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She cupped my cheek, her touch soft. “Same goes, Callan. Thank you for racing to my rescue earlier.” She sighed heavily. “He gave up too easily. Even if you deleted everything from his camera and phone, it probably backed up to another device he didn’t have on him. Those pictures are coming out. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Archer and I were just talking about that.” I clasped her hand and drew it to my chest. “How do you feel about us going public? Instagram official, I think is the term.”
She studied me for a second. “I have something to show you.” She lifted her phone from the chair cushion. She stared at the screen for a long moment.
“Red?” Had the pictures already surfaced? Or worse, that damn video? My anxiety escalated the longer she stared at the screen. “What’s going on?”
Doubt and apprehension shaded Catie’s expression. “I’ve been getting these text messages.”
“Okay. Who are they from?”
“Don’t know. Don’t have the number in my contacts. It just always comes from Unknown Number. That’s kind of how I think of them.”
“How long?” I clenched her fingers in mine.
“A couple months. They’re sad messages.” She shifted her feet off my thighs, and turned the screen around so I could see. “Here, see for yourself.”
Without releasing her hand, I took the phone in my other fist. She’d opened the texts so it was at the beginning. The messages were incoming only. She’d never replied.
As I read through them, my breath shallowed, my heart thudded.
Love you, Dad. Miss you.
Every message in her texts were words I’d typed and sent to my dad. Every damn one.
“What the hell?”
“When I first moved here, Steve just wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept calling and texting to make up with me. He wanted us to get back together.”
“I hope you told him to fuck right off.” The nerve of that asshole. Letting a revenge porn video hit the internet was not the way you wormed back into a lady’s heart.
“I mostly ignored them. Then when he left me a voicemail, sobbing about his side piece being pregnant, I knew I had to do something. I got a new number.” She skimmed her fingernails along my scruffy jaw. “I’ve heard that phone companies reassign released numbers all the time. I didn’t put two and two together, because these came from an unknown. Not the number you gave me when we first started working together.”
I clicked through to the info screen for the number. “This is my other phone. My private number. I only ever text my dad from that phone.” All this time, she’d been reading about what was going on in my life. “I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection. For all the times I’ve called or texted you.”
She shrugged and took the phone back. “You gave me your phone and told me to save my details on it while you paid the bill at Pour It On. Plus, you were distracted by the song inspiration. And I saved the contact with my name. The number doesn’t appear.”
“Why didn’t you reply?”
With a blush and a snort, she explained, “I’m a creative. So when I started getting the messages, I… Well, I made up stories in my head about who might be sending them. And they were so sad. It felt like if I replied back with something like ‘hey, not who you think I am’ the sender might lose their dad all over again. I mean, the messages weren’t hurting anyone, maybe actually helping them through a bad time. Although, I promised myself that if the texts ever took a turn for the tragic, I’d reply.” She smiled at me. “Then a couple weeks ago, the tone did change, but it was, I don’t know, I guess optimistic.”
“Probably about the time we got serious. Once you stopped working on my projects.”
She shrugged again. “Anyway, it clicked today with the last message. About the release and tour. I was getting ready to go back to the house to ask you about it when the photographer showed up.”
I held my hand up for her phone. She unlocked the screen and passed it back to me. I thumbed through the messages again, starting at the top. I showed her. “This one was the day I met you on the trail. I was angry because the artist working on my album cover seemed to be a bit of a flake.”
Catie rolled her eyes. “Was not.”
“No, but I didn’t know that.” I looked down again and barked out a laugh. “Here’s one about Barry’s new boots. Man, I cemented that kid as a loyal employee on that day.”
“You definitely better give him a job when he graduates.”
I lifted one of her hands and kissed the knuckles. “Got that straight.” I scrolled some more. “This one”—I angled the phone toward her—“was from the morning after I got Elvis.”
“I figured.”
“These texts tell our story, Red. A story written on the stars and brought to life in the most incredible twist of fate. These are the story of when we fell in love.”
