All Chapters of Addicted to Roseanne {GL}: Chapter 21 - Chapter 29

29 Chapters

Ten

Chapter Twenty — TenRoseanne's POVI did not wait for her to promise.I already knew she would not do anything stupid before tonight. Elle did not make reckless moves. She made calculated ones, and the calculation required information she did not have yet. That was the only reason Jake was still untouched.I went home and made it through dinner.My father was tired from travel and my mother had made pasta and kept the conversation neutral, the way she did when she was managing the room. We talked about school, about the weather turning, about my father's trip. Nobody mentioned Jake. Nobody mentioned Elle. The name sat under the table like something we had all agreed not to step on.After dinner my father asked me to sit with him in the study for a minute.I sat. He closed the door and stood by the window with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the dark street. The lamp on his desk was on and it made the room feel smaller and quieter than it was."Thursday still works for you?"

patient

Chapter Twenty-One — PatientElle's POVI let it ring.Not because I was scared. Because picking up a call from Vince at ten fifteen on a Monday night without knowing why he was calling was a mistake. You did not walk into a room you had not scoped first. You did not answer a question before you knew what was being asked.Roseanne watched me. She did not say anything.It rang out. Went to voicemail. Thirty seconds later a text came through from the same number.Call me back. Tonight.I read it and put the phone face down on my thigh."He doesn't usually call this late," I said."What does that mean.""It means something changed." I ran through the options. Either he had found out something that made him nervous about waiting until Thursday, or someone had said something to him, or he was just applying pressure to see what moved. Loan sharks worked on fear. Fear made people do stupid things like run or borrow from someone else to cover the first debt. He wanted my mother rattled."He d

Recording

Chapter Twenty-Two — RecordingElle's POVI read the text twice.Then I took Roseanne's phone and read it a third time, slower, the way you read something when you are hoping the words will rearrange themselves into something less serious.They did not.Jake had recorded the conversation. The parking lot confrontation, or the call after, or the morning I showed up at his door. One of those three. Maybe more than one. He had been scared and backed into a corner and scared people in corners did things like hit record and wait for a moment to use it.I had walked into every one of those conversations thinking I was the one holding leverage."How much did he play," I said.Roseanne was already typing back to Becca. "She says enough. The part where you mentioned his dad's business partners. The part where you said you'd go to the school and the police.""He cut it strategically.""Obviously." She kept typing. "She says people were calling it blackmail. That you threatened him to protect me

Richard

Chapter Twenty-Three — RichardElle's POVI played the voicemail a second time.Same voice. Same measured tone. No threat in it, no edge, just a man who was used to people returning his calls because not returning them had consequences he did not need to spell out.I sat in the car for a few minutes after. The street was empty and the neighborhood was asleep and I had Richard Harlan's voice sitting in my phone like a live thing.The smart move was to not call back. To sleep on it, talk to Roseanne in the morning, maybe think about whether I needed someone older in my corner before I walked into whatever Richard Harlan considered a conversation. Paul Calvert came to mind. A man who had already called Richard out once today.I did not call back.I drove home, checked the house, found my mother gone to Aunt Karen's the way I had asked. The rooms were quiet and clean in the way they only were when she was not in them. I made toast, stood at the kitchen counter and ate it, and thought thro

Mother

Chapter Twenty-Four — MotherElle's POVI read the text four times.Each time it said the same thing. Four words, no punctuation at the end, the kind of sentence that did not need it because the weight was already there.I know about your mother.My first thought was practical. What exactly did he know, and how. My mother was not a public figure. She was a divorced woman with a drinking problem and a loan shark debt in a mid-sized town. Nothing about her was remarkable except the specific shape of her trouble, and that trouble was not in any record Richard Harlan should have access to.Which meant someone told him. Or he had someone who found things out. A man with political and business ties did not dig through people's backgrounds himself. He made a call and someone else dug.My second thought was Roseanne, already in class, not knowing this had landed.I did not go after her. She was in the middle of a school day and this was not something I was going to drop through a text. I went

Meridian

Chapter Twenty-Five — MeridianElle's POVThursday came faster than I was ready for.I spent Wednesday clean. No contact with Richard, no contact with Jake, no drama. I picked up Tony's wages in the morning, three weeks at once, nine hundred and change in an envelope he handed me without making it a thing. Roseanne's transfer landed in my account by noon. By two o'clock I had twenty-seven hundred in cash and an appointment with Vince set for three.Vince's guy met me in the parking lot of a laundromat on Crescent, which was apparently how these things worked. I handed over the envelope. He counted it without looking at me. Texted someone. Looked up."Remainder by the thirty-first," he said."That's the arrangement."He nodded and walked back to his car and that was it. No drama, no threat, nothing cinematic. Just a transaction. The remaining fifteen hundred sat in my account as a number I would figure out before the month ended.I drove home and stood in the shower for ten minutes and

Brunch

Chapter Twenty-Six — BrunchRoseanne's POVMy mother had made three things by the time I got home from school.A lemon cake, a tray of roasted vegetables nobody had asked for, and the particular atmosphere that filled our kitchen when she was anxious and had decided that productivity was the solution. She moved between the counter and the stove with that focused energy she got at dinner parties when she was managing twelve people and two dietary restrictions. There were four of us eating tonight."She called me this morning," my mother said without turning around. "Sandra Harlan. About Easter. I didn't know what to say so I said we'd have to check the calendar.""That's fine, Mom.""It's not fine. We've had Easter plans for six weeks." She turned around. Her expression was the careful one, the one that meant she had a lot of feelings organized into a line and was releasing them one at a time. "I've known Sandra for four years. Book club, the school fundraiser. She brought us soup when

Becca

Chapter Twenty-Seven — BeccaRoseanne's POVI took my phone from my mother and looked at the screen.Four messages from Becca. The first three were texts, sent two minutes apart. The fourth was a voice note.The texts said: Call me. Seriously call me. Rose please pick up.I played the voice note with the phone pressed to my ear. Becca's voice came through fast and slightly breathless, the way she got when something had already happened and she was catching up to it.Jake threw a party tonight. Like an actual party, his parents' house, and he played the recording again but this time it wasn't just fifteen people it was everyone. And he added to it. He had someone edit it or something because there's new stuff in it that wasn't there Monday and it sounds worse and people are filming it off the speaker and sending it around. I'm outside right now. Call me.I lowered the phone.Elle was still on the porch. She read my face and held out her hand for the phone. I gave it to her. She played

played

Chapter Twenty-Eight — PlayedElle's POVThe kitchen went completely still.Paul looked at me. My mother looked at me. Roseanne looked at me with an expression that was somewhere between surprise and something that might have been relief."You recorded it," Paul said."When I went to his house Sunday morning I had my phone in my jacket pocket. I hit record before I knocked." I pulled my phone out and set it on the table. "I did the same thing before I called him the night the link went up. I had no way of knowing then that he was doing the same thing. I just knew I needed something real if it ever came to this."Paul looked at the phone. Then at me. "You've had this since Sunday.""Yes.""And you didn't use it.""I didn't need to. Until now."He was quiet for a moment. His hands were still folded on the table. My mother had turned the radio off at some point without me noticing and the kitchen was very quiet."Play it," he said.I opened the file. The recording was forty-three minutes

1 2 3

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP