Chapter 40
40
Natalie
L ater that day, Hanna helps me unpack another truckload into the stable stall. Then I drive back to where I left Preston. In the meantime, he’s finished disassembling the splatter tent. He’s standing over the pieces like a hunter over a wildebeest, looking triumphant.
“You guys okay without me for this last load?” Hanna asks.
“Totally,” I say. “You get back to Eloise and Easton.”
She heads off in their direction, and the two of us start loading up the truck with the last of our stuff.
“You did it,” I tell him. “You fulfilled the will.”
“We did it,” he corrects. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“So. You’re free to go.”
He shakes his head, his expression serious. “I don’t have to leave yet,” he says. “Due diligence is still in progress, and negotiations won’t stop till those are done. I’m guessing I have at least another week? Maybe more?”
A week sounds like bliss to me. I lean toward him, his mouth comes down hungrily on mine, and I know we’re going to celebrate today’s win in the best possible way in a few minutes.
Except right then I feel the vibration of his phone against my hip. Not the single buzz of an incoming text, but the insistent rasp of a call.
“I should probably get that, huh?” he says.
I nod.
He pulls his phone out, reads the screen, and curses.
“Anjali?”
“Yeah,” he says.
Anjali’s his boss—and, I’ve learned, the only call he’ll take any time of day or under any circumstances. Well, not any. I’ve been delighted to discover that when Preston’s giving me his, shall we say, undivided attention , it’s definitely undivided.
He answers it. “Hey.”
After a moment of silence, he says, “What do you mean, an issue?”
More silence, then, “Why am I hearing this from you?”
I take a step away to give him more privacy, but he shakes his head, meeting my eyes—he doesn’t need me to go.
His voice is tight. “It’s personal when a deal is on the brink of falling through and the principals don’t trust me to help them sort through it. They know I’m good with numbers and documents and spreadsheets and data, but they don’t trust me when the chips are down.”
I don’t know what she says in response, but he says, “I can fix this.” Then, again, “I can fix this. Get MegaStar in the conference room, Monday morning at nine.”
He paces.
“I’ll be there.”
He hangs up the phone.
“Bad?” I ask, trying to read the situation on his face.
“Not great,” he admits. “The buyer found something.”
“Something you can tell me about?”
“In vague terms. The seller was threatened at one point, a year or two back, with an intellectual property lawsuit. It didn’t go to trial, but the information wasn’t disclosed to the buyer, so now it’s—a thing.”
I wince.
“Yeah,” he agrees. There’s a tautness to his expression I can’t read, and it makes my stomach hurt.
“You have to fly back tomorrow?”
“Yeah. But I can probably come back again. Do the rest of the due diligence here.”
Probably. He doesn’t sound confident, and he looks miserable. “It’s okay if you can’t,” I say. “We knew you were going to have to leave at some point. And you’ll…visit.”
But it hits me how uncertain all of this is. He’s about to get a promotion that will undoubtedly change the nature of his work life. I don’t know much about the investment-bank food chain, but I have to imagine that the higher up you are, the more of your work involves face-to-face meetings and skin-on-skin handshakes. The promotion could make it harder to leave New York than he’s planned for.
People who are away from their real lives have fantasies that don’t fit their day-to-day realities and make promises they can’t keep. Something that seems fun when you’re thousands of miles from home might seem impossible when you’re back on your own turf.
“You okay?” he asks.
For a second I think about lying about it, saying yes, but Preston and I have always been honest with each other, and I don’t want to stop now.
“I’m scared,” I confess. “That you’ll get back there, and…this whole thing will feel like something that happened to you in another life. That this—that I—won’t make any sense to you. That you’ll want someone more serious. More like you.”
He’s shaking his head. “I don’t want someone more serious,” he says. “I want you . But I’m scared, too. I’m scared that what happened with Kali will happen again. That I’ll go back, and after all this, after?—”
He makes a gesture that encompasses us. And the festival. And maybe all of Rush Creek.
“—I won’t be any different at all. I’ll slip back into spending all my time working, and I won’t know how to be there for you when you need me to, and?—”
I don’t know how to reassure myself, but I know how to reassure him. “That won’t happen,” I say. “I won’t let you forget how to be there for me.”
His eyes are dark and uncertain. “Promise?”
It makes me smile, and I reach for his hand. “If you promise you won’t get back there and forget all about how good this is. Or decide your ideal woman is someone who works in I-banking and wears pencil skirts.”
“Not a chance,” he says fiercely, and then we’re kissing, desperate and messy, like it’s the last time.
When he finally breaks it off, he smiles down at me. “We should get this stuff unloaded,” he says. “And then we have just enough time before the party at Hanna’s to?—”
I’m climbing up into the truck before he can finish the thought, and it makes him laugh—a rusty, beautiful, rarely used sound I can’t get enough of.