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Chapter 57
Cash
Hourspassandmyimpatience grows. With each passing sweep of the clock, I imagine what Grace is doing. Laughing with her mother about the one she got over on me. Hiding out at Tessa’s trying to scheme her way out of this. Toasting with Hanson that she’s gotten away with it.
My imagination is a bastard, and my heart is a coward.
If Grace actually told her mother the truth, and my father knows about the business, then he’s already ten steps ahead, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before he notifies Hanson of our plan.
I shoulddosomething—warn Landry, call Carter—something. But as the hours tick on, I can’t get myself to move. I can’t leave this apartment until Grace comes back.
She’s going to come back,I remind my stupid brain. There is an explanation for everything. A reason why she hid her relationship with her mother.Somethingthat will explain all of this as just another misunderstanding.
There has to be. I refuse to do what I did last time. I refuse to crucify her before I talk to her.
But I’m losing my mind. I need something—anything—to remind me that Grace isn’t the person my bastard brain keeps conjuring. And then I remember the video Carter gave me months ago.
The interview.
For months, I’d held onto it, knowing I didn’t deserve to hear what Grace really said after I had written her off without so much as a conversation. Tonight, I’m not as strong. I slip the SD card from the top drawer next to my bed into the computer, my heart beating so loud I can hear it in my eardrums, just like the damn hands on the clock.
And then Grace’s face appears, and I feel myself exhale. I listen intently, consuming her words, her expressions, her smiles, the tilt of her head when she looks away from the camera, shy in her discussion of her love life but vibrant when she turns back and admits that, yes, she’s in love. She never says with whom, but I can feel it through the screen. It’s as if she knew all those months ago that I would need this moment. I would need this reminder that she picked me long before I thought she did. She chose our relationship when I thought she’d written us off.
She sat across from Vanessa and told her she was ready to stand in the sun with me. That I taught her what real love was. That she was finally happy.
And then I destroyed us.
Sitting in my bedroom, I stare out at the sun setting over the city. The fire-like show would be something that Grace would enjoy.
It was another plan we made, how at the end of our days we promised to make time to watch the sunset together. And after the baby is born, we planned to do it with a glass of wine and our daughter between us.
There was an entire life I planned. A life filled with sunsets, dancing, working together, living together, laughing together, sitting on the porch at night, holding hands, taking baths.
I can’t help but wonder if she has even been listening these last few months. Has she been paying attention? Does she get that I’d do anything to make her happy?
She didn’t tell me she was seeing her mother again. She still doesn’t trust me.
It appears that no matter how hard I’ve tried, Grace never really forgave me for what I did to her all those months ago. Instead, the fears her mother has instilled in her—the fear that love doesn’t last, that happily ever afters don’t exist, that marriage isn’t forever—seem to win out every time.
And rather than me proving her wrong, rather than me earning her forgiveness and proving to her that love can be enough, she’s proving she’s right. What the hell do I know about happily ever afters? I cost my mother her own.
Guilt eats at me. Guilt for doubting Grace, guilt for not being more careful about my family’s secrets, and guilt for killing my mother.
And shame because I feel myself slipping further and further into a man I recognize and a man I hate—my father.
