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“Sept 4: Ronald doesn’t think the Paramount people will consider me for the lead in Bright Things. The role is too opposite from Janelle. I should fire him, but he’s my third agent in two years. Ugh. I really want that movie!”
Interesting. Caitlyn wouldn’t have considered Vanessa the type to record her innermost thoughts, especially not in written form when her sister had been so attached to her smartphone, but here it was, in blue pen. With all of the email hacking and cloud-storage security breaches that plagued celebrities, Vanessa might have felt paper had a measure of privacy she couldn’t get any other way. Feeling a little voyeuristic, Caitlyn read a few more entries at the beginning and then skipped ahead.
Wow, she hadn’t realized how much Vanessa had wanted to move on from Janelle, the character she’d played on the prime-time drama Beacon Street. Her sister had never said anything about how trapped she’d felt.
It kind of stung to find out Vanessa hadn’t confided in Caitlyn about her career woes. Or much of anything, apparently. The journal was full of surprises. Caitlyn would have said they were pretty close before the crash, but obviously Vanessa had kept a lot of things hidden.
Antonio’s name caught her eye and she paused mid–page flip.
“I told Antonio about Mark. He totally freaked out, worse than I expected. Simple solution to the problem, I told him. If he’d just stop this ridiculous nonsense about reviving his glory days in the ring, I’d agree to stop seeing Mark. Which won’t be hard. He’s nowhere near as good as Antonio in bed, but I had to do something to get my stupid husband’s attention!”
Caitlyn went cold, then hot.
Her sister had been having an affair, too?
Dread twisted her stomach inside out as she flipped to the beginning of the entry. It was dated over two years ago. Well before Vanessa had approached Caitlyn about being a surrogate. Her sister’s marriage problems had extended that far back?
She kept reading entry after entry with slick apprehension souring her mouth.
“Antonio is still really upset about Mark. He demanded I quit Beacon Street. I laughed. As if I’d ruin my career for him just so my darling husband didn’t have to watch me on-screen with the man I’m sleeping with? Whatever.”
And then a few pages later: “Antonio is so horrible. Not only is he still talking about fighting again—which I will not put up with!—he’s found what he thinks is the best way to get back at me for Mark. He’s having an affair with a woman who looks like me. On purpose. It’s so juvenile. He’s so not the type to be this vindictive. But I left him no choice, he said in that imperious voice that never fails to piss me off.”
Antonio had started his affair in retaliation for Vanessa’s. It didn’t change how she felt about infidelity, but it changed how she felt about her sister. And her sister’s views on marriage, which clearly didn’t mirror Caitlyn’s.
Information overload. Wave after wave of it crashed over her. So Antonio had wanted to get back in the ring even before the crash—did he remember that?
Her throat and eyes both burning uncontrollably, Caitlyn forced herself to read to the end. Without checking her strength, she threw the leather-bound confessional at the wall, unable to hold the evidence of how little she’d actually known her sister.
She’d walked into this attic hoping to find some comfort for the task ahead of her—living with a man she loved but couldn’t fathom how to trust—and instead found out her sister hadn’t been sitting around pining for her husband. In fact, Vanessa had had skeletons of her own in her closet.
Hot, angry tears coursed down Caitlyn’s face, and she couldn’t stop the flood of grief. Didn’t want to. Nothing was as she’d thought. Vanessa had pushed Antonio into the arms of another woman first by forbidding him from doing something he loved and then punishing him via a romance with her costar. It didn’t make Antonio’s choices right, but against everything Caitlyn would have expected, she had sympathy for him nonetheless.
It was too much. She sank into a heap and wept.
She registered Antonio’s presence only a moment before he gathered her into his arms, rocking her against his strong chest. Ashamed that her soul had latched on to his touch like a greedy miser being showered with gold, she clung to him as he murmured her name. She cried on his expensive shirt and he didn’t even seem to notice the huge wet spot under her cheek.
His fingers tangled in her hair as he cupped her head gently, massaging with his strong fingers. Tiny needles of awareness spiked through her skin, energizing her with the power of his sweet touch, but she ignored it. He didn’t speak and somehow that made it okay to just be, no words, no excuses, no reasons to shove him away yet again.
