Chapter Seven
Lachlan
I walk home the long way.
I’ve been doing that lately. Twenty extra minutes walking through streets I’ve got no reason to be on, and today I spent all of them on a question Tatum asked me yesterday that I hung up rather than answer.
Are you going back to the shop? Working on cars again?
There’s an empty repair shop on Delano with a roll-up door and a lease sign that’s been in the window since March. I’ve walked past it four times this week. Today, I stopped and wrote the number on the back of my hand.
I don’t know what I’d do with it. I know what I’d need, which isn’t the same thing. But for the first time since a judge read a sentence out loud to me, I stood on a sidewalk and thought about a year from now, and the thought didn’t slide straight off.
I’m going to tell her tonight. That’s the plan. Get home, call her, tell her about the empty space, and let her be as pleased about it as I know she’s going to be.
Then I open my door.
The first thing I notice when I walk in is the eerie silence. It’s almost like a feeling of doom. My hand tightens slightly around my keys as I shut the door behind me, my eyes scanning the space automatically. Then I see her.
Tatum is on my kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and her legs folded under her, and there’s paper everywhere. In her lap. Around her. A stack of it squared at the corners beside her knee, exactly the way I left it.
I know what it is before I’ve finished shutting the door.
Shit.
She looks up, and the look on her face hits me like a gut punch. It’s not just anger. It’s hurt—deep, raw, and unfiltered.
“What is this?” she asks, her voice shaking as she lifts a page.
I stop a few feet away from her, my jaw tightening as I exhale slowly. I should’ve locked them away.
“Tatum…”
“Don’t,” she cuts in quickly, her eyes glassy now, her grip tightening around the documents. “Don’t say my name like everything’s fine. Just tell me what this is.”
There’s no point denying it. “It’s exactly what it looks like,” I say, my voice flat.
Her breath hitches. “You’ve been paying for everything?” she asks, disbelief bleeding into every word. “My tuition. My rent. All of it?”
I don’t answer right away. I don’t need to. The silence does it for me.
Her expression crumples. “The money…I thought it was Tyler’s money.”
“There was no money,” I say quietly.
“What?” she asks, shock written on her face. “And you didn’t think to tell me?” she demands, her voice rising now, hurt turning sharper. “You just…what? Decided to take over my life without even asking me?”
My stomach twists. “You needed it.”
“That’s not the point!” she snaps, a tear slipping free, her hand coming up quickly to wipe it away. “You don’t get to make decisions like that for me, Lachlan. You don’t get to run things behind my back like I’m—” She stops, shaking her head.
I stay where I am. Because I know if I move closer, it’ll only make it worse.
“I sold the shop,” I say finally.
The words land between us like a blow.
Her head snaps up, her eyes widening in disbelief. “You what?”
“It was the only way to cover everything long-term,” I continue, keeping my voice even as the memory of it settles heavy in my chest. “Tuition. Living expenses. Everything.”
Her face goes pale. “That was Tyler’s,” she whispers, her voice breaking now. “That was ours.”
“I know what it was,” I snap, sharper than I intended.
She stares at me, wide open and gutted. I stand here and let her because there’s something I can’t say out loud: I’d do every bit of it again tomorrow.
“You shut me out for four years,” she says quietly. “Wouldn’t see me in the hospital. Wouldn’t see me in prison. And all this time, you were doing this?”
Each word hits harder than the last.
“You didn’t trust me enough to let me in then,” she continues, her gaze locking onto mine, hurt burning through it now. “And now I find out that everything I thought I knew was a lie.”
“It wasn’t a lie,” I say immediately.
“Then what was it?” she demands.
I hesitate. Just for a second. “I owed him,” I admit quietly. The words hang there. “And you,” I add, even though I shouldn’t.
Her breath catches. “Owed us?” she repeats, her voice hollow now.
I don’t respond. Because there’s nothing I can say that won’t make it worse. The moment the words leave my mouth, I hear how they sounded. Like a transaction. Like something that can be measured and settled. But it’s too late.
Tatum’s face falls completely, the last bit of hope in her expression flickering out like something fragile finally giving up.
“So that’s what this is to you?”
Something tears loose in my chest that has nothing to do with my own pain. I almost can’t breathe. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” Her voice breaks, though I see how she tries to hold it together. “Because it sounds like you’ve just been paying off a debt.”
“It’s not like that,” I say, more firmly now, even though I know it won’t be enough.
“Isn’t it?” she whispers.
I don’t have an answer. Instead, I stand in my own kitchen and stare at her.
Her breath hitches, another tear slipping free as she steps back like she needs the distance just to breathe.
My heart clenches at the sight of her tears. “Tatum…”
“All of this,” she cuts in, gesturing vaguely between us, her hand trembling now. “Taking care of me. Paying for everything. Showing up out of nowhere after years of shutting me out—”
“It wasn’t out of nowhere,” I cut in, frustration bleeding through now, even though I know this isn’t about me. “You came to me.”
“And you let me stay,” she shoots back immediately. “Why? Because you wanted me here, or because you felt it was your job, your responsibility to keep me happy?”
The question lands hard. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out because the answer isn’t simple. The truth is tangled up in too many things I can’t separate.
My hesitation says everything.
“Oh my God,” she breathes, her voice barely there now. “It isn’t even real to you?”
