Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 81281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81281 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
“Come on, Locke.” Her tone shifts again. Softer and encouraging. “I’m more than just my job with the Wildfire and you know that. What we are to each other—what this has been—you know I’m with you. Not just physically, but I hope you know emotionally.”
I look at her and I can see she means it.
“You can trust me,” she says, and that’s where it all goes sideways.
Trust.
The word drops between us with a thud and my blood runs cold.
Trust.
She says it like it’s simple. Like it’s just a word, just an offering, just the obvious next step for two people perhaps starting to fall for each other. She says it in that naive way someone would who has never had it weaponized.
I look at her sitting in that chair with her careful eyes and the mandate from Patrick Rowe that started all of this, and a vault that I’ve been keeping sealed for a long damn time cracks open within me.
“You want to talk about trust?” I grit out. She clocks the difference in my posture and my tone and goes very still. “You want to throw that word around and think because you and I got naked, that you can assume it exists between us?”
“Locke—”
“No,” I snarl in fury. “You leveraged our personal relationship to get me to open up, and now you’re going to hear it.” I lean forward, elbows on knees, and I’m aware that my hands are not entirely steady. “Let me tell you what trust got me. Adam Belleau came to me when we were seventeen. My very best friend. Really, my brother. Came to me in the middle of the night, scared like I’d never seen him, and he told me that our coach was abusing him and had been for months.”
Livia gasps. Yeah, I know it’s shocking.
“I told Adam to report it. Begged him to, but he refused. He was ashamed, said he couldn’t, said the stigma would destroy everything, the team, his career before it started. He begged me not to say anything.” I look at my hands, then back up to Livia. “So I didn’t. I honored it. I kept his secret and I watched him fall apart. I kept my mouth shut because he asked me to and because I thought that was what trust looked like.”
“But you didn’t keep your silence forever,” she guesses.
I shake my head. “No, not forever. I suspected it was happening to another player. A younger player. I saw that coach and another kid… in the corridor outside the locker room one day, and I just knew… it was happening again.”
My voice has gone distant. I’ve never told this story to anyone, and I feel like it’s happening from far away. But she pushed it. She forced it, and now she’s getting it. “I knew I couldn’t keep my mouth shut anymore. Not for Adam’s sake, not for anyone’s sake. There was another kid and I was the only person who knew. So I reported it.”
I finally look up, not realizing my gaze had dropped again.
Livia’s face is completely open. No professional composure, no careful management. Just a woman hearing a terrible story and listening objectively but with clear sorrow. “What was the fallout?” she asks.
“The coach resigned,” I say bitterly. “It was all done quietly and no charges were filed. No accountability. Just—gone. Packed his office and disappeared while the investigation was still running and nobody pushed hard enough to follow it and that was the end of it.” Heat flushes through me. “He walked away clean.”
“That’s not fallout,” she says. “What happened to you? To Adam?”
Pushing. Always pushing.
I exhale, helpless to reel any of this back in. “The team needed somewhere to put it. Someone to be the problem and that was me.”
“Adam,” she says. Barely above a whisper.
“Adam told them I was lying.” The words come out with a terrible flatness. “Stood up in front of the entire team and said he never told me anything. Said I fabricated the whole thing. Said he didn’t know why I’d done it—maybe I had a problem with the coach, maybe I was angling for something, maybe I was just the kind of person who burns things down.” I look at the window. “His exact words were that I was the kind of person who couldn’t be trusted.”
The silence in the room is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“He denied it,” I say, feeling the surge of anger welling inside me. “Everything he told me in confidence, every word of it, he stood up in front of thirty people and denied it. And they believed him because it was easier to believe him. Because the alternative—that their coach had been doing what I said he’d been doing—was not a truth anyone wanted to look at. So they looked at me instead.”