The Graduation Trap novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: Thirty Days
I took the bus to Alder Street with the paper bag of cookies from the bakery on Elm in my lap.
Number 41 was a narrow yellow house with a crooked porch rail, and the key still worked.
The kitchen light was already on.
Braden sat at my mother's table in his dark overcoat, with her recipe tin open in front of him and his hands folded on the lid.
He had not slept either.
"You let yourself in," I said.
"The Archibalds hold the note on this house. Technically I'm not letting myself in anywhere."
"Technically you can leave."
"Sit down, Joanna."
"No."
He looked at me, and for a moment he was seventeen again, the boy from next door who taught me to ride a bike on this very street.
Then it passed.
"Mother is angry," he said. "She's also reasonable. If you come to Sunday lunch, apologize for last night, and take your ring back out of the glass, the note stays quiet."
"The ring is in the dishwasher at the Larkspur."
"I had it fished out."
He set it on the table.
It rolled in a slow circle and fell against the recipe tin.
"I don't want it."
"You want the house."
"I want," I said, "to know why a man who can't stand me asks his mother for sixty people to watch me smile at him."
His jaw tightened.
"Because it's what's owed."
"To whom?"
"To a woman you handed to Sullivan Brennan on the happiest night of her life."
There it was.
I had waited five years for him to say it plainly.
"I never handed her over," I said. "I led her to a door. I thought you'd find her there and be done with her. It was a cruel little plan, and I was twenty-two and stupid, and I have paid for it every day."
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