“It is,” I say quickly, stepping toward her. “You think I would—”
“Yes,” she cuts in, louder now, tears spilling freely as she finally lets everything break. “I think you would, Lachlan, because that’s exactly what you’ve been doing this whole time. Taking care of me like I’m something you owe, like I’m one more thing you have to carry because of Tyler.”
“That’s not fair,” I snap, even though part of me knows it is.
“You told me you thought about me graduating.” Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “In your bed. You told me that’s what you held onto in there, and I thought—” She presses the back of her wrist to her mouth. “I thought you meant me. I didn’t know you meant the invoices.”
That one goes into some place inside me I didn’t know was open.
“What’s not fair is falling in love with someone who never saw me the same way,” she says, her voice shaking but her words hitting with razor-sharp precision.
The air goes out of the room. Everything stops.
She stares at me, waiting. Hoping. Even now.
All I have to do is say it. Tell her the truth, that she’s wrong. That it isn’t an obligation and never was. That she’s the only thing that kept me going when everything fell apart.
That she’s the reason I got through four years of concrete and noise. That every day since she pushed her way through my door has felt like something I stole.
That I love her.
The word is right there. Ready. But it doesn’t come out.
Because I don’t deserve to say it. Because if I do, she’ll believe me. And she shouldn’t. Not when everything I’ve done says otherwise. Not when I couldn’t face her when it mattered most. Not when I was the one behind the wheel.
I force the words back down where they belong.
“No, I didn’t,” I say instead, low and quiet.
Her face stills completely. “Right,” she whispers, nodding slowly. “That makes sense.”
Something in my chest turns to lead. Heavy and poisoning me from the inside out. I should tell her the truth, ease her hurt. But my guilt silences me.
She grabs her bag without looking at me, her shoulders squared already putting distance between us before she’s even reached the door.
“I guess I should thank you. At least now I know the truth.”
At the door, she turns. Her eyes are red but clear. “And for what it’s worth,” she says, “it’s sad. Falling for someone who only ever saw you as something to fix.”
The words hit harder than anything else she’s said.
Then she’s gone. The door closes, the sound echoing through the apartment in a way that feels too final.
***
I don’t know how long I stand there. Long enough that the light changes.
My chest feels tight. As if something inside me is trying to break through and I’m holding it back with everything I have. I drag a hand down my face slowly, exhaling through my nose as I force myself to move. I need to do something because standing still is worse.
That’s when I see the folder. It’s sitting on the counter, green, with LEGAL STUDIES across the front in her handwriting. Her coursework, probably notes. She must have set it down when she came in.
Except she doesn’t bring coursework here. I asked her about that once, early on, and she went pink and said she can’t concentrate around me, and I can still see her face when she said it. Pain and regret flare in my chest as I recall the look in her eyes when she left earlier.
If that’s the last time I see—
Stop. Just stop.
I step forward and pick up the folder, flipping it open. Not lecture notes. Legal documents. A class action lawsuit. Two hundred and six plaintiffs against a parts manufacturer over eight years of components they tested, documented, and shipped anyway.
I know the company name. I know it the way I know my own hands. We bought from them for six years. Bardon Automotive,
I sit down on the floor where she was sitting.
I read the incident schedule twice. Eleven crashes settled quietly before anybody thought to consolidate. Steering assemblies. Tie rods.
And the thing I’ve kept behind a locked door at the back of my head for four years starts kicking at it.
I remember the wheel going light in my hands.
I’ve never once said that out loud to anybody who wrote it down, because by the time anyone was listening I’d already been told what happened, and the man telling me had a badge and a report. I had a feeling and a dead best friend.
I jump up and cross the apartment, digging through the drawer where I shoved a stack of paperwork—prison release forms, hospital discharge orders, the official crash report. I pull it out with a little more force than necessary and start flipping through it.
I stop at the police report. Photos. Damage assessment. Diagrams with arrows on them. Details I tried not to look at too closely back then because I blamed myself. But now I do. My eyes land on one of the images. And everything stills.
It’s a close shot of the front left. The outer tie rod end is in frame, snapped clean through.
I’ve held a thousand of those. Tyler and I installed enough new parts to know what they look like, both new and after they’ve become worn. I know what one looks like when a crash breaks it—bright metal, torn edges, a fracture that runs whichever way the force went.
This isn’t that. Two-thirds of the break surface is dark. Worn smooth. Polished and discolored the way steel gets when it’s been failing slowly under a load for a long time. There’s a thin crescent of clean bright metal on the rest of it, where the last of it finally let go.
That part was cracked before we ever left the shop.
It didn’t break in the crash. It caused it.
I sit on my kitchen floor with a photograph in my hand while four years rearrange themselves around it.
I wasn’t driving recklessly. I was slowing down. And a component I installed with my own hands, out of a box with a name on it that nobody in that courtroom asked a single question about, came apart at seventy miles an hour with Tyler in the passenger seat.
Not my fault.
The words don’t land. They can’t yet—four years of the opposite is a lot of concrete. But something shifts underneath it.
Under that, though, is the part that actually gets me on my feet. Tatum brought me this. She walked in here carrying the one thing that might undo the worst day of my life, and I sent her out that door believing she’s a debt, an obligation I’ve been paying for.
I file all these thoughts in another corner of my mind. Instead, I straighten slowly, the paper still in my hand as I reach for my phone with the other. Greg. I hit call without hesitating. He picks up on the second ring.
“It’s me,” I say. “That feeling I always had about the car.” I look down at the photograph. “It was never just a feeling. I need you to look at something.”