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“I didn’t say that,” Candy sniffs, wiping at her face to clear the tears that are still spilling there.
“Lexie, please,” I say, raising my hands again to try and give her a calming gesture. “Everyone out there is listening – there’s quite a crowd gathering. Let’s try and quiet down a bit and talk about this, okay? Like adults?”
“Oh, so this is still about your reputation?” Lexie shakes her head furiously. I just can’t seem to say the right thing – I keep digging myself deeper. I don’t even know if there is a right thing to say anymore. “You know what, Dad? Screw you. You can have my roommate. Hey, why don’t you just move in here for the rest of the year? I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”
With those words, my daughter rushes forward. At first, I think that she’s rushing at me – that she might push me, or throw herself into my arms for comfort, or punch me, or something, anything. But then she pushes past me and grabs for the door handle, and before I can react, she’s gone, racing out into the hall and leaving the two of us behind.
“What… Lexie,” I shout, but it’s too late. She has no intention of coming back, and how can I blame her?
And what do I do now?
My gut, the fatherly instinct that has guided me for the last twenty years, wants me to go after her, to find her and comfort her until she stops crying. But my heart sees Candy standing in front of me, also upset, also in need of me. My heart is torn into two halves, and each of them is gone in a different direction.
I can’t be in two places at once. So, what the hell am I going to do now?
How do I choose between my daughter and the woman I know is the one I’ve been waiting for to share my life with?
Chapter Twenty-Five
Candy
“Go,” I tell him. I recognize the indecision on his face, the way he looks after Alex, and then back at me, unsure which way to go. I wipe the tears from my cheeks stubbornly, sniffing, trying to make myself appear as calm as possible so that he won’t be tempted to stay. “Go after her. She needs you.”
“But,” Finn takes a half-step towards me, and I know I haven’t done a good enough job of convincing him that I’m fine. “What about you? I can’t just leave you like this.”
“Yes, you can,” I insist. “For your daughter.”
Finn makes a face, obviously torn with the idea of leaving me. I can see by the way he takes a half-step back again that he doesn’t want to just let Alex go like this. He wants to follow her. But he also wants to stay with me.
So, I’m going to have to make this easy for him.
“Go after her,” I say. “I’ll come with you – she’s my best friend, too, and this is half my fault. Come on, before she gets too far ahead and we can’t find her.”
It seems like that was all the motivation Finn needed to get moving, he leaps forward into action, striding out into the hall so quickly that I can barely keep up. I lock our door as quickly as I can and then rush forward, having to almost run to catch up with his long legs. People are staring at us from their rooms like Finn said, but I ignore them. None of that matters now.
If I was vain at all, I would care that I only managed to throw on the least matching outfit from the pile on my floor before Alex came back into the room and started yelling again. I would care that my makeup isn’t done, that my hair is a mess, that I’m red and streaked with tears. But I don’t care about any of that. Not when it comes to finding my best friend and stopping her before we lose our friendship forever.
I just rush after Finn, keeping up with him as best as I can as he hurtles through the doors at the end of the hall and down the stairs, where we just catch a glimpse of Alex heading outside before she’s gone. She isn’t too far ahead of us and moving slower than we are. We might be able to catch up to her before it’s too late.
We rush together down the stairs, and I almost think once that I will trip and probably break my ankle on the way down, but I don’t. Instead, we make it outside, dash along the paths towards the parking lot, gaining on Alex all the time. But she glances behind and sees us and starts to speed up, and my heart is pounding in my mouth, making me think that we won’t get to her before she reaches her car and she’s gone.
