Page 70 of The Hometown Heartbreaker

I opened the truck door for her, waited until she was settled before sliding behind the wheel. I wanted to say something profound, or at least clever, but all I managed was, “It’s really good to see you again, Sadie.”

She looked at me sideways, her hair catching bits of streetlamp. “It’s good to be seen.”

I pulled away and decided it was time to take her to the place I’d bought for both of us. The house that had been our dream. It was time to take her home.

27

HARD TRUTHS AND HARD COUNTERTOPS

Sadie

The thing about riding in Dawson’s truck was that you always knew exactly what you were going to get: hard lefts, hard stops, one-word sentences, and a silence so loud it filled your head with questions. All the years of second-guessing myself around this man, and I’d finally made my peace with that. I could do hard lefts. I could do loaded silence.

What I could not do—what nothing prepared me for—was the moment the most tight-lipped man in Sutter County turned off the radio, white-knuckled the steering wheel, and said, “Gio and Vicki told me what really happened on Grad Night.”

I’d spent the better part of my adult life building a tidy little story around that night, too much booze, bad judgment, the kind of blurry mistake you bury under enough years that it starts to look like fiction. But I was wrong. Apparently, Gio had shown up at the ranch the week before, restless in that way that meant something big was eating him alive, and he’d unloaded every last bit of it.

Jeremy had planned it. The roofie in the beer was a prank gone sideways. The only problem—the one detail that rewrote everything I thought I knew—was that Donovan had never touched that drink.

Dawson had.

And Vicki was just another pawn in Jeremy Miller’s sick and twisted game of human chess. She’d been told Donovan Valentine was waiting for her, only to find a very passed out Dawson Lockhart.

A cold bloom of shock spread through my chest, radiating to my fingertips, and then the slow, stinging burn of something like betrayal followed in its wake. All these years, I’d carried around my own narrative, that Dawson had been unfaithful, on purpose or not, and that I’d been right to leave, right to build a life out of self-respect and preservation. But now everything was unsettled, like someone had shaken the snow globe and all the pieces were suspended and drifting, not landing anywhere clear.

“How did Gio even find out?” I asked, my voice sounding weirdly flat, like it wasn’t broadcasting at full volume.

I could see why Vicki hadn’t said anything. She thought she’d gotten set up and didn’t want to make herself look any worse, although it would have been nice to know nothing happened between them twelve years ago.

“He overheard Jeremy talking about it,” Dawson explained, not taking his eyes off the road. “Back when he was working construction. Jeremy was bragging about it at lunch.”

I tried to picture Gio at seventeen, Dawson’s best friend, overhearing that and not doing anything about it and doing nothing. “So Gio’s known this whole time, and he never told you?” I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Gio was the one person who’d always been on my side, no matter what.

“Yeah,” Dawson confirmed, like the syllable fought its way out against a lifetime of holding things back. He didn’t look over, but I could see every muscle in his jaw cut and tense, an entire argument happening between his teeth.

The world outside was a monochrome blur as we drove. I felt the chaos of it all—what I’d just learned about Gio, about Jeremy, about the night that had changed my entire life—rattling around my chest like pennies in a dryer. I wanted to ask a hundred questions, but the first one that came out sounded small, even to me,

“Why?” I said, and the word was so flat it barely cleared my lips. “Why did he wait all this time to tell you?”

Dawson didn’t shrug, but he didn’t need to. “It’s complicated.”

I gave him a sidelong glance, searching his face for even a hint of the old Dawson—my Dawson—the one who would have turned that into a three-act joke, drawn it out to see me laugh. “What? Like a Facebook relationship status?”

He huffed, just the hint of a smile, and it hit me that this was the first time he’d laughed all night. “Something like that.”

“Are you guys okay?” I asked, meaning him and Gio, but really wanting to know the answer for him and me. Would he forgive me for not knowing he would never do that to me?

Dawson considered a long time, then nodded once. “Yeah. We’re fine, or we will be.” It sounded final, so I let it die there.

For a few miles, the only sound was the hum of the engine, tense and steady.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the chain of events, all the things that would have been different if any one of us had just said something out loud. I let it churn, and when I spoke, it came out in a rush. “What are you going to do?”

He looked at me, this time meeting my eyes just long enough for the question to land. “About Gio?”

“No, Jeremy,” I said, the words rolling off my tongue like gravel. It surprised me how harsh I sounded. “Are you going to press charges?”

“No,” he stated flatly.