If the Red Slipper Fits... by Shirley Jump (9)

CHAPTER NINE

THE factory was humming with a new energy, one Caleb hadn’t seen in years. As he walked the floor, he heard the buzz from the employees—they were overwhelmed by the additional work, but excited about the new designs, ones that he and his team had put together with inspiration from Sarah’s shoe design. He’d tacked it up in the conference room and told them to build the collection around the satin high heel. At first, the team had thought he was crazy, then they’d gotten to work and had dozens of new ideas by the end of the day. That buzz extended to Caleb, too, and his steps held a new energy. He had a good feeling about this collection. A damned good feeling.

And it was all thanks to Sarah Griffin. If he hadn’t asked her opinion, he’d be putting out the same tired product as before. But that wasn’t what he thought about when he thought of her. No, his mind drifted to her smile, her eyes, the way her face lit up when she laughed. It had been years since he’d spent his days thinking about a woman, her presence lingering in the back of every sentence he spoke, every move he made. He was already wondering how long it would be until he saw her again.

“I think you’ve done it,” Martha said.

“Done what?”

“Brought this company back from the dead.” Then Martha’s blue gaze softened and she laid a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Caleb. Bad joke.”

“It’s fine.” He cleared his throat. “I’m glad to see things are back on track. I really think these new designs will do it for us. They’re bold, bright and—”

“Not quite what your mother would have done.”

Caleb stopped walking and looked at Martha. “What do you mean, not quite what she would have done? That’s exactly what I was going for.”

“Lenora was an amazing designer, don’t get me wrong, but she had a tendency to run a one-woman shop. She was the vision for this company, the one who created everything herself. She chose every element, right down to the thread they used in the sample pieces. She had designers, yes, but they weren’t used for much more than translating her ideas onto paper.”

Caleb thought back to the Saturdays he’d spent here as a little boy, playing trucks on the floor of the very office he now occupied. The summers he had spent working here, both while he was in high school and during college. Martha was right—it had been the Lenora show, every year. Every collection.

His mother’s creative genius was unmatched, except by her need to control every element of the production process. He’d thought it was because she wanted to ensure quality and perfect execution of her vision, but he realized now that it had been part of her personality. As well as something that hurt the company in the long run because LL Designs lost one too many smart and talented people who were frustrated because they weren’t being heard or utilized. “Do you think that’s why two of them left just be fore she got ill?”

Martha nodded. “They wanted a chance to shine on their own. To actually design.”

“I can understand that,” Caleb said.

“The designs you and the team came up with yesterday are collaborative,” Martha said. “They have that feel of…” She paused, searching for the right words. “…being created to appeal to a broad audience.”

“You trying to tell me nicely that they’re cookie-cutter?”

Martha laughed. “Not at all. Rather a wider variety of offerings. Something for everyone. And, you’ve managed to incorporate the flair that LL Designs is known for. Not to mention, you weren’t afraid to bring in an outsider for an opinion. Brilliant, if you ask me.”

Caleb basked in the praise. For a year, he’d been struggling in the top spot. Most days he felt like he had no idea what the hell he was doing. He’d come over to the company from a totally different field with a lot of good intentions and not a lot of fashion experience. Coupled with the constant worry about his mother, the stress of the last year had been a heavy load for Caleb to bear, and there were days when he’d thought he couldn’t do it one more second.

But now, it seemed things were finally turning around. As if he had hit his stride. “I have Sarah Griffin to thank for that. She got me thinking in a new direction. Well, not new, but rather, the way I used to think when I was a creative director. If one brain isn’t doing the job, bring in outside brains and tap the talent you already have. We’d have meetings once a month in the pit, as we called it. No idea was too off-the-wall or bad. We found that a couple hours of collaborative thinking brought out some of the coolest ideas.”

“So how is this ‘collaboration’ going?” Martha asked, putting air quotes around the word.

“Great. You’re seeing it at work right now.” He waved toward the busy factory floor. “And over there, they’re starting the prototype for the shoe line. It should be—”

“I meant with Sarah Griffin.”

