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“That’s a good idea.”
“She’ll like it,” I say, and I feel confident about that.
But I sure as shit don’t feel confident about whether Elodie still likes me or not. Or if she even should.
Alone in bed a little later, I’m still replaying our last encounter on the street. Still trying to figure out if I handled it badly when I got Celeste’s email, an opportunity and a Post-it saying get your focus on.
I chew on all these questions in the dark when my phone pings with a message from my brother.
Zane: WTF?
I furrow my brow. What is he talking about?
Gage: WTF what?
Zane: I go to London and you got your ass engaged? Am I even invited to the wedding?
Shit. I didn’t even tell my brother. I suck. Immediately, I reply and give him the details, and the second I’m done, my phone rings. I answer it right away. “What time is it in London?”
“Fuck all late. It’s three-thirty in the morning. But we were at a club and now we’re heading back to our flat, and I’ve seen the pictures online so I’m calling you. So you’re fake married?”
I shake my head, scoffing. “No way, man. Just fake engaged.”
He snorts. “Doesn’t sound that different.”
“Look, we’re only doing it to impress the guy.”
“I don’t get how that impresses someone?”
I explain the situation with Felix and the last couple he leased to who broke the agreement, then how Celeste had been playing hardball with her marketing requests. “And the guy who’s leasing us this shop is obsessed with marketing. He’s a wizard, Zane,” I say, excited just thinking about the lineup for tomorrow night’s opening. Felix knows how to bring it. “I think this could make the difference in me getting the second location.”
Zane knows why I’ve been chasing expansion for a long time. Hell, he knows better than anyone. When Eliza was younger, I had nothing saved up. No security. I lived paycheck to paycheck. When I was a bar manager in Sacramento five years ago, my boss was a ballbuster, reaming me out every night for every little thing. Nothing made me want to work for myself more than working for someone else.
Zane helped me out big time when he set aside money for Eliza’s college fund, and I’ll forever be grateful for his generosity. But I won’t rely on my little brother for handouts. I’m Eliza’s dad, and it’s my responsibility to take care of her. There are no guarantees with just one bar. A second though? Maybe even a third one down the road? That’s when I won’t always be sleeping with one eye open. Always looking behind me. Always wondering when the shoe is going to drop.
I tell Zane about the opening night and some of the opportunities that Felix has lined up. And as I talk, I feel a little more settled. It was right to cool things off with Elodie. It would be a mistake to keep bending the rules and looking for loopholes. “So we cooled it, but we’re pretending to be together,” I finish.
He’s quiet for several long seconds.
“Huh.”
“What’s that huh for?”
“But you do like her?” It’s a legit question.
I answer him from the heart. “I do. But it doesn’t really matter. I don’t have a good track record with romance. When I go all in, everything falls apart. And you know it.”
I put my heart on the line with Kylie and got two hearts broken in return. And well, then there’s Hailey. Without her I would never have the love of my life in Eliza.
But the dirty little secret of my young marriage to Hailey—we were both twenty-one when I got her pregnant, and then married a week after we found out in a shotgun wedding—was that less than two years after the city hall I do, we were in the process of splitting up. When she died of a brain aneurysm, no one knew we were falling apart. Her sister didn’t know. Her parents didn’t know. My family didn’t know. Hell, I didn’t even tell Zane. Only my shrink.
Never her family.
They don’t know she was struggling as a new mom. They don’t know her postpartum blues hit her hard and for months. They don’t know she was ready to give me primary custody and that she needed a break. They don’t know any of that because none of that matters now that she’s dead.
I just don’t see how romance—big romance that you throw your heart into—can lead to anything that lasts.
21
