He Called Me Dramatic, So I Took the Club novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Ray's Text

Mace put ice in a dish towel and held it out to Brandi without a word.

She took it with both hands and pressed it to her jaw.

I didn't tell her to sit, and she sat anyway on the crate where I'd read my mother's letter.

"I'm not your friend," I said.

"I know."

"Say what you came to say."

She turned the phone over and unlocked it with a shaking thumb, and then she held it out to me.

It was a chain of texts between Gage and his father, a year old and then older and then older still.

Brandi had scrolled all the way back to a screenshot she'd taken of Gage's phone while he slept.

Ray had written five years ago: "Watkinson's daughter is working the grill at Hutchins'. Go eat there. Be charming."

Gage had answered: "Why her?"

Ray: "She's the last of Tom's. She'll never open that tin if she doesn't know what's in it. Marry her. Keep the bird in the house, where we can get to it."

Gage: "And if she finds out?"

Ray: "Then you'll have been kind to her for years, and she'll be grateful. They always are."

I read it twice, and then I set the phone on the workbench very carefully, because I wanted to throw it.

Four years.

A forehead kiss every morning, and a ring from a pawnshop, and him crying at my mother's funeral.

"You could have gone to Ray," I said to Brandi. "You could have kept your mouth shut and kept the job."

"He hit me, Mallory." She touched her split lip. "He said I'd cost him Friday, and he hit me in my own kitchen."

I took the dish towel from her, wrung it out in the sink, and folded fresh ice into it.

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