All Chapters of Addicted to Roseanne {GL}: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

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?"

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

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

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

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