Chapter 6 - The One Who Didn't Take the Deal
Roan Delaney didn't do what he'd been asked to do.
He read that note at my own dinner table, fork gripped white-knuckled in his fist, and he sat there through twenty-five more minutes of forced small talk, and then he went home and didn't sleep a single hour that night, and at ten to nine the next morning, he handed it to me in a parking lot.
"She asked me not to," he told me. "I want you to know I sat with that for about six hours straight, because she's a kid, and she asked me directly, and doing this felt like a betrayal of her trust."
Then he said the thing I will be grateful to him for until the day I die.
"But she's sixteen, and she's carrying this entirely on her own, and somebody had to finally be the adult who wouldn't take the deal."
Three men took the deal before him. And I want to say this clearly, because when I've told this story out loud, people get instantly angry at Grady and Lowell and Casimir, and that anger is completely misplaced.
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Every one of them was shown a photograph of their own front door by a teenage girl and quietly told to walk away. Every single one of them did exactly what any reasonable, frightened person would do in that position.
Roan is simply the one who didn't — and the only real difference is that he'd known me for six years already, and knew Sorrel's name before he ever sat down across from her.
