Chapter 18
Charlie knew the day that Laura left Miami, probably for good. Not only did Carla tell him point blank that he was a stupid idiot for letting her walk out on their marriage, but he had felt it in his bones that she was really gone before his best friend’s wife plopped down in the chair opposite his desk.
“This is bad.” She said nothing else, just leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest.
Charlie looked back down at the spreadsheet he’d been staring at for the last five minutes. “What’s bad?” When she didn’t respond when he continued, he said, “I’m your boss, you know.”
“You’re really more of a business partner.”
She had a point. Both she and Jonah had a stake in the show and were credited as executive producers.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re being awkward, or am I going to have to guess?” Charlie only flirted with Carla in front of Jonah, because it pissed him off. When they were alone, they felt more like siblings.
“You look like you’ve been sleeping on a bed of nails for about a month.” She squinted at him. “Sort of lackadaisical and constipated.”
He sniffed, although she had the lackadaisical part right. “How does one appear constipated?”
“Using that form of a verb doesn’t help.”
“Do you have a point?” He threw his pen across the desk. It ricocheted off the edge and slid across the floor.
Carla seemed to light up at his expression of exasperation. “You’re totally brokenhearted.”
“And your point?” There was nothing he could do about the fact that Laura left him. All he could do now was regret the way he’d said goodbye.
After he’d regained consciousness and the ability to use his limbs, neither of them had said a word. He tucked his used-up cock back into his pants and walked out. He’d swiped the tequila, and called a car. By the time he’d gotten to his house, he’d been too drunk to use a phone. If he’d been any more cogent, he would not have been able to resist calling Laura and begging her to give him another chance.
She would have turned him down, as well she should have.
“That this is bad.”
“I don’t see how talking about it is going to make it any better.”
Carla stood up and leaned over his desk. “I think that you need to go to New York.”
“I can’t.” He did need to get out of Miami, but he needed to get further from his soon-to-be ex-wife, not closer. “I’m flying to Chile tomorrow.”
“You shouldn’t go.” She straightened up and crossed her arms. “In fact, I’m forbidding you to go.”
“Even if I admit that you and Jonah are partners, that doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”
She shrugged. “I tell everyone what to do. That’s sort of my thing.”
“Can you go somewhere and boss Jonah around right now?” He scrubbed his hands over his tired face. “I just, I don’t need this right now. Us breaking up was the best thing for everyone.”
“Then why do you look like someone held you down and made you watch them drown a kitten?”
“That’s a little graphic. It’s not that bad.”
“It is.” She sat back down, and all hope of getting rid of her fled. “Laura’s mother went to rehab the night of the opening. That’s why they weren’t there.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with me.” Laura was gone, and if he couldn’t have gotten her to stay, he was sure her mother’s stint in rehab wasn’t going to change things.
“I think it has everything to do with you.”
“Are you going to leave if I don’t let you explain?”
“Not a chance.” One shake of her red locks, and he knew he’d better settle in.
“Fine.” He made a rolling motion with his hand. “Proceed.”
“Laura didn’t always want to be a ballerina. In fact, we started dance together.”
“Don’t tell me that you were better.” Even though it was none of his business, the urge to protect Laura’s reputation remained.
Carla’s smile had a devious tone. “No. She was always much better than me. But she didn’t really care about dance, didn’t talk about leaving home to go to school, until she was eight.”
“What happened when she was eight?” Just thinking about what would have made a little kid want to leave home made him sick to his stomach.
“Her mom fell near the pool at their house, broke her ankle, and she got a pain pill prescription.”
“Lots of people get pain pills.” Suddenly, Charlie remembered how vehement Laura had been about refusing that ibuprofen at his house, and the full extent of the damage Laura’s family had done finally sunk in. The mother’s vacant expression, the father’s half-disgust. Mrs. Delgado was an addict, and it had twisted his wife up inside. “For almost twenty years—”
Carla nodded sagely. “Yep, and Laura was the first one who saw it. She tried to tell her older brothers, who were almost out of the house by then. They did nothing.” Carla sighed, and Charlie willed her to say more. “And when she told her father, he slapped her across the face. I was there. It was like something important changed about Laura right then. She’d been my best friend, and I could always count on her. But it was like her light switched off in that moment.”
His fist clenched hard, and he wanted to go to her parents’ house and kick her father’s ass. Even though his father was a dick, he’d never hit any of his sons. “And she turned to dance.”
“With a passion that bordered on maniacal. We lost her as soon as she realized that if she told the truth, no one would believe her. She was gone the second she realized that she could count on no one but herself.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with me. I tried to show her that she could trust me, that I was there for her.” He shook his head to clear the creeping doubts away. “But she didn’t believe me.”
“Then you didn’t see what I saw.”
“What was that?” A desperate thread of hope was trying to work its way into the back of his mind. It got as far as his heart before he grabbed on and snapped it so it couldn’t wrap around his guts.
“I’ve never seen her care about someone the way she cares about you.” Carla got up and paced. He’d known her long enough to realize that telling her to calm down or sit down when she got worked up was one very good way to get shanked. “She lights up when she looks at you. And she tries not to look at you because she knows.”
“Knows what, exactly?” He needed his friend, his wife’s best friend to say she knows that she loves you. But he wasn’t going to shake it out of her.
“She wants you like she’s never wanted anything. Not ballet. Not her mother to get well. Nothing.”
“I have to hear her say it.”
“Then you have to go to her.”
“But I tried to go to her on opening night, and she wanted to take the job in New York. She wanted to leave me.”
“Who says she has to leave you to take a job?” Carla stopped in her tracks. “You can live anywhere. And travel from anywhere.”
“But I’ve made my home here.” Even as he uttered the excuse, he knew it was purely weak sauce. His home was with Laura.
