I Left Long Before You Looked novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Seven O'Clock

Sadie's POV

I spent the whole night on my back in the room over the bakery, replaying his thumb on my wrist.

I had counted that pulse of his a thousand times.

Nobody had ever counted mine.

At two in the morning I took my own wrist, two fingers, and my pulse was racing.

At five I gave up and went to work.

The gym was still wet from the storm.

I unlocked the front doors and turned on the lights one bank at a time, and I bit my bandage, and I did not look at the clock.

At 5:58 my phone rang.

It was my mother, and her voice was wrong.

"Don't say anything," she said. "Listen."

"Mom?"

"Brody's father came to the house last night. He sat in my kitchen with a glass of my wine and his hand on a folder." She was breathing very evenly. "He says he has the real lifeguard report. The one I asked the county to bury."

I put my hand on the desk.

"How..."

"The county is for sale, Sadie, it turns out. Everything is." A pen clicked and stopped. "He says if I vote yes on the twenty-seventh, it stays in his drawer forever. And if I don't, he reads it out loud at the hearing in front of the whole town, with Wyatt in the room."

I couldn't say anything.

"Brody didn't date you for your charm, honey. He was sent for the file."

"He asked me about it once," I said. My voice sounded very far away. "In April. He asked what happened at the lake when we were kids, and I changed the subject."

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