That was a question that required a much more complicated answer than the one he’d just given. How were things with him and Sarah?

Well, if those kisses were any indication, things between him and Sarah were hot—and heating more by the day. She was the first woman in a long time—maybe ever—that he found himself looking forward to seeing. Wondered about when she wasn’t with him.

Sarah Griffin had gotten under his skin, and he was damned glad. He was thinking about things he hadn’t thought about in a long time—like a future.

“That’s…developing,” Caleb said.

Martha chuckled. “Is that a smile I see on your face? Are we going to have some Lewis babies running around here someday soon?”

Caleb backed up, putting up his hands to ward off Martha’s words. “Whoa. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All I did was kiss her.” A foolish grin filled his face, and a lilt of joy simmered in his gut. “Twice.”

Martha’s hand landed on his shoulder again. “I think you’ve changed more than just the company, Caleb. And if you ask me, it was about damned time.”

 

The scoop broke over the next day. Headlines everywhere, blaring at Sarah as she walked to work.

Sarah’s steps sputtered to a stop as she took in the headlines from several publications, the words hitting her like punches. Each publication said pretty much the same thing. Sarah knew how it worked—one magazine got the story, the others rushed to blast the same scoop on their pages. It was an incestuous business, with each trying to top the other for better newsstand sales. She skimmed the competition’s front pages, thinking in her head about which ones had hit the street first, who had the earliest deadlines, trying to figure out the pack leader for the story. She stopped when she got to Behind the Scenes.

Sarah gasped, yanked the tabloid off the pile, and skimmed the article. According to the “source,” one of the employees at the rehab center in New Jersey where Lenora Lewis was being treated, the famous designer had been in a coma for a year, while Caleb Lewis went about his life. “He just ignores her,” the staffer said. “I’m sure it pains her.”

Lenora was in a coma? Not retired at all? And Caleb hadn’t told her? Why?

“You going to buy that, miss?” the tall dark-haired man behind the counter asked, gesturing at the tabloid. “Because this ain’t a library, you know.”

“Uh, yes.” Sarah dug in her pocket for a few bills, then added the other tabloids to the pile before paying. She headed to work, flipping open the article from Behind the Scenes to read that first.

She read it twice, three times, sure that it wasn’t Lenora’s name she was seeing at all. But no, it was. Caleb had kept a huge secret from her. There was only one reason why he would do such a thing.

Because despite everything they had gone through together in the week and a half they had spent with each other, he still didn’t trust her. At heart, he still saw her as the gossip reporter.

As she read the pieces, she was more and more sure that Behind the Scenes had been the one to break the story, and the others had followed, like vicious dogs nipping at the publication’s heels. But the real question was who had written the piece for Behind the Scenes? Why? And where had they gotten the information?

She stopped dead on the sidewalk when her gaze fell on the byline.

Oh, God. How could this have happened? She hadn’t written this article. Not one word. Why would Karl attribute it to her? Sarah stuffed the tabloids into her tote bag and hurried down the sidewalk toward the twelve-story building that housed the Smart Fashion publication family. She bypassed her cubicle—

And went straight to Karl’s office.

“What the hell is this?” She slapped the article on his desk. “Why is my name on this? I didn’t write it.”

“It’s your column. Who cares if you wrote it?” Karl took a bite out of the blueberry muffin beside him. A purple smear lingered on the corner of his mouth.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s lying.”

Karl threw up his hands. “I swear, you writers are impossible to keep happy. You weren’t here, you were off writing that ‘real’ piece you wanted to do, so when the information came in, I had one of the interns do it. You’ll have to split the pay for the piece, of course, but the byline is the biggest part.”

She imagined Caleb’s reaction when he saw her name on the piece, and how he would think that she had betrayed him. “Do you know what this is going to do to my life?”

A smile crossed Karl’s face, and for a moment, Sarah was reminded of the Cheshire cat. “It’s going to make you the most famous gossip reporter in this town. Isn’t that everybody’s dream, baby?”

 

Caleb was twenty feet from the office when the pack of reporters descended on him, shouting questions about his mother, angling in closer, hoping for a remark. What the hell? How did they find out about her condition? He said only two words, “No comment,” then headed into the office.

