***
“You’re doing great!” I said, sitting down next to my sister at Mom’s therapy appointment. I kept my focus on Mom and grinned wide. “You’re blowing them away. I swear next week we’re getting you into one of those walk-run 3ks. You’re unstoppable.”
Mom chuckled and gripped the beams harder to keep herself from falling. The tech braced her back with his hands. “I think I’d settle for just walking around the department without my walker. I’m so sick of going to the bathroom for two, me and my walker buddy.”
“Well, keep kicking ass like this and you will be!” I said, grinning and setting my basket of blueberry muffins down by my feet. “So,” I continued, turning my attention to Carol as Mom worked on her next round of exercises. “How’s she really doing?”
“The specialist from UCLA, well, the oncologist one, thinks that she does have a medication that she’ll be responsive to without the side effects. Once the neurologist clears her, Mom will be starting on that.” Carol shook her head. “I don’t know what you did to Drake to reform such a famous bad boy.”
“I think we both have an idea.”
Carol waved her hand and lowered her voice. “I’m not talking about that. You must have done something more than the usual.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said, feeling my heart break when I thought about how much more experience Drake had than me. I had been the blushing virgin under his tutelage. The dreamy-eyed girl who had no idea what I was doing. Had he resented my naiveté? “We were there and, well, you can guess much of it,” I said, my fingers coming to my neck almost on their own. It was as if they expected to feel the diamonds and stones of my collar under them still. Maybe in some ways, it felt as if I could never truly take it off. “I don’t think I was anything special.”
Yes, I’d left it very badly. Torn his heart out and run, but he must not have cared that much. In the almost ten days since I’d left for L.A., he’d sent envoys to my father and sister. He’d even started orienting my dad about all the ins and outs of the kids’ charity. But he hadn’t called. There’d been no texts or emails. There’d been nothing.
I’d done it to myself with my own big mouth, but he hadn’t fought for me either so maybe he was glad I was gone. Maybe what we had wasn’t built to last back in the real world and off a tropical island.
“I think that you must have mattered to him,” Carol said, pulling out her phone. “He’s really pulling out every stop he can think of for Mom, and I’m glad he is. I don’t understand why you don’t call him.”
This was the most casual conversation that Carol and I had had in years. We’d fallen so long into the roles of caring for our parents. When we spoke, it was about Mom’s medication schedule or fourth-quarter profits. I didn’t remember the last time we’d felt like sisters gossiping, let alone friends. It was nice to feel an easier rhythm between us.
She was trying.
“I did,” I admitted, my voice low and mournful. “I’ve tried talking to him a few times, leaving voice messages. I stopped calling after the third try because I didn’t want to seem like a pathetic stalker. I mean, the merger went through better than we could have ever hoped for. Mom has the pick of any treatment she wants. Hell, Dad’s in better shape. He doesn’t get Tweets and Instagram posts, but he loves working one-on-one with people, and he loves kids. I think being CEO there is going to be just the second career he’s been looking for.”
“Then it’s all happily-ever-after, then?” Carol asked.
I traced my fingers over my bare throat. My collar was still here. I’d brought it with me back to the States and hidden it under my pillow at home. At night, like the pathetic loser I was, I’d pull it out and hug it to my chest and cry. Drake was right. For right now, it was the only piece I had left of him, almost the only proof that anything that had happened in the Bahamas had been real at all and not just a fairy tale.
Of course, it wasn’t a fairy tale, right?
Those ended in everyone being happy. Well, I mean, not the Grimm original ones. More like a Disney one where the bad guys were always vanquished and everything ended in a song and dance number. The curtains closed on a kiss. That kind of fairy tale was the furthest thing for my life.
“I think it ended up as well as it could,” I said, focusing on Mom, who was making her next lap, her steps seeming stronger with every pass. So much was changing, so much hope after years of pain. It should have been enough. It wasn’t. “This is right, you know? I’ll find someone else.”
Carol shrugged. “You could still call him and… oh, my God! No way!”
I frowned and craned my neck to her so quickly I almost got a case of whiplash. “Whoa, that was a fast change of tune. And what?” I asked, my tone growing frantic.
My sister looked at me and handed her phone into my hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger, sis. I was just trolling the usual industry sites to keep up with the news of the day and I came on this.”
My heart was in my throat as I scrolled down her phone screen. It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t. It was Drake from last night’s opening of a club downtown. He had a reed-thin blonde on his arm, some girl barely out of her teens who was the lead on the latest Freeform show, some vampire drama. She was leaning in close to him and whispering in his ear, her hand firmly on his chest.
“‘Rose Pearson steps out after her wrap party with PR Guru Drake McManus for a steamy night!’ Ugh, I hate TMZ,” I said, handing the phone back to my sister and fighting my first inclination to throw the thing across the room as hard as I could.
Only the fact that I didn’t want to spend eight hundred dollars on a new one kept me from doing something totally nuts.
Carol slipped the phone into her purse and took my hand. “Sis, forget about him. You can do better anyway.”
“I wish that were true.”