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‘Sure, what?’
‘Could you forget about me and Luke and please don’t tell the others. I couldn’t bear for this to become a massive issue. For him or for me. It was fun and casual and not a big deal.’
Jacie’s brow furrowed. Ruby knew she was effectively asking her friend to swallow a circus elephant by asking her to remain silent about the best bit of gossip since Kim Kardashian released her sex tape. But when it came to something this serious, she knew Jacie would choke down the elephant if she had to.
‘Why are you so determined to make this not a thing when it could be a thing?’ Jacie said. ‘I don’t get it? Don’t you want it to be a thing?’
‘I’m not sure it can be a thing, even if I wanted it to be,’ Ruby said. ‘And I’m not sure I do.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m grieving, Jace,’ Ruby stressed, knowing what could have been a convenient excuse to end the conversation was actually the truth.
As much as she had enjoyed last night, and been moved by Luke’s revelations this morning, was she really strong enough emotionally to embark on a relationship? A relationship which was full to bursting with complications before she and Luke had even touched each other for the first time. She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Luke Matty had been the father of her heart. She was still processing the fact he hadn’t told her about his love affair with Falcone, but the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Would a man talk to his daughter about his failed love affair? Matty’s silence didn’t detract from the closeness of their relationship, if anything, it enhanced it. Matty had been protecting her, and her dreams, telling her the truth about Falcone would have been too much information.
But she was a grown woman now, and the truth about Luke was he was a complicated, conflicted guy trying to navigate the mistakes both his parents had made. Something she suspected was a lot tougher than he had let on after finding his father’s body. And while Luke didn’t blame his father anymore for that, she did. A little bit. Suicide was often a result of depression – which was beyond any person’s ability to control even with therapy and medication. She knew that, intellectually.
But the thought of Luke as a fourteen-year-old boy going to his father’s house to visit with a man who had failed him and finding something so horrific made her want to blame someone. And the only person she could think of to blame was Luke’s father. The man who should have loved him and protected him but had been too consumed by his own demons to do either. And that was without even factoring in how Falcone had failed Matty, too.
She let out a breath to release the tightness in her chest.
Anger was pointless and unproductive. Especially anger against a man who had died sixteen years ago.
People were fallible, parents made mistakes, love didn’t always conquer all, she of all people knew that. After all, she’d hardly spoken to her own mother since she’d left home at eighteen. There was no law that said you had to understand your parents, or the choices they made, and no law that said you needed to atone for them either.
But she wasn’t convinced Luke had gotten that message.
He clearly had a very strained relationship with his mother, but he hadn’t bailed on Helena Devlin the way Ruby had bailed on Margie Graham. Did that make him a good man, or a foolish one, or simply a dogmatic one? She didn’t know, but what she did know was she had no intention of breaking the confidences he’d given her, or exploiting the heat between them, any more than she had already.
Which meant she wasn’t going to force this thing-or-not-thing.
‘I just don’t have the head space for a grand love affair right now,’ she continued, because Jacie was still looking at her as if she’d punched a gift horse in the mouth.
And neither does Luke.
‘I’m too busy trying to save The Royale and deal with the fact that Matty is gone forever to think about much else.’
‘I think you’re missing the big picture here,’ Jacie said, still frowning.
‘What big picture?’
‘If you want Luke Devlin, and he makes you happy, maybe you shouldn’t give up on this thing so easily?’
The conviction in Jacie’s voice made Ruby’s throat thicken again.
‘I’m not giving up on anything. If we can keep things casual, I certainly won’t say no.’ She wasn’t ruling anything out, but she wasn’t going to rely on Luke either for anything. ‘All I’m saying is, I have to put myself first at the moment. And that means not relying on other people to make me happy or to fix stuff – other than my dodgy boiler or the cracks in the cornicing, that is.’
‘What about the plan to get Luke to invest his gazillions in The Royale?’ Jacie said, pragmatic as always. ‘Is that not happening now?’
‘No, it’s not,’ she said, feeling ashamed now she had ever seen Luke as a possible cash cow. ‘Saving The Royale is not Luke’s responsibility. It’s my job to get the theatre into profit and find a way to cover the debts.’
‘How?’ Jacie said. ‘You know as well as I do we can’t possibly make enough money to cover that much debt. Not unless you sell the cinema. And if you do that they’ll be no business anyway. There’s nothing wrong with our business model,’ Jacie added passionately. ‘Matty wasted money on stuff he didn’t have too, like the ten gallons of expired mimosa mix we found in the basement left over from the twenty-fifth anniversary screening of Steel Magnolias in 2014.’ Jacie huffed out an exasperated breath.
‘I know, Matty wasn’t the most astute businessman.’ Ruby had to agree, in the past month she and Jacie had been able to find a ton savings, and it hadn’t been that hard. The mimosa mix debacle was just one of Matty’s many sentimental expenditures. She could still remember how much he’d loved dressing up as Dolly Parton that night, though, so she didn’t begrudge him in the slightest.
Matty had been a showman first and foremost. Perhaps he should have let her and Jacie take over managing the budget a long time ago, but it was too late to agonise over that now.
