Free One Night in the Ice Storm by Noelle Adams

you’re talking about.”
    Brad
cleared his throat. “David never wanted to dump you back then. He was crazy
about you. Still is. He just didn’t have a choice.”
    “I
don’t understand. Why would he…” She trailed off, wiping tears from her face
and trying to force the world to make sense again.
    “I
promised I wouldn’t tell you. I promised him.”
    “You
have to tell me,” she almost pleaded. “I have to know.”
    When
he still didn’t respond, she was on the edge of tears again. “Please tell me.
You have to tell me. This is my heart, Brad. It’s my heart.”
    He
let out another thick breath. “Okay. Fine. It was Grandpa.”
    “What?”
    “Grandpa
found out about you and David. That summer, I mean.”
    “But..”
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think, even in the force of her chaotic
emotion. “But what would he do—”
    “What
do you think he did? He found David and told him he had to stop seeing you.”
    “But
David wouldn’t have listened. He didn’t care about what anyone thought. If he
really cared about me—”
    “This
is Grandpa we’re talking about, remember? I wasn’t just an empty warning or an
idle threat. He made sure David knew that, if he didn’t stop seeing you, he would
bring David up on statutory rape charges.”
    “What?”
she choked.
    “You
heard me. You were seventeen. He was nineteen. That’s technically against the
law in Virginia.”
    “But
the courts would never—”
    “In
this county? If Grandpa was the one pressing charges? You know better than
that. David could have gone to prison for a year and it would follow him the
rest of his life. And that wasn’t even all. You know those rumors about David’s
mom? Well, Grandpa threatened to—”
    “Oh
God,” Rachel breathed.
    “Maybe
if he was the only one threatened, he would have risked it. But you don’t
expect him to make his mother go through that as well, just so he could keep
dating—”
    “No,
of course not!  But I can’t believe Grandpa would have done that.”
    “You
know Grandpa as well as I do. He could be great sometimes, but sometimes he was
just a bastard. I swear he did it. You were his princess, and he didn’t want
David anywhere close to you.”
    She
was silent for a long time, trying to process this truth, this explanation that
rewrote the whole story of her life. “So he…he didn’t want to dump me like
that?”
    “ Want to? Listen to me, it killed him. It tore him up. But what else could he have
done.”
    “Why
didn’t he just tell me? I would have understood—I really would have understood.
And I wouldn’t have had to hate him all this time.”
    “Part
of Grandpa’s terms was that no one could know—especially you.”
    “How
did you find out?”
    “He
wasn’t going to tell me either. I went over there to…well, to beat him up for
how he’d treated you.” Brad sounded as awkward about this confession as if he’d
committed a guilty sin. “Because of how he acted, I figured out something else
must be going on, so I wouldn’t leave until he told me.”
    “Why
didn’t you tell me ? All this time, you’ve known what I thought, and you
haven’t bothered to tell me—”
    “I
told you before. I promised David I’d never tell you. I shouldn’t have told you
now.”
    “Yes,
you should have.” She was still confused, overwhelmed, and far too
emotional—but something like hope had sprung to life inside her. “But I still
don’t understand. I’ve been a legal age for years now—we could have had a
relationship and no one could stop us. David’s mom is dead, and Grandpa’s been
dead more than a year. Why couldn’t he have told me himself, if he was still
interested…interested in…” She trailed off.
    “It’s
your own fault, you little idiot. You put on such a good show of not caring
that he believed it.”
    The
whole world seemed to freeze. “What?”
    “He
believed it. He thought you didn’t care that much about him, that it hadn’t
been