Chapter Eleven
Lila
I put a hand on my hip and narrowed my eyes at Adam. Surely, I hadn’t heard that last comment correctly. “What are you saying?”
“All I can think is someone wrote that to keep you away from me. Or vice versa.”
I recoiled and snatched the paper from his hand.
Who would do that? Why? I pointed at the scrawled signature at the end of the crumpled, aging page, which still had wrinkles and smears from the tears I’d cried over it so long ago, when Mom had given it to me in the kitchen, the day after Peanut Island.
He sounded so shocked. I didn’t think he was lying. But who else knew?
“I don’t get it. Mom gave me the letter in the kitchen the day after they went to Miami, after I finished my Latin lesson. It came in a blue envelope, and she—”
I broke off, remembering how much it had hurt to read those words for the first time, to see them so plainly written on the page, to feel my heart shatter into a thousand pieces with each careless, emotionless word.
I don’t care about you, Lila. I don’t like you like that.
The kiss had been a mistake…I’d always wondered why the focus had been on that one moment in the library. Just the kiss—
“Mom told me you’d resigned. That you’d decided the scholarship wasn’t for you…
that you weren’t…that it was probably better I never see you again anyway.
” I stopped for a moment again and looked away from him.
He didn’t write the letter? Why would my mom tell me he had?
Still confused, I pulled my gaze back to his.
“And so, I went back to school. I left the next day.”
Adam took the paper from me and skimmed it. When he finished, he laughed without humor. “And you believed them. You believed what they told you. You didn’t think—”
“We were teenagers. I was young, and practically a kid.” A kid with a bunch of dumb ideas about a prince charming, a kid who thought the first person she ever kissed would end up being the love of her life.
“This is so fucked up.” He shook his head a few times. “It’s not how things happened for me.”
“All I know is, we spent the day together on Peanut Island, and then the next day, you disappeared forever.”
He shut his eyes and groaned. When he opened them, they’d hardened. “You sure you want to know my side of the story?”
“Of course.”
He took a deep breath. “Your father accused me of sexual assault, Lila.”
“What?” The question leapt out of my mouth. “What do you mean?”
“He brought me into his office and accused me of forcing myself on you. He showed me a video of the Christmas party when I’d kissed you in the library.” Adam stepped closer to me