I hear our mother approaching. I sit up quickly and turn to Claire. “Does it look like I’ve been crying?” I ask. “I don’t want her to ask why I’ve been crying.”
Claire looks me over and says, “Yeah, you look like shit, but she had something done to her face this morning. Needles or a peel or something. She’s wearing her recovery sunglasses. She won’t see a…”
“Mom, hello,” I say. Claire echoes me.
“There you both are.” She stops and waves from a few yards away, black Lucite frames bigger than the windshield of my Miata covering her face. “I have a masseuse waiting in the pool house. My muscles are still tense from the flight. Why don’t the two of you join me?”
“I’m good,” I say. “Thanks anyway.”
“I’ve got a call with Tokyo in ten,” Claire says.
“Suit yourself,” Mom says, and she floats out of the room.
Once she’s gone, Claire turns and points. “That’s the door you have to open now.”
“Mom?” I ask. “She’s not a door. She’s a wall.”
“Brady, you think you don’t have enough confidence to pursue what you want. But you do. Hayes is not the source of your confidence. He’s a witness to it. Go to the pool house and tell Mom you aren’t going to law school.”
“Here at the Silversteins’? I’d hate to have to replace the pool house if Mom burns it down.”
“You’ve never told her what you wanted. You can’t blame her for that.”
Claire isn’t wrong. I’ve never been great at making decisions. One summer when I was eight, I couldn’t decide between a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate, a lemon ripple cup or a banana split at Sundaes on Main in Bridgehampton so my parents bought me all three.
“She sent you to boarding school and you went. Sailing school. You went. Whatever she signed you up for, you did. I told you in London. It’s time to stop being what other people want and start being what you want. If you can tell Mom the truth, you’ll know the confidence you gained this summer wasn’t built on a lie. It was based on knowing what you want. That’s the version of you I’m pretty sure Hayes loves. You can do it. Tell her.”
“Byheryou mean Eleanor Gibson? The woman we just saw pass through in the Chanel suit and her afternoon diamonds headed to a massage.Thather?”
“Yes. Have you even told Mom about being a teacher?”
“She’s seen me in the playroom with Gemma. It’s not like she was encouraging.”
“Were there open bottles of paint or glue?” Claire asks, and I nod. Mom does hate the potential for a spill. “Tell her your plan.”
But is it my plan? Or is it our plan? The plan Hayes and I dreamed together. Could I ever dream it without him? I walked out on Hayes. He’ll be on a flight back home soon. I told him to go, and it wasn’t because of the lie. It was because he doesn’t think I’m smart enough to handle the truth. If he thinks I’m just this spoiled rich kid, I can’t be with him. Or am I running away from responsibility because I don’t think I can handle it?
“Uncle Brady!” Gemma comes running down the hall and I wipe any tears from eyes so she doesn’t know how much I’m hurting.
“Gemma!” I pick her up and twirl her around. She giggles and smiles and I think for a few seconds that there has to be a way to make everything okay.
Chapter 49
Capri
Hayes
A tiny sliver of light pierces through an opening in the curtains and reaches my eyeball. My head pounds and my mouth feels like it sucked a dirty tennis ball. The doctor in me knows I need to get out of bed and hydrate but the country boy wants to pee the bed. Then I remember I heard a knock at the door maybe a quarter hour ago.
I use all my energy to get up and walk to the door. I open it and there’s a tray with a note. My head clears and I bend down to grab it. My heart races with hope. But the note is not from Brady. It’s from Phil and Will. “Thanks for the text. Glad you’re alive. Hope this will help.” I pick up the tray and bring it in. A glass with a raw orange-yellow yolk, and tiny twin bottles, one brown with Worcestershire sauce the other red with hot sauce. A “prairie oyster” has absolutely no basis in scientific evidence but I’ll try anything right now. I mix it together and chug it down in one gulp.
I pull back the curtain slowly so my eyes can get used to the light. It stings, but less than I thought it would. Maybe it’s the amino acids from the yolk, or the placebo effect, but I’m not as much of a physical wreck as I was in bed.
Emotionally is another story.
I try to piece together everything that has happened the past day, the past summer, the past year. The past year is the easiest, working at the garage, missing Brady like crazy. The past summer, being with Brady, falling for him again. The past week… My mind comes to a screeching halt.
I treated Brady like he was too fragile. I wasn’t protecting him, I was making decisions for him about what I thought he could and couldn’t handle. I was so wrapped up in my damn clinical assessments of situations that I couldn’t see what he really deserved.
