off the hood.
“You let Erica carry what happened to Beto, even when we both knew it wasn’t her.
You know he supplied the drug, but somehow you got her to believe she was the reason he’s dead.
What did you promise her? Money? And let me guess, you never paid her. Never will.”
The anger sits low and steady in my chest, the kind that’s been there a long time. “So don’t talk to me about truth.”
Silence lives on the line. The comfortable silence of a man selecting his next words carefully. “Honor your commitment, and—”
“I’ve been honoring it.” I stop at the fence line, fingers curled around the railing, gaze on the track.
“I’ve jumped through every hoop you put in front of me since I retired.
Shit, since I started working for you. Every appearance, every obligation, every favor.
I did all of it. Three more days and we’re done. ”
I pause, my turn to show him who’s in control. “But hear me clearly—I’m blocking your number. Don’t go through anyone to get to me. We end here.”
“Fine.” Something shifts beneath the smoothness, just barely. “That’s all I need.”
I end the call, block the number before the screen dims, and pocket the phone.
Then I stand there at the fence line in the quiet and look out at the track— the first track I ever turned a wheel on, the one my father brought me to as a kid with grease already under my fingernails, the one I bought with a career I had to choose to end.
Fuck, three days.
Grace leaves in three days.
The moment things got complicated, I stopped trusting any of it—stopped trusting her—and went looking for the threat.
She was never the threat.
In front of my house, I sit in the truck as the sun comes up, working out what to say.
Whether to start with the apology or build to it, whether she’ll even let me get that far.
I’ve been turning it over the whole drive back, and I still don’t have it right, but I’m done letting that be a reason to wait.
I step inside, and Mom is in her nightgown, arms crossed, a folded piece of paper held between two fingers. She looks at me the way she did when I hit high school and would come in past curfew—not angry exactly, just deeply, specifically unimpressed.
Something drops in my chest. “Mom—”
“She’s gone. I came home from dinner with Patsy last night and found this.”
I cross to her and take the note. It’s addressed to my mom, not to me. In fact, my name isn’t anywhere on it.
Meri, I don’t have the words to thank you enough for opening your home to me. Your kindness and generosity are something I’ll carry with me for a long time. Thank you for everything. Goodbye and all the best, Grace
I read it twice. Three times. The goodbye sits at the bottom of the page like a door swinging shut.
“Where did she go?”
Mom tilts her head, studying me the way she does when she’s deciding how much grace to extend.
“The inn reopened several days ago. Patsy told her she was welcome back anytime.” She places her hands on her hips. “I told Grace she didn’t have to go anywhere. That this was her home for as long as she needed it.”
Something softens in her features as her gaze pins me in place. “Grace said she wasn’t going anywhere. Everything she ever needed was right here.”
The words lodge under my ribs like a knife sinking into flesh. I already know I fucked up, but this drives it home.
Mom’s lips thin. “I called Patsy after I saw the note to make sure she’s there.”
I’m already at the door when Mom hollers, “You make it right with her, Maddox Raymond Hartley.”
I get in the truck and check the time on the dash. There’s enough of it to talk to Grace and make it to school for first bell when the game starts. The varsity basketball team made it to the semi-finals. I have time.
I take the inn’s front steps with my hands shoved deep in my pockets, swallowing against the knot sitting low in my throat. I can’t let her leave. I don’t know how to fix what I broke or whether there’s even a right thing to say anymore.
All I know is the idea of Grace Buchanan packing up, getting in her car, and driving out of Winslow Grove feels like something vital being stripped out of me, cell by cell.
The lobby is quiet when I push through the door.
Grace is her only guest right now, and it should be easy to figure out which room is hers.
My heart picks up with every step to the second floor.
She could see this as an ambush. But I’m hoping she’ll see it for what it is.
One door is ajar at the end of the hall.
I stop outside of it and listen. Nothing. She must have stepped out, or she’s in the bathroom. Either way, I push the door open enough to see inside.
The room smells like her. Fresh citrus and something warmer underneath it, something that reaches into my chest and makes it harder to breathe. I step inside, meaning only to wait, and call her name once into the quiet. The bathroom door hangs wide open. That, too, is empty.
I sit on the edge of the bed and pull in a slow breath. That’s when I see her laptop is open on the desk, screen glowing softly in the dim room. A document fills the page, and I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to move, crossing the room in a few steps.
It’s the feature, or one article of it, at least.
Grace wouldn’t want me reading this. It’s her work, her boundary, and I know better. I straighten and start to turn away until a name catches my eye, rooting me to the floor.
Beto Varón.
My breath stutters. Beto was part of my pit crew—a handsome kid, barely twenty-two, always smiling, always the first to volunteer for whatever needed doing. He’d only been with the team two years before everything fell apart.
He took an immediate liking to Erica. The poor guy never stood a chance with her.
I don’t know who made the first move, only that I still remember him coming to me, making sure Erica and I were well and truly over before he let himself go there.
He was that kind of person—considerate, careful, decent in the ways that mattered.
They became inseparable fast, and it didn’t take long after for the signs to show. Sloppy work. Not coming in. He was becoming a liability and already halfway out the door when the incident happened.
The words on the screen pull me back, and I look again despite myself, closer now, pulse already climbing.
His name isn’t buried or mentioned in passing.
It’s woven right into the opening paragraphs.
Context. Facts. Consequences. The truth of my retirement laid out in clean, careful sentences that leave nowhere to hide.
The room tilts and sweat beads at the back of my neck.
I lean in closer without touching anything and read.
Every word lands a blow and a confession at once.
All of it is there—the breakup and why, the downward spiral, the overdose, the ultimatum, the choice, the lie the world swallowed whole and called a retirement.
Grace built a career and tragedy into something that would hold up under scrutiny, under publication. The sick, dizzying mix that moves through me has no clean name. Betrayal and grief and rage and something that feels uncomfortably close to understanding, because I hurt her.
I know what it cost her to tell me about her brother, about the story she lost, to crack herself open and lay all of that at my feet. That was the moment I should’ve trusted her back. That was the moment I should’ve chosen differently.
But I didn’t. I walked out the door and handed her a reason.
I wanted to believe she wouldn’t do this, but how can I argue with what’s right in front of me? A sharp and relentless ache rips into my chest. I was an idiot who couldn’t extend the same kindness she’d extended to me, and now, I’m standing in her room reading the consequence of it.
Is this how she’s dealing with it? Turning us into copy, turning me into a story she can shape and control when I made her feel like she had no control at all?
Everything I sacrificed, everything I walked away from, all the quiet months I spent rebuilding something small and manageable in this town—if this gets out, all of it will have been for nothing.
I don’t know how long I stand there staring at the screen like the words might rearrange themselves if I wait long enough when I hear footsteps sound in the hallway. I turn as Grace walks through the door, a small paper bowl of popcorn in her hands.
The moment she sees me, her whole body halts. Her eyes lift to mine, then drop to the open laptop before coming back to me. And in the space of a single breath, I watch her understand exactly what I’ve done.