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But this is not a fairy tale.
“Ivy,” he says in that professionally trained, butter-soft, deep, rich voice. “I’ve missed you.”
Luckily my heart is not in charge of this operation. My brain—captain of the ship—kicks into gear and says, We don’t negotiate with assholes. And I say, “No, you haven’t, Anthony. What do you want from me?”
Because if I learned anything from my thirteen months with Anthony, it’s that he doesn’t do anything without a reason, and that reason always serves him. If he flew all the way up to central Oregon from LA, it’s to get something he wants.
“Don’t be like that, Ivy. We had something special. It just ran its course.”
“It ran its course because you got what you wanted from me and moved on to exploit someone else for your next gains,” I point out. I don’t add leaving me and my life in shambles—but I could have. I was a mess after Anthony ended things.
But that was then, this is now, and I have everything I want: my picket fence, the community theater I run, someone in my life I can totally trust (even if that person is my sister).
I don’t need or want Anthony in my life, and I won’t let him unsettle me.
Captain Brain, take it from here.
“Good talk,” I say. “Can you just move over a bit so I can get into my house?”
He rises to his feet, towering over me at six feet plus. “Okay, look, you’re right,” he says. “I owe you an apology. I should have stood up for you when the producers were making the decision about writing your character out of the show.”
“Damn straight you should have.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I experience a small melting event, more on the ice cube than the ice shelf scale, but I can feel my shoulders sinking and some of the tension goes out of my body. “Thanks.”
“Can I come in so we can talk?”
I can feel myself caving. Not because I still have feelings for him (I really, really don’t), but because it was a long day at the theater with the kids and I’m wiped.
“We can talk right here.”
He frowns. “At least sit down.”
“Are you going to tell me you’re pregnant and it’s mine?” I joke.
“Just sit.”
I do. He sits down on the stoop a little distance from me.
“Hear me out,” he says.
“You’re scaring me.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. This would be a good thing for both of us.”
Why do I doubt that?
“If you’ve been following my career, you’ll know it’s stalled out a bit…”
I have been following his career, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to admit that to him. Sometimes in my lower moments, I Google him to see if he’s scored the lead in some Hollywood blockbuster yet. The answer’s no. After Bridge—the show we were both on—ended, he got a part in another Screenflix show, but they only made two seasons. Then he was in a streaming movie, but as far as I know, it faded rapidly into obscurity.
I wasn’t exactly happy to see that he hadn’t broken out…
But I was…
Happy.
