27. Hard Truths and Hard Countertops
HARD TRUTHS AND HARD COUNTERTOPS
Sadie
The thing about riding in Dawson’s truck was that you always knew exactly what you were going to get: hard lefts, hard stops, one-word sentences, and a silence so loud it filled your head with questions.
All the years of second-guessing myself around this man, and I’d finally made my peace with that.
I could do hard lefts. I could do loaded silence.
What I could not do—what nothing prepared me for—was the moment the most tight-lipped man in Sutter County turned off the radio, white-knuckled the steering wheel, and said, “Gio and Vicki told me what really happened on Grad Night.”
I’d spent the better part of my adult life building a tidy little story around that night, too much booze, bad judgment, the kind of blurry mistake you bury under enough years that it starts to look like fiction.
But I was wrong. Apparently, Gio had shown up at the ranch the week before, restless in that way that meant something big was eating him alive, and he’d unloaded every last bit of it.
Jeremy had planned it. The roofie in the beer was a prank gone sideways. The only problem—the one detail that rewrote everything I thought I knew—was that Donovan had never touched that drink.
Dawson had.
And Vicki was just another pawn in Jeremy Miller’s sick and twisted game of human chess. She’d been told Donovan Valentine was waiting for her, only to find a very passed out Dawson Lockhart.
A cold bloom of shock spread through my chest, radiating to my fingertips, and then the slow, stinging burn of something like betrayal followed in its wake.
All these years, I’d carried around my own narrative, that Dawson had been unfaithful, on purpose or not, and that I’d been right to leave, right to build a life out of self-respect and preservation.
But now everything was unsettled, like someone had shaken the snow globe and all the pieces were suspended and drifting, not landing anywhere clear.
“How did Gio even find out?” I asked, my voice sounding weirdly flat, like it wasn’t broadcasting at full volume.
I could see why Vicki hadn’t said anything. She thought she’d gotten set up and didn’t want to make herself look any worse, although it would have been nice to know nothing happened between them twelve years ago.
“He overheard Jeremy talking about it,” Dawson explained, not taking his eyes off the road. “Back when he was working construction. Jeremy was bragging about it at lunch.”
I tried to picture Gio at seventeen, Dawson’s best friend, overhearing that and not doing anything about it and doing nothing. “So Gio’s known this whole time, and he never told you?” I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Gio was the one person who’d always been on my side, no matter what.
“Yeah,” Dawson confirmed, like the syllable fought its way out against a lifetime of holding things back. He didn’t look over, but I could see every muscle in his jaw cut and tense, an entire argument happening between his teeth.
The world outside was a monochrome blur as we drove.
I felt the chaos of it all—what I’d just learned about Gio, about Jeremy, about the night that had changed my entire life—rattling around my chest like pennies in a dryer.
I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but the first one that came out sounded small, even to me,
“Why?” I said, and the word was so flat it barely cleared my lips. “Why did he wait all this time to tell you?”
Dawson didn’t shrug, but he didn’t need to. “It’s complicated.”
I gave him a sidelong glance, searching his face for even a hint of the old Dawson—my Dawson—the one who would have turned that into a three-act joke, drawn it out to see me laugh. “What? Like a Facebook relationship status?”
He huffed, just the hint of a smile, and it hit me that this was the first time he’d laughed all night. “Something like that.”
“Are you guys okay?” I asked, meaning him and Gio, but really wanting to know the answer for him and me. Would he forgive me for not knowing he would never do that to me?
Dawson considered a long time, then nodded once. “Yeah. We’re fine, or we will be.” It sounded final, so I let it die there.
For a few miles, the only sound was the hum of the engine, tense and steady.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the chain of events, all the things that would have been different if any one of us had just said something out loud. I let it churn, and when I spoke, it came out in a rush. “What are you going to do?”
He looked at me, this time meeting my eyes just long enough for the question to land. “About Gio?”
“No, Jeremy,” I said, the words rolling off my tongue like gravel. It surprised me how harsh I sounded. “Are you going to press charges?”
“No,” he stated flatly.
“Why not?” I could feel my hands balling into fists in my lap, a righteous anger that didn’t even make sense. After all, Jeremy had drugged him, not me. But it felt like an offense against the whole world, like the crime was bigger than just the sum of its parts.