“Dumb dumb head.” Carla flicked him on the chest, over his heart—reminding him to mind the constant ache there. “Go find her. Figure out the rest later.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’re going to have some time to think about it.”
Carla bit her lip as though she were hiding something. “Oh?”
“Yeah, I’m knocked up again. So, we need to take a hiatus, partner.”
He smiled, and his heart lightened. He knew Carla and Jonah wanted more kids, but he thought they might wait. They were moving on with their life, growing their family.
The idea of another baby for his friend made his desire to go get Laura even more acute. He needed to be with her, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer—not as long as there was hope.
The hole in his chest wouldn’t heal without her. It was so bad now that he was willing to take any risk to get her back. He needed to hear her story from her mouth, and he would follow her around until she knew that he was a safe person to show her whole heart to. He would keep her safe from the journalists who might follow him around there. He would love her so much that none of them mattered.
* * * *
After the third show that week, Laura sat in an ice bath, holding her phone. They’d done two weeks of shows in Miami, then she and Matthieu had come to New York to rehearse the show with the new company for three weeks.
She wasn’t waiting for a call from Charlie. After she left Florida, she’d given up hope on Charlie calling her. No, today her mother was leaving rehab. And she wasn’t going home to her father. She was moving into Laura’s condo with Lola. The idea made her nervous, as if her mother was dead set on testing her sobriety by moving in with the mother who had abandoned her.
When Laura had brought it up with Lola over the phone, she’d pushed her off. And from the brief conversation she’d had with her mother two weeks ago, it seemed like Lola had spearheaded the effort to support her mom in getting sober. Just thinking about hearing how clear her voice was had tears welling up in Laura’s eyes.
The phone buzzed in her hand, and Laura blinked. Her brother Max.
“Hermanita, como estas?” Neither of her brothers had ever called her before their mom went to rehab. They’d been avoiding each other for years as much as they’d been avoiding their parents.
And it was stupid. In the last month, she’d felt like she’d gotten her family back. With that progress and dance, she should feel like she’d gotten everything she’d ever wanted.
Except for Charlie.
She rubbed the spot between her eyes, trying to banish him from her head. “Fine, Max. How’s Mom?”
“All settled in with Lola.”
“How’s that going?” Her free hand clenched on the side of the tub. “Lola got all the liquor out of the house? And she promised not to make out with abuelo in front of Mom?”
It was as close to addict-proofing the condo as her or either of her siblings could think of.
Max’s bark of laughter shocked her, and the water and ice sloshed around. Her toes were pretty much numb, which meant it was time to get out.
“Yeah, they’re going to be fine. All making out in the bedroom.”
“Somehow, even that’s disturbing.”
“I think it’s kind of nice.” Laura wondered about the wistful tone of her brother’s voice. Because he was so much older than her, and because she’d never taken the time to get to know him as an adult, she didn’t know him well enough to prod more, even if she wanted to. “But the booze is gone. I delivered it to Maya and Javi, just as you asked.”
“Thank you.” She decided to start repairing their relationship by revealing something of herself. “It’s hard not to be there right now.”
“Are you kidding? Mom would never want you to give up your lifelong dream to babysit her. She’s incredibly proud of you.”
“Yeah?” Her mother had never said it out loud. After the pills had started, she hadn’t said much about anyone but her father—her obsession.
“We’re all proud of you, hermanita.” This time, it didn’t feel so awkward for him to call her “little sister.”
“Even Joaquin? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him express an emotion.”
Max laughed again and she reveled in how normal their relationship was starting to feel. “Can you blame him? Every time he cried as a little kid, Dad belted him.”
Laura knew exactly why. Her older brother was gay, and her father never would have approved of that. He had tried to beat it out of him. Uber-masculine sporty guy Max would have escaped their father’s wrath. Joaquin would have borne the brunt of her father’s rage.
Laura didn’t remember any of that, and it sent a chill down her spine. She only remembered Joaquin as an adult, and the thought of hurting a little kid made her ache inside. She needed a moment.
“Do you have to go?”
She didn’t want to get off the phone, but she didn’t want to freeze her feet off either. “No, I just need a second.”
When she was out of the bath and wrapped in a bathrobe, she sat down on one of the tables in the empty training room with her phone. “I didn’t know any of that.”
“I’m sorry.” Her brother’s voice was heavy with sorrow.
“What for?” She used to blame her brothers for bailing as soon as they were eighteen, but given their options, she couldn’t exactly blame them. “You did what you had to do to survive.”
“We should have believed you.”
She toyed with the sash on her robe, searching for the right words. “There’s not much either of you could have done.”
“I guess you’re right, but we could have gotten you out of there.”
“I got myself out.”
“We should have been there to help.”
Hearing that from her brother almost had her losing it. She’d just never asked for their help because the Delgados didn’t do that, at least according to their father. Thinking of that fucked up family motto had her thinking about her mom again. And how much it must have crushed her to leave.
“Have either of you talked to Dad?”
When Max answered, it was like a door slamming. “No. He wasn’t going to let her go to rehab. And I don’t know if I can forgive him for that.”
“Aren’t we now supposed to be all loving and forgiving?”
“Some things I can’t forget.” Jesus, she needed to get to know her brother more when she went home. Even growing up there, living there her whole life, it was strange to think of Miami as home. She’d always longed for the anonymity and fame promised by New York. Now that she was here, feeling alone and disconnected from everyone she cared about, she longed for her hometown.
And it wasn’t just about Charlie, although he was a big part of it. She wished she had said something when he was leaving her dressing room. She wished she had torn up the divorce papers instead of turning them over to her grandfather.
But it was too late to take it all back. He’d let her know that, as soon as a judge signed the decree, they wouldn’t be married anymore.