Page 25 of My Girl to Ruin

Of course, he knew everything. People who pay tuition get reports.

I picked something else to think about instead. Something that hadn’t happened yet and might.

You. Graduating.

My hand comes up over my mouth.

He wasn’t imagining it. He was funding it.

And underneath all of it, something colder is assembling itself.

He wouldn’t see me. Not at the hospital, not once in four years of visitation, not a letter, not a call. He sent money and nothing else. And then I turned up at his door and made it impossible to do anything but let me in. Now, I’m on his kitchen floor finding out that the only relationship we’ve ever had is one where he pays, and I don’t get told the truth.

Where does a man in prison get four years of tuition?

The question forms, and I push it away because I’m not ready for the answer. Yet some part of me already has it.

I’m still on the floor when I hear his key in the lock.

Chapter Seven

Lachlan

I walk home the long way.

I’ve been doing that lately. Twenty extra minutes walking through streets I’ve got no reason to be on, and today I spent all of them on a question Tatum asked me yesterday that I hung up rather than answer.

Are you going back to the shop? Working on cars again?

There’s an empty repair shop on Delano with a roll-up door and a lease sign that’s been in the window since March. I’ve walked past it four times this week. Today, I stopped and wrote the number on the back of my hand.

I don’t know what I’d do with it. I know what I’d need, which isn’t the same thing. But for the first time since a judge read a sentence out loud to me, I stood on a sidewalk and thought about a year from now, and the thought didn’t slide straight off.

I’m going to tell her tonight. That’s the plan. Get home, call her, tell her about the empty space, and let her be as pleased about it as I know she’s going to be.

Then I open my door.

The first thing I notice when I walk in is the eerie silence. It’s almost like a feeling of doom. My hand tightens slightly around my keys as I shut the door behind me, my eyes scanning the space automatically. Then I see her.

Tatum is on my kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets and her legs folded under her, and there’s paper everywhere. In her lap. Around her. A stack of it squared at the corners beside her knee, exactly the way I left it.

I know what it is before I’ve finished shutting the door.

Shit.

She looks up, and the look on her face hits me like a gut punch. It’s not just anger. It’s hurt—deep, raw, and unfiltered.

“What is this?” she asks, her voice shaking as she lifts a page.

I stop a few feet away from her, my jaw tightening as I exhale slowly. I should’ve locked them away.

“Tatum…”

“Don’t,” she cuts in quickly, her eyes glassy now, her grip tightening around the documents. “Don’t say my name like everything’s fine. Just tell me what this is.”

There’s no point denying it. “It’s exactly what it looks like,” I say, my voice flat.

Her breath hitches. “You’ve been paying for everything?” she asks, disbelief bleeding into every word. “My tuition. My rent. All of it?”