Martha’s face shimmered with sympathy. “I put it on your desk.”

She didn’t have to say what it was. He knew exactly what she meant, and a big part of him didn’t want to see it, read it or deal with it. He’d always known this day would come, that the media would put the pieces together at some point. The headline hit Caleb before he even reached his desk.

The black-and-white claims glared back at him. From the cover of the one magazine he’d thought he could trust.

Behind the Scenes.

He jerked open the tabloid, so sure he was wrong. She couldn’t have. She wouldn’t have. Not after everything they’d talked about. Everything they’d shared. Had she just been using all that as a cover? To spy on him? On his mother?

The betrayal ripped through his heart. He’d thought he could trust her.

But there, in print for the entire world to see, were the three words he couldn’t believe: By Sarah Griffin. Caleb dropped into his chair, the treachery a sharp blade along his senses. He’d believed she was different. Hell, he’d started to fall for her. Hard.

Had he been blinded by his emotions? Been distracted by kissing her? Or had she just been one hell of a good liar?

A pang rose in his chest, and he refused to call it hurt. He’d let her into his world, his business, his life, and this was how she repaid him?

She’d done this for one reason only—to advance her own career. He’d been wrong about Sarah Griffin, on every single level.

He picked up the tabloid, headed out of the building again, and straight for the offices of the magazine. This time without any chocolates or good humor. He had one mission and only one in mind—destroy Sarah Griffin.

 

Sarah typed until her fingers hurt. She pored over her notes from the last few days, scoured the morgue of old articles on LL Designs, and pulled up everything that had ever been written about the company by the competing publications. By eleven, the article was coming together, and Sarah finally felt that she had something that could mitigate the damage done by the tabloid.

She couldn’t write fast enough, as far as she was concerned. Undoubtedly, Caleb had already seen the articles and was blaming her. Before she tried to explain, she wanted to show him that she wasn’t that writer. That her intentions were true. Surely, he would listen to reason.

But what if he didn’t?

“How could you?”

She wheeled around. Caleb Lewis stood beside her desk, his face an angry mask. Damn. He’d seen it and jumped to the only possible conclusion—that she had written it, purposely hurting him. He probably thought she’d been betraying him all along. Oh, how was she going to fix this? “I didn’t have anything to do with it, Caleb.”

“No one knew this information.” He leaned in toward her. “No one. The only person I let get close enough to me was you. I don’t know how you found out or why you went digging into my mother’s personal business.”

“I swear, Caleb, I had nothing to do with this,” she said again. “I didn’t even write it.”

He snorted. Clearly, he didn’t believe her. “Then where did the information come from?”

“I have no idea. My editor said he got a tip and gave it to an intern to write. He put my name on the piece because it’s my column. It was wrong, and if I’d known I would have stopped him.” Damn. That didn’t sound good or even believable.

Caleb shook his head, disgust washing over his features. “Are you trying to tell me this was just one big huge misunderstanding?”

The sarcasm in Caleb’s voice stung. How was she ever going to get him to understand? How could she make up for the damage these articles were doing, and would continue to do, now that the pack of media vultures would be pecking away at Caleb for the rest of the story? “Caleb, I—”

“I don’t know why I ever trusted you. Why I ever thought you were different.” He threw the tabloid onto her desk. The pages fluttered open, then slid to the floor, a jumbled mess of printed headlines and speculations. “You’re like all the rest of them. You use every piece of dirt you can to ruin someone else’s life and then call it your job.”

She glanced up at him. Yes, what had happened today was a terrible thing, but in her mind, long overdue. She could see the toll this secret had taken on Caleb. How long did he think he could keep this information to himself before some other reporter got hold of it and ran the piece? “Don’t you think having the truth out there is better than people speculating? Wondering where Lenora is or how she’s doing?”

“My mother wanted privacy. Not this…” He waved at the pages scattered at her feet. “…this mess.”