“If I was going to do anything about it,” Dawson sighed, “I’d handle it myself. No way I’d trust Gary Williams to actually follow through.”
That made me laugh, and not in a nice way. “Gary Williams is a police officer?”
Gary was the hall monitor and I could see him being mall security, but an actual police officer with a gun and authority, that just didn’t track.
His eyes cut to mine before looking back at the road. “Lieutenant Williams is second in command at Valentine Bay P.D.”
I squinted through the windshield, imagining Gary Williams in a cop uniform. I couldn’t do it. “But isn’t Donovan a cop? And the roofie was meant for him?”
Donovan Valentine had spent six years on the East Coast in D.C. working in the Secret Service. We’d met up a few times when he was in the city. He came back home a couple of years ago and married his childhood best friend Ella.
“Yes, he is.” Dawson’s fingers tightened on the wheel.
“So why not go to Donovan?” I asked, not out of loyalty to the badge, but because someone should have done something.
Dawson’s knuckles flexed, pale and bloodless on the steering wheel. “Because Jeremy’s life is shit enough. He’s been in and out of prison, three DUIs, the last one put him in a wheelchair. He’s in a halfway house now.”
That stopped me. I thought I’d feel vindication, or at least relief, but instead there was just this empty, hollow ache. “So, nothing’s going to happen to him.”
I didn’t love that Jeremy wasn’t going to answer for drugging Dawson, but since it wasn’t me, I didn’t really have a leg to stand on.
Something about the logic of it—that the world’s most glaring injustices could slide by, as long as you weren’t their direct target—clanged around in my ribcage as the truck slowed, then stopped altogether.
I surfaced from my thoughts, expecting the familiar sight of the cedar-shake cabin at Lockhart Ranch, the one with the two-burner stove, fireplace, and rainfall shower head that I had been calling home for the past month.
But that wasn’t where we were.
The landscape outside the window was a freshly mowed lawn hemmed in by white-washed fences.
It overlooked the little cove at the edge of Valentine Bay, the one with the driftwood pile and the scraggly pines.
In the midst of all that was a house so familiar it made my breath catch, the one-story, sugar-cookie-colored cottage with the powder-blue trim and the wraparound porch.
The ‘seashell cottage,’ as we’d once called it—at twelve, at fifteen, at seventeen—because the scalloped molding around the window frames reminded us of the conch shells we’d dig out of tide pools on day trips up the coast.
I blinked at the sight of it, half expecting the next inhale to bring a rush of cinnamon like the old owner’s baking, or the woodsmoke that always seemed to hang in the eaves. Instead, all I got was the plasticky new-car scent of Dawson’s truck and a metallic tang at the back of my throat.
He’d put the truck in park but didn’t kill the engine.
He just stared straight ahead, his hands still wound tight around the steering wheel.
I was so thrown that at first I couldn’t speak.
The cottage had been our private fantasy, something we’d built together out of late-night promises, long before either of us had a credit score or any idea how thirty-year mortgages worked.
It was, for lack of a better word, our dream house, the one where we’d raise three imaginary golden retrievers, and a couple of kids, and maybe plant an apple tree in the side yard.
I cleared my throat, not trusting my voice. “What are we doing here? I think someone is living here.”
When we’d fantasized about this being our dream home, it had been vacant. But now, it looked renovated. Updated. The paint was fresh, there was a wraparound porch and the shrubbery was well maintained.
Dawson hesitated, which was rare. He was a man of action, historically allergic to even a two-second pause.
“I know the owner,” he said, which was not what I expected.
Then he turned off the engine, unbuckled his seat belt, got out of the truck, came around to my side, opened my door, and shot me a look that was a challenge and an invitation at once as he offered me his hand. “Come on.”
Before I could protest, I was out of the truck, and he was shutting the door behind me with a soft, decisive thunk. Dawson and I walked up the flagstone path that led to the porch, his stride purposeful but not rushed, shoulders squared as if braced against a headwind that only he could feel.
When we reached the porch steps he nodded toward the swing at the far end, its ropes sun-bleached but perfectly intact.