Chapter 32

She’d expected it to be more…prepossesing. It was just an office building with hundreds of small glass windows, surrounded by a not-terribly-elegant fence. She did have to give her name, and Stefan’s, at the security station in the front, but the guy in the booth reminded her more of a parking-lot attendant than the kind of high-minded caricature you’d see in the movies or…on TV. It was kind of funny that even when TV portrayed TV, it fancied it up.

Stefan stepped out of the elevator, looking—well, good. Movie-star handsome. But her heart didn’t skip a beat or clench with longing, and there was no regret left anywhere in her. He was just a man. Maybe if he’d never stood on a stage with that ferocious snake-oil salesman energy, she never would have seen him as anything other than a good friend. But then Phoebe wouldn’t have been born, so she couldn’t regret even that.

He hugged her, and she let him. And then she said, “I’m so sorry, Stefan.”

Startled, he scanned her face thoroughly but still looked puzzled.

“I can’t take the job. I can’t stay. We’re not going to stay.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going to stay?”

“I’m sorry about the bait and switch. I know you held the job for me—”

“Damn straight I held the job for you.”

“But I also know there are probably a hundred people breathlessly waiting behind me, and that it’s going to take you all of ten minutes to fill it.”

A little flicker in his expression acknowledged the truth of that. But he shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Can we go somewhere we can talk?”

He took her to the cafeteria and they sat and drank bad coffee while she told him the story. The whole story, including his unintended role in it.

“I see,” he said, when she was done.

“Do you?”

He was no longer angry. His face had sagged a little, and she could see how he’d look when he got older. She was reminded about how brutal his profession was, how unforgiving. Behind the glamour, that was the truth of it.

“He’s like the anti-me, right? He stuck it out with his pregnant girlfriend and kid. He stayed because it was the right thing to do. And I left. I abandoned the two of you, even knowing it was the wrong thing to do.”

She didn’t know what to say. Whether to argue with him, say that wrong was a strong word, that she and Phoebe had been okay. Or—to let him own his failure.

“From what you’ve told me, Hunter is the kind of father Phoebe deserves to have.”

There, she wouldn’t argue.

He took a deep breath. “I’d hoped for a second chance with Phoebe. But there just aren’t that many second chances in life. I can’t blame you at all for wanting to grab hold of yours. But you’ll let her visit?”

“Of course,” she said. “I do want her to know you. And get to spend time with you. She’s getting old enough that she could probably fly down here on her own occasionally. Weekends here and there. You’d buy her ticket, of course.” She didn’t even bother to feel guilty about that. Stefan could afford it, and there was that whole matter of back child support…

“Absolutely,” Stefan said.

Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t buy those tickets, and when he disappointed them or canceled at the last minute, that would be okay, too.

She and Hunter would take the girls on a marvelous consolation trip instead.

She sat with Stefan for a while longer, talking about Phoebe, mainly; then he excused himself, saying he had to get back to the office to offer the job she’d just turned down to someone else.

Later that day, he led the four of them on a studio tour, introduced them to his stunning actress girlfriend, and took them out to dinner at his favorite restaurant, pointing out stars to the dazzled girls. But Trina noted that he never asked Phoebe anything about what she liked to do or what was important to her, and by the end of the evening, she could tell from his body language—and his girlfriend’s—that both were eager to say goodbye.

Stefan didn’t offer to take Phoebe out for lunch or do anything else with her, and in the hotel room afterward, Trina sat with her almost-full-sized daughter curled up in her lap while Phoebe sobbed her hurt out.

“Not everyone is cut out to be a dad,” Trina said quietly. And felt grateful that Stefan had known that about himself at age seventeen, long before she’d been willing to accept it about him.

A few minutes later, the tears having subsided to occasional hiccups, Phoebe said, “I’m glad we’re not staying here. I’m glad we’re going home.”

The word home cut a warm swath through Trina’s chest. The ease with which Phoebe said it.

“Hunter is a good dad. Don’t you think?”

That took Trina’s breath away. When she could speak again, she said, “Yes. Yes, he is.”

“Do you remember when we had the stomach flu?” Phoebe asked.

It had been awhile since she’d looked, really looked, at her daughter. There was a smattering of small pimples at the side of Phoebe’s nose, and her eyebrows had darkened from baby strawberry blond to a more adult color. Her expression was older than her years.

Funny that she was asking about that night, which had been a turning point for her and Hunter a year ago. “Yeah.”

“Hunter held my head the first time I threw up.”

Of course he had. It had never occurred to Trina to ask what had happened before she’d arrived at Hunter and Clara’s that night, but of course he had.

Her heart filled with love for him. Her heart would always be filled with love for him.

I promised my feelings for you wouldn’t change. And, Trina—they never really did. Only how hard I tried not to feel them.

“Hunter is the best man I know,” Trina said quietly. “Stefan—he’s not perfect, but he’ll be a friend to you, if you let him, and that’s worth something, for sure. But you can let Hunter be your family. And your home.”

Phoebe sighed, the soft, yielding sigh at the end of a good cry, and settled more thoroughly against her mother, and Trina held her tight and felt her heart overflow with gratitude.

The four of them drove out to see Linda and Ray, who had a lovely, immaculately kept double-wide in an beautiful park north of L.A. Ray was a short, bald retired Coast Guard admiral who appeared to be a decade younger than Linda; Hunter couldn’t bring himself to ask. The introduction between Hunter and Ray was awkward, since Ray had met Hunter once before and Hunter couldn’t remember one fucking thing about the guy, but he’d just have to get used to the occasional mental blank along those lines. There were little scraps here and there coming back to him from the past, but he wasn’t putting his life on hold to wait for everything to return in a rush. Not gonna happen.

He let his mom take the girls for short motorcycle rides. Trina couldn’t even watch; she had to go inside, and afterward she said she’d covered her ears. But both of them agreed that there was a fine line between protecting against risk and depriving kids of experiences, and a few hundred helmeted yards on a Gold Wing on deserted roads with a grandmother at the handlebars was a pretty low-risk proposition.

Afterward, Hunter and Linda went for a walk, and he told her what had happened, the whole story, from Clara’s disappearance to the proposal on the airplane.

“Thank God you came to your senses,” Linda said.

“I heard you played a role.”

She ducked her head.

“Mom.”

“I might have made a few suggestions here and there.”

“Fake her period? Go missing?”

“You’re not mad, are you?”

“Of course I’m mad,” he said. “You manipulated two little girls to get your way. You manipulated me and Trina. That’s not acceptable, and I don’t want anything like that to happen again.”

She gave him a look. It was the same look she’d given him countless times over the course of his life when he’d broken a rule or come home after curfew or talked back to her. “Someone had to get you to see the light,” she said sternly. “And who else, if not your mother?”

They were rounding back on the trailer now, and Ray was showing Clara and Phoebe something in the motorcycle engine, while Trina watched. The expression on her face—

She was glowing. He’d never seen her that happy. And while he watched, she looked down at her hand and turned his ring this way and that, admiring. He almost couldn’t stand the rush of love he felt; it seemed to want to knock him off his feet.

“Besides,” his mother said, and he looked up to see her watching his family—his family—with an expression not unlike Trina’s. “You have to admit, it worked. Right?”

He didn’t have to answer that, because she looked up then and saw the expression on his face, and she said, “Oh, Hunter, that’s all I ever wanted for you,” and burst into tears.