Page 28 of My Girl to Ruin

I don’t know how long I stand there. Long enough that the light changes.

My chest feels tight. As if something inside me is trying to break through and I’m holding it back with everything I have. I drag a hand down my face slowly, exhaling through my nose as I force myself to move. I need to do something because standing still is worse.

That’s when I see the folder. It’s sitting on the counter, green, with LEGAL STUDIES across the front in her handwriting. Her coursework, probably notes. She must have set it down when she came in.

Except she doesn’t bring coursework here. I asked her about that once, early on, and she went pink and said she can’t concentrate around me, and I can still see her face when she said it. Pain and regret flare in my chest as I recall the look in her eyes when she left earlier.

If that’s the last time I see—

Stop. Just stop.

I step forward and pick up the folder, flipping it open. Not lecture notes. Legal documents. A class action lawsuit. Two hundred and six plaintiffs against a parts manufacturer over eight years of components they tested, documented, and shipped anyway.

I know the company name. I know it the way I know my own hands. We bought from them for six years. Bardon Automotive,

I sit down on the floor where she was sitting.

I read the incident schedule twice. Eleven crashes settled quietly before anybody thought to consolidate. Steering assemblies. Tie rods.

And the thing I’ve kept behind a locked door at the back of my head for four years starts kicking at it.

I remember the wheel going light in my hands.

I’ve never once said that out loud to anybody who wrote it down, because by the time anyone was listening I’d already been told what happened, and the man telling me had a badge and a report. I had a feeling and a dead best friend.

I jump up and cross the apartment, digging through the drawer where I shoved a stack of paperwork—prison release forms, hospital discharge orders, the official crash report. I pull it out with a little more force than necessary and start flipping through it.

I stop at the police report. Photos. Damage assessment. Diagrams with arrows on them. Details I tried not to look at too closely back then because I blamed myself. But now I do. My eyes land on one of the images. And everything stills.

It’s a close shot of the front left. The outer tie rod end is in frame, snapped clean through.

I’ve held a thousand of those. Tyler and I installed enough new parts to know what they look like, both new and after they’ve become worn. I know what one looks like when a crash breaks it—bright metal, torn edges, a fracture that runs whichever way the force went.

This isn’t that. Two-thirds of the break surface is dark. Worn smooth. Polished and discolored the way steel gets when it’s been failing slowly under a load for a long time. There’s a thin crescent of clean bright metal on the rest of it, where the last of it finally let go.

That part was cracked before we ever left the shop.

It didn’t break in the crash. It caused it.

I sit on my kitchen floor with a photograph in my hand while four years rearrange themselves around it.

I wasn’t driving recklessly. I was slowing down. And a component I installed with my own hands, out of a box with a name on it that nobody in that courtroom asked a single question about, came apart at seventy miles an hour with Tyler in the passenger seat.

Not my fault.

The words don’t land. They can’t yet—four years of the opposite is a lot of concrete. But something shifts underneath it.

Under that, though, is the part that actually gets me on my feet. Tatum brought me this. She walked in here carrying the one thing that might undo the worst day of my life, and I sent her out that door believing she’s a debt, an obligation I’ve been paying for.

I file all these thoughts in another corner of my mind. Instead, I straighten slowly, the paper still in my hand as I reach for my phone with the other. Greg. I hit call without hesitating. He picks up on the second ring.

“It’s me,” I say. “That feeling I always had about the car.” I look down at the photograph. “It was never just a feeling. I need you to look at something.”

Chapter Eight

Tatum

It’s been a week. A long, quiet, empty week.