The Graduation Trap novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Bar Across the Street

Sullivan Brennan tells Joanna he never touched Daphne, and Joanna walks out on him, only to get a text from Daphne: she is coming to find her.

I should have kept walking.

Instead I stood under the awning with rain running off my dress, and Sullivan Brennan stopped a step short of me.

He was older than he had been at twenty-four.

The scar through his left eyebrow was the same.

"You're soaked," he said. "Come in. I'll put the kettle on."

"Why would I go anywhere with you?"

"Because the next place open is a gas station," he said. "And because you've been looking at my door for ten minutes."

I had been looking at it for seven years.

I followed him across the street.

The sign over the door said Brennan's.

Inside, the chairs were turned up on the tables, and one lamp was lit behind the bar.

He gave me a clean dish towel and a black work shirt that smelled of cedar.

I held both and didn't use either.

"How did you know I'd come out tonight?" I asked.

"The bartender's sister works the Larkspur Room. She said Cynthia Archibald booked sixty seats and a quartet." He set a mug of tea on the bar. "I figured you'd leave that building one of two ways."

"And you wanted to watch."

"I wanted to say something to you before you went home to him."

"I'm not going home."

Something in his face eased, and I hated that I noticed.

"Then I'll say it standing here." He leaned on the bar across from me. "I never touched Daphne Lowell."

The kettle clicked off behind him.

"Don't," I said.

"She stood in my doorway for about a minute. Then she left. I was sitting on my bed with my boots off."

"Don't do this."

"I'm not asking you to believe me."

"She cried for a year, Sullivan."

My voice cracked on his name, and that made me angrier.

"She still goes quiet when somebody mentions a bar. She took a leave from nursing. Braden sat up with her for months. I watched it."

"I know what she told people," he said. "She told it to a dean, and a campus officer, and Braden Archibald. I lost my degree and my scholarship. My mother stopped answering my calls."

"There were no charges."

"There were no charges because there was nothing to charge." His voice stayed level. "That doesn't give anyone their year back."

I picked up the tea so my hands would have a job.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're the only person who was in that hallway who never accused me of anything."

"I wasn't in the hallway," I said. "I was in room four."

"I know."

He said it very quietly, and he didn't explain.

"What do you mean, you know?"

He looked at me for a while.

Then he shook his head.

"Not tonight. You've had a night."

"No. You say it now."

"If I say it now, you'll hear a stranger saying it about your best friend." He pushed the black shirt an inch toward me. "In a week you'll ask the right questions yourself, and then you'll listen."

"You think I'll come back here."

"I think you've got a house you can't go to and a husband you can't stand."

"I had a husband," I said. "I just left him in front of sixty people."

The corner of his mouth moved.

It wasn't quite a smile.

"I saw," he said. "There's a window on the second floor of this place. Best seat in town."

I put down the tea.

"You watched me do it."

"I watched you drop a ring in a glass and walk out with your back straight." He held my eyes. "I've been waiting seven years to see somebody in that family get told no."

I should have been grateful.

I felt, instead, the plain weight of what I was doing, standing in a stranger's bar in a ruined dress, with nothing in my purse but a phone, a lipstick and forty dollars.

"I'm going to a motel," I said.

"The Pinewood on Route 9 takes cash. Tell them Sullivan sent you and they'll take the room off my tab."

"I don't want your tab."

"Then pay him in the morning." He nodded toward the door. "Go on."

I left the shirt on the bar.

I left the tea half drunk.

Outside, the rain had slowed to a mist, and I stood on the curb and read my phone.

Braden had written four times.

Come home and apologize to my mother, and I will forget tonight.

Then: Don't be dramatic, Joanna.

Then: You have nowhere else.

The fourth message was only my name.

I didn't answer any of them.

I was walking toward Route 9 with my arms around myself when my screen lit again.

It was Daphne.

Where are you? I'm coming to get you. Please don't be alone tonight.

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