I Slept With My Ex's Best Friend novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Hers

I stopped where I was.

The snow came down between us under the parking lot light.

Behind me people were still pouring out of the union, loud, half of them on their phones, replaying it.

"Okay," I said.

He blinked. "Okay?"

"I won't. Not tonight. Not in a parking lot with him still in the building." I pulled my coat tighter. "You don't get an answer tonight, Jace."

Something in his face eased.

Like that was the answer he'd been hoping for.

"Okay," he said.

His bus came.

He got on it.

I watched it pull away down University Avenue with its windows fogged and his shape in the back, and I stood there in the snow until Gretchen honked at me.

Tanner withdrew at seven the next morning.

It was a ninety-second video posted to the campaign page.

He was sitting at his parents' dining table in Green Bay, in a white button-down, reading off a paper he kept glancing at.

"Last night I said something I deeply regret," he read. "I've decided to step back from the race to focus on my growth."

He didn't say my name.

He didn't say Kenzie's, or the captain's, or Jace's.

At the edge of the frame, you could see his mother's camel sleeve.

The comments were already over ten thousand.

The top one said: Venmo her for the growth.

I worked the six a.m. shift anyway.

At seven-forty the coffee bar door opened and the whole Langdon house walked in.

Not all forty.

Maybe twenty-five of them, in hoodies and slides and the shame of a Friday morning, filling the shop to the pastry case.

The redheaded president in the Brewers hat came to the counter.

"Hey," he said. "Twenty-five coffees, please. Whatever's fastest."

"That's a lot of coffee."

"We had a long night." He put his card down. "We voted at two. He's out. Off the house, off the composite, off the alumni list."

I stopped with a stack of cups in my hand.

"I'm not telling you so you'll say anything," he said. "We stood in that living room and laughed when he said you'd be back by Sunday. That's on us."

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