My Ex Threw Me Away, Now He's Bleeding for Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Spare

Margo records Reid saying it, Nell takes the leg back, and at the police station the Garrity family's lawyer offers sixty thousand dollars for her silence. She tears it up, and her fellowship is suspended by midnight.

I didn't sit down.

I stood in my own doorway with lemonade drying stiff in my hair and took out my phone.

"What are you doing?" Reid asked.

"Recording."

I pressed the red button and held the phone at my chest so the lens faced him.

"Say it again. Tell me what you just told me."

He looked at the phone and then at me.

"Margo, don't do this. You're upset."

"Say that you'll give me my leg back when I stop being dramatic."

His jaw worked.

He had never once said no to a camera in his life, and he didn't know how to say no to this one.

"It was a joke," he said. "Paige needed a shot. Nobody was going to hurt you."

"You sat in my room with my spare leg across your knees and gave me orders."

"I was waiting for you to calm down."

"You were waiting for me to beg."

He stood up and held out a hand.

"You need to hear this. You're going to go to the police and ruin your whole life over a prank. My father is on the board. You'll lose your fellowship."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's advice," he said. "It's the only advice I've ever given you."

That was true, and I could hear how long he had been giving it.

The door banged against the wall behind me.

Nell stood in the hall in her blue graduation gown with a bag of takeout in one hand.

She looked at me, at the lemonade, at the leg in Reid's lap.

She put the bag down on the floor very carefully.

"Give her the leg."

"Nell, this isn't your business."

"Reid." She said it flatly. "I put people back together for a living now. Give her the leg, or I put you on the floor and take it."

He gave it to me.

He actually held it out to me, and I took it, and he walked out past Nell with his shoulders up near his ears.

I sat on the bed and cried, and Nell sat down and held on to me.

Then I washed my face and changed into a clean dress.

"Police station," I said. "Now. Before he gets his father on the phone."

The campus police sent us to the dean's office.

The dean's office gave us two chairs and a box of tissues.

"I'm so sorry this happened, Margo," the dean said from behind her desk. "I think it would be best if we arranged a mediated conversation with the students involved. It was a very emotional day."

"A conversation," I said.

"Restorative. Everyone would get to share how they felt."

Nell stood up.

"She was held down on your lawn by fraternity boys while the whole school filmed. We're going to the real police."

The dean said that was of course my right.

She didn't look up from her screen while she said it.

The officer at the town station was kind.

He took my statement at a metal table and wrote down every name I gave him.

When I said the school's photographer had pictures of the faces, he stopped writing and looked at me.

"Do you know his name?"

"No."

"Then I need those pictures, Miss Tennant. A video of a crowd laughing isn't much by itself. Faces and a clock is what makes it a case."

He had barely finished the sentence when a man in a gray suit pushed the lobby door open.

He carried a leather folder and stopped at the table.

"Miss Tennant? I represent the Garrity family. I'm so sorry about today."

Reid stood a step behind him with his hands in his pockets.

The lawyer took a single sheet of paper from his folder and set it in front of me.

"The family would like to resolve this quietly. Sixty thousand dollars, paid today. In return you'd sign a short agreement that you won't discuss the incident or speak to the press."

Sixty thousand dollars was more than I'd ever had in one place.

It was more than a year of rent.

Behind the lawyer's shoulder, Reid was looking at me.

His mouth moved.

He mouthed: Please.

He wasn't smiling and he wasn't giving advice.

For one second I couldn't tell what he was asking me for.

Then I picked up the paper and tore it in half and in half again.

"No," I told the lawyer.

"Miss Tennant, I'd urge you to think about what you're turning down."

"I did," I said. "Officer, may I give you my statement again? He just offered me sixty thousand dollars to leave."

The officer picked up his pen.

The lawyer closed his folder very slowly and walked out, and Reid went after him.

It was past midnight when Nell and I got back to her apartment.

My phone buzzed on the couch.

An email from the Garrity Fellowship office, sent at 12:04 a.m.

Dear Ms. Tennant, your fellowship has been suspended pending a conduct review.

Your campus housing agreement will end this Friday.

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