The Graduation Trap novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: Your Rule
Joanna's POV
Braden did not call, and he did not text.
By evening I had stopped checking.
Sullivan's mother lived in a green house on Pruitt Street.
A lemon tree stood in the front window, and it had no business surviving an Ohio winter.
"Sit," she said, when she opened the door. "You're thin."
"Mother," Sullivan said.
"I'm making an observation."
She put me at the kitchen table, set a bowl of stew in front of me and sat across with her arms folded.
"Do you cook?"
"I teach music."
"That's not an answer."
"She doesn't cook," Sullivan said from the counter.
"I didn't say that."
"You said it with your face."
His mother's mouth twitched.
"He burns everything," she said to me. "He once set fire to a salad."
"That was one time."
"It was a salad, Sullivan."
I laughed, properly, for the first time in a week, and she watched me do it with a face I couldn't read.
When Sullivan went to find the bread, she leaned in across the table.
"I owe you an apology," she said quietly. "I sat through that luncheon for seven years and let Cynthia Archibald talk about my boy."
"You stood up on Sunday."
"Too late."
"You stood up," I said. "He saw you."
She nodded, once.
She patted my hand.
When we left, she pressed a foil tray of stew into my arms and told Sullivan to drive carefully.
We did not talk in the truck.
He parked behind Brennan's, and we climbed the back stairs to the apartment above the bar.
He put the stew in the refrigerator.
Neither of us said anything about where this was going.
The room was small and warm.
I stood by the window with my coat still on.
"You said not until I knew," I said.
"I did."
"I don't know. I may never know." I turned. "I know that I'm standing here, and nobody has given me anything to drink, and nobody told me where to sit."
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