The Graduation Trap novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: His Seven Years
I caught my palm on a nail in the porch rail on my way out of my mother's house.
It was a small cut, and it bled onto the folded page I was carrying all the way across town.
Brennan's opened at four.
I walked in at five past, and Sullivan was behind the bar slicing limes.
He looked at my hand, set down the knife and said nothing.
"Don't say anything clever," I said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You said last night you'd tell me something in a week."
"I said you'd ask the right questions in a week."
"It's been a day." I smacked the folded page down on the bar, and it left a red thumbprint. "I wrote that at twenty-two and forgot it. Tell me what it means."
He read it once.
He read it again.
Then he came around the bar, took my wrist and turned my palm up under the light.
"Sit."
I sat.
He got a first aid kit from a shelf, and a clean towel, and cleaned the cut with a cold bottle of water while I stared at the top of his head.
His hands were big and careful.
His thumb rested on the inside of my wrist, and I could feel my own pulse knocking against it.
I told myself that was the cut.
"Hold still," he said.
"I am."
"You're not."
I held still.
"Seven years," I said. "Start there."
He pressed a square of gauze down and wrapped it twice.
"The dean called me in on the Monday after graduation. Daphne Lowell had told campus police a man on the third floor had hurt her. Her description was a motorcycle, a scar through the eyebrow, and room seven."
"She said that?"
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