Page 88 of Hypnotized By Love

“You know, don’t you?” she asked in a soft voice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“I came over here to find out the truth,” I said, my hands still trembling. I hadn’t been able to calm down ever since Mason had told me about Bridget.

She didn’t meet my eyes and shifted her weight back and forth from one foot to the other. I had never seen her anything but supremely confident in herself, and it was disconcerting. “It was me. I told everyone you were sleeping with Mr. Landry.”

I let out a sound of disbelief, not able to stomach that she had done this to me. Part of me had desperately hoped for another explanation. “I don’t understand why.”

She audibly gulped and then admitted, “I was having an affair with him.”

I had not been expecting that. “What?”

“When Mason and I saw the two of you together after that debate, I was so angry and jealous. I knew Greg—I mean, Mr. Landry—flirted with other girls, and it infuriated me when I saw him with you. My friend Olivia found me crying in the bathroom. I was sobbing about it, and she started to put the pieces together, and I realized that I was about to get caught. So I lied. I told her that you and Mr. Landry werehooking up because I knew it would keep people from looking at our relationship too closely.”

“I ...” I was in such shock that I didn’t know what to say.

“I did it because I didn’t want my mom to find out. I knew how angry she would have been.”

“As she should be! You were a child, and he was a grown adult. It was wrong.”

She nodded, tears forming in her eyes and falling slowly down her cheeks. “I know. I know it was. At the time I thought I loved him, but you’re right—it never should have happened.”

While she had been taken advantage of, no one had forced her to throw me under the bus. And it might have been a very good thing for her if adults in her life had known. “So you lied about me so that your mom wouldn’t find out?”

“She was a single mom and was so overprotective of me. She worried all the time that bad things would happen to me, and if I had told her about Mr. Landry, it would have destroyed her, and I couldn’t do that. She didn’t deserve that kind of pain.”

“But I did?”

“No, of course not.” She reached out like she wanted to hug me, but her arms dropped when I moved away from her. “Then when he got fired, I figured the gossip would eventually die down and there would be some new scandal that would come along to replace it.”

“It didn’t,” I reminded her. “It was traumatizing for me. People judged me for years. They still do. You destroyed my reputation.”

“I know! And when you went away to college, I told myself that it would be okay, and I pushed the whole thing out of my mind. When you moved back here, I was going to tell you about it. But then we started spending time together, and I really liked you and Sierra, and I didn’t want our friendship to be ruined. I tried so many times to tell you, but I always chickened out. The longer it went on, the worse it got.”

While I understood that, she still should have told me. “Were you just hoping I’d never find out?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think things through,” she said with a shrug. “I am so, so sorry, Savannah. I know there’s nothing I can say that will ever make this up to you. I know that it wasn’t right or fair, and I should probably apologize to Mason, too. Because I made a bad decision at a terrible time, and part of the reason I didn’t tell you after we came back to Playa Placida was because I knew once I told you the truth, I was going to have to tell my mom so that she’d hear it from me first, and I didn’t want to break her heart. I didn’t know how to tell her. I still don’t.”

While I had a lot of compassion for how hard that would be for her and her mom, they weren’t the only people involved in this. “I’ve blamed Mason for that rumor for years. You ruined my relationship with him.”

Her voice cracked as she said, “I didn’t know! I had no idea you blamed Mason for the rumor until you told me that night at the restaurant. I felt so unbelievably guilty that I had messed that up for you, because Sierra told me how in love with him you were in high school, and it was obvious that he feels the same way about you now. I hated myself for being the reason you weren’t together.”

There was a sharp, aching pain that throbbed at the base of my stomach. Bridget had been lying to me for a very long time. I understood why, though. What had happened to her was wrong, and as a teenager she probably didn’t have the maturity or the tools to deal with it. I couldn’t blame her for that. She was desperate and had made a stupid decision. I’d certainly done that enough in my own life that I couldn’t be mad at somebody else for it.

But then I thought about what she had taken from me. All those years I might have had with Mason, how happy we could have been, the way she’d hurt both of our families by causing the anger I had toward him ...

I didn’t want to be upset with her. I’d spent the last six years furious with Mason, hating him, and Sierra was right. It was a heavy burden I’d been struggling with for a long time, weighing me down. I didn’t want that to happen again. I wanted there to be a way to move forward, but in this moment? I didn’t have the answers.

I took a step back, standing on the top step of the porch. “This whole thing sucks. I’m sorry that happened to you. A teacher shouldn’t have preyed on you, and I’m sorry that you were scared to tell people. I get how hard that must have been for you. But I don’t know how to move past what happened. I think I should go.”

“Savannah, wait. You have every right to be angry with me—” she said, but I interrupted her.

Despite my not wanting to be mad, fury rose up inside me. “I’m so glad I have your permission to be angry. It wasn’t just me and Mason that you hurt. You’ve hurt my family, too. I sacrificed time with them because of what you did, staying away because I blamed him. It ate away at my soul to be accused of something I knew I hadn’t done, and to think a person I cared so much about had done that to me? It made me not trust people. Your actions made me a more negative person than I’d ever been before.”

“I did try to fix it. I went to the police and made an anonymous report against Mr. Landry, showing them evidence. I wasn’t willing to testify, but it got him fired. When he landed a new job at a different school, he started texting inappropriately with a student, only it was an undercover cop, and he was arrested. He was convicted and is in prison.”

That I had not known. “I’m glad that you spoke up so that he didn’t have the chance to hurt anyone else.”

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