Griff’s silence is heavy, he watches me for a long beat. Then he nods once. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “That part’s not wrong.”
My phone buzzes again, and my pulse spikes.
It’s a text from Knox, but I don’t open it.
I can’t.
Because if I do, I’ll fall apart. I stare out at The Brew House doors like I’m looking at the last moment before a storm hits.
Griff’s voice is quiet beside me. “Once you start this,” he says, “there’s no going back.”
I swallow hard. “I know,” I whisper. And for the first time in months, I don’t feel relieved.
I feel the bomb is armed, and my finger is on the trigger.
Griff doesn’t speak right away.
He sits rigid in the passenger seat, forearms braced on his thighs, staring straight ahead like he’s mapping out every possible version of the disaster I just set in motion. His jaw is tight. His shoulders are locked. He looks like a man preparing to take a hit meant for someone else.
Which he is.
“I need you to hear something,” he says finally, still not looking at me.
I brace instinctively.
“If you do this,” he continues, voice measured now, stripped of heat, “you don’t get to decide how people react. You don’t get to manage the fallout or soften the landing.”
I nod once. “I know.”
“You don’t get to explain your way out of it either,” he adds. “There are no right words to make this better.”
“I know,” I repeat, quieter.
He exhales through his nose. “Good. Because the fastest way to lose what little control you still have is to pretend this ends clean.”
That lands harder than the anger ever could have.
Griff finally turns to look at me, and for a second, he doesn’t look like my older brother or the man who’s always stepped in front of me when things got ugly.
He looks tired.
“You ready to be the villain in someone else’s story?” he asks.
My chest tightens. “Yes, because… I already am.”
He studies my face like he’s checking for cracks. “You’re not wrong,” he says after a beat. “But once this comes out, you won’t get to be misunderstood quietly anymore.”
I swallow. “I’m not asking for quiet.”
He nods, once. Sharp and final.
“Okay,” he says again, and this time it sounds like commitment instead of defeat. “Then we do this the right way.”
My pulse stutters. “There is no right way.”
“There is when you stop hiding,” he counters. “You don’t run. You don’t spiral. You don’t let Mom and Dad corner you into rewriting reality.”
A humorless laugh slips out of me. “Good luck with that.”
