The Graduation Trap novel · Chapter 8 of 24
Chapter 8: After Close
I texted Braden at nine that night.
Play me the voicemail from graduation.
He answered in under a minute.
No. It's mine.
I wrote back: It's the only proof of what happened to me.
He did not reply to that.
At one in the morning I was standing outside Brennan's with my coat buttoned wrong, watching through the glass as Sullivan flipped the last chairs onto the tables.
He saw me and unlocked the door without a word.
"He won't play it," I said.
"I figured."
"I wanted to be somewhere that wasn't the Pinewood."
"The Pinewood's still on my tab." He shut the door behind me and turned the lock. "You can have the room upstairs, Joanna. I'll sleep behind the bar."
"I don't want a room."
He went still.
The lamp over the bar was the only light, and it made his scarred eyebrow look deeper.
"What do you want?"
"I want to say it." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For all of it. For the door. I was jealous and I was twenty-two, and I walked a girl toward your room so Braden would find her in it. I wanted her ruined. I've never said that out loud, and you've been paying for it for seven years."
He didn't say anything for a long moment.
Then his hand closed on the edge of the bar.
"You think I don't know that?"
"I'm telling you."
"I knew the whole time." The calm in his voice was gone. "I knew she wasn't lost, I knew she knew where she was going, and I knew who'd pointed her. You walked her to my door, Joanna. I lost the only thing I'd ever worked for, and my mother, and four years of my life, because a girl wanted a boy to look at her."
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