“But now that it’s out there, you can deal with it. People care about Lenora Lewis, and you might find that making the information public will make it easier to cope with her illness. Hiding the truth is never a good idea because someone will always ferret it out.”

He snorted. “And what do you know about that? You’ve spent your life hiding in the corners, writing about other people.”

The words stung. She recoiled, her back pressing into the smooth surface of the cubicle wall. “I…”

“Would you want your mother’s story splashed across the front page?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then what made you think I wanted my mother’s in this rag?” He shook his head and let out a gust, not meeting her eyes, not looking at her at all. If anything, that was the worst part. The article had done so much damage that Caleb didn’t even want to see her face. “I thought you, of all people, would understand why I wanted to keep this out of the public eye. This decision—”

He cut himself off and swore under his breath.

“What were you about to say?”

“Why? You want to put it in next week’s issue?”

“Of course not. I care about you, Caleb.” She reached for him, but he was too far away, and she was sure that if she tried to get any closer, he would leave.

“Yeah? I don’t think so. If you did, you’d understand that the decisions I have had to make have been agonizing. Not something I wanted trotted out for all the world to see.”

She thought about the article she had read, the things he had mentioned, and a similar decision that had faced her not so long ago. The pieces fell into place. Why Caleb seemed so tortured when it came to his mother. Why he wouldn’t want anyone to know about her condition. Why he had stepped in and taken over the company—and refused to give up on it. “Your mother isn’t going to get any better, is she?”

He swore again and turned away.

She rose and put a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but didn’t pull away. She took that as a good sign, albeit a small one, but a sign nonetheless. Maybe this wasn’t unsalvageable. “Caleb, talk to me. I can help. I’ve been there.”

He spun around and in his eyes, she saw one irrefutable fact, and another truth that Sarah hadn’t wanted to accept or believe—everything between them had dissolved in light of that one article. She’d been found guilty of destroying his life—without a trial.

Caleb assessed her for a long silent moment, his gaze cold, his face hard. “I don’t know if I believe that you didn’t write that piece of trash. Frankly, I don’t care. But I do know one thing. You’re not the person I thought you were. I should have trusted my instincts and said the same thing to you that I said to all the other vultures.” He leaned in and his blue eyes sparked with anger. “No comment.”

 

The vultures were everywhere. Caleb pulled into the parking lot of the rehab hospital, turned off his car and steeled himself for the pack of reporters waiting outside the hospital. He let out a sigh, put his keys in his pocket and was just about to get out on the driver’s side when the passenger’s-side door opened and Sarah slipped into his car.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

If she was daunted by his angry outburst, she didn’t show it. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Why? So you could get your information before the others?” He gestured toward the pack of reporters milling about the hospital entrance. They toted their cameras and microphones like gladiators preparing for battle. “You want an interview? Or did you just bring along a tape recorder so you can get what you want without me knowing?”

She winced, and he wanted to take the harsh words back. But he didn’t.

“I came here to support you,” she said.

Had he heard her right? Support him? “Why?”

The car’s engine ticked softly as it cooled. Outside, a light rain had begun to fall, washing the windows with a fine mist. The view of the reporters blurred, until he could almost believe they weren’t there anymore.

“I know you don’t believe I had nothing to do with that article, and that’s fine. I’m not here to try and change your mind about that. I’m here because I know what you’re going through.” Sarah sighed and ran a hand along the center console, as if the words she sought were in the stitched edge of the leather. “In the end, with my mother, we had to make the same torturous decision that you’re facing.”

“You, your sister and father?”

“My sister was at college by then, and I didn’t want to upset her by drawing her into this. My dad…” Sarah shook her head. “He was having a difficult time facing anything to do with my mother. He just tuned out. So ultimately, I was the one who had to make that call. Who stayed until…” She exhaled a shaky breath. “…it was over.”

His heart went out to her. In her eyes, he could read how hard that decision had been for her, how agonizing those last moments must have been. Despite everything, his esteem for Sarah rose several notches. To go through all that, and do it alone? He knew the pain of sitting by a parent’s bedside, second-guessing every decision. She’d been younger than him when she’d done it, and she’d still come through okay. Knowing she’d done the right thing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The words seemed useless. Just two words people tossed out there for everything from an inadvertent bump to a major loss. There should be degrees of sympathy words, stronger ones for much bigger traumas. He reached for her, then pulled back at the last moment, not sure where they stood right now, but glad she was there all the same.

Sarah nodded. “Thank you.”

His gaze went out the rain-dotted window. The reporters still hadn’t noticed his car sitting in the lot. Thank God for that.

He rested his hands on the steering wheel. The hard surface pressed against his palms. Real, solid and something tangible in a day when everything he had to deal with was in his head. He let go, then turned back to Sarah. Was she this woman, the one who was in his car, supportive and caring, or the one who had written that article? Caleb decided he didn’t care right now. He needed the supportive Sarah, and he needed her desperately. “So how do you make that decision?”

“There is no litmus test.” Her gaze softened. “Sure, the doctors will give you this test result or that one, and medically, it may be a clear-cut answer, but the problem is, your heart doesn’t want to hear test results. It wants to hope.”

Hope. What a powerful word for just four letters. So tenuous, yet so fragile.

He thought of all the sleepless nights he had spent, weighing the doctors’ grave advice against his own undying optimism that maybe they were wrong. “I kept hoping that maybe if I held on long enough…”

“They’d come back with a different diagnosis?”

He nodded, unable to speak. Thick emotion charged through him and his throat closed, choked with tears he had yet to shed. “Damn,” he said, and shook his head. “Damn it all.”

She reached out and touched him, her hand resting on his arm, a warm, comforting connection. Just…there. For him. He didn’t pull away, just absorbed the warmth. “Your mother was a vibrant, powerful woman. Before…this.”

A smile crossed his lips. “She was, wasn’t she? And after the stroke—” He exhaled. “Everything that was Lenora was gone. She wasn’t there anymore. She hasn’t been ever since that day.”

Sarah’s fingers curled around his arm. “Then let her go, Caleb. Don’t make her suffer any more.”

The hot sting of tears pushed at the back of his eyes, but he didn’t let them fall. He couldn’t, because it was like giving in, and for so long, Caleb had refused to do that.

“I can’t.” His gaze met Sarah’s. The pain of the last two months rushed to the surface, threatening to tear him apart, forcing him to face everything he had tried so hard to bury with night after night of loud music and mindless chatter. He realized now that he hadn’t buried it at all. He had merely let that wound fester in the background until now, it threatened to undo him. “You don’t understand, Sarah. I’m the whole reason she’s there. She asked me to come by that morning to talk to her about her marketing plan. I thought I could let her wait and show up a little late. My mom was always so buried in her work, she never noticed if I came in ten minutes or two hours late.”

Sarah waited for him to continue. Her touch lingered on him, patient, understanding. But no one could understand this…this mistake he had made.

“By the time I got there, at least an hour, maybe more, had passed since she’d had the stroke. I called the ambulance, and they rushed her to the hospital, but…” He sighed. “…it was too late. There was nothing they could do.”

“Oh, Caleb. That’s not your fault.” Sarah’s soft, understanding voice filled the car’s interior, brushed against his heart. “You don’t have to keep paying the price for something that was a twist of fate, nothing more.”

“No, I should have been there. I should have…” He bit his lip, hard, but that pain did nothing to assuage the pain inside him. “…done something. Been a better son.”

Sarah shifted in her seat, and watched the rain slide down the window. The storm had increased in intensity, and the mist had become fast, fat drops covering everything around them. “When I was a little girl, I used to think if I behaved well enough or I prayed hard enough, God would come along and make my mother better. That maybe this was some kind of cosmic punishment for my mistakes, or that God was waiting for me to prove how much I wanted my mother to be better. It was a long, long time before I finally accepted that her health had nothing to do with me. Or my actions. Hearts give out, Caleb, blood clots explode and cancer multiplies, because…”

“Why?” he asked when she didn’t finish.

She swung back around to face him. A glimmer of tears showed in her eyes. “Just because. That’s all. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but that’s the way things work. Just because.”

He digested those words. Was it as simple as that? Even if he had been on time, he’d have seen the same end result? Maybe not then, but later?

Just because. That day had been his mother’s time, and he couldn’t have averted it if he tried. Since then, his actions had only compounded his regrets. They hadn’t made his mother better, hadn’t eased her pain, or his.

There was nothing he could do to make her better, to turn back the clock. Not then, not now. For the first time in a year, the bricks of guilt began to lighten. “What do I do from here?”

“What’s right.” Sarah’s hand covered his. “That’s the only litmus test you need, Caleb.”

He exhaled a long sigh. “I know. It’s doing what’s right that’s so tough.” It was the decision he had delayed, time and again. The doctors had told him there was no hope, and yet, Caleb hadn’t listened. He’d just kept on hoping for the impossible.

“All this time,” he said, “I’ve been doing what was right for me. What made things easier for me to deal with. Instead of doing what was right for her.” The light bulb in his head shone so brightly, he didn’t know how he had missed the obvious for so long. “Now I see that there’s really only one choice to make.”

Her fingers curled around his arm. “Do you want me to go with you?”

He considered her for a moment. “Why would you do that for me?”

A smile wavered on her lips. “Because you’re not the story, Caleb. You’re…so much more.”

He wanted to believe her, wanted to trust that she was the Sarah he had come to know, not the one whose byline he had seen this morning. But that would have to wait.

Right now, he had something else to do. Something he should have done a long time ago. He clasped her fingers. “Thank you, but I think this is something I should do on my own.”

“Okay.” She pressed a kiss to his cheek, lingering for a moment there, then drew back and got out of the car. Sarah Griffin ran toward her car, the heavy rain swallowing her up and taking her out of Caleb’s line of sight.

As he’d expected, the reporters attacked him with questions as soon as he reached the door of the hospital. Once again, he said nothing, just brushed past them and inside. The receptionist glared at him for bringing this mayhem onto the staff. He gave her an apology, and her glare softened slightly.

The door to his mother’s room was ajar. The lights were dimmed inside the private suite, and only a small Tiffany nightlight burned on the corner table. It was enough to illuminate the bright bedcovers, the dozens of flowers, the portraits of family members lining the window ledge. Nearly everything in the room had been brought here from his mother’s Central Park apartment, as Caleb tried to recreate her home bedroom in this foreign place.

As if having all these things from home would be enough to make her want to wake up or restore her to her former self. Like Sarah, he would have done anything to make that happen. And nothing he had done, nothing he had said, no doctors he had paid, had changed the facts. Maybe Sarah was right, and he just needed to face reality. Things like this happened…

Just because.

He dropped into the wingback chair beside his mother’s bed, and watched her for a long time. Her eyes were closed, her jaw slack, as if she was sleeping. So peaceful, so quiet. But as the machines beeped a steady rhythm, and his mother’s chest went up and down with the help of the respirator, Caleb knew the truth. It was all an illusion, just like the bedcovers and flowers. This wasn’t his mother, not anymore, just as this wasn’t her cozy bedroom in Manhattan.

Lenora Lewis had left a long time ago. The doctors had been telling him this for a year, but he’d refused to accept it. Refused to accept that a woman who had been such a force in life could be gone.

He laid his head on the bed, and reached out to cover her cool, limp hand with his own. Every time he came here, it seemed she got thinner, paler, frailer. Like there was less and less of her every day.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered to her. “I’m so sorry.”

The machines beeped. The respirator raised and lowered, a soft whoosh with each breath it pumped into Lenora Lewis’s lungs. Out in the hall, the sounds of life carried on—people talking, walking the halls, sharing laughs.

He clutched his mother’s hand, and now, finally, the tears raced to his eyes and a sob chased up his throat. The tears that Caleb Lewis had never shed began to fall, dropping into small round puddles on the white crisp sheets.

“I love you, Mom,” he whispered, and now the tears blurred his vision until he couldn’t see anything but her delicate pale fingers. “Goodbye.”

The word tore his heart in two. But still, he stayed. Until there wasn’t a reason to stay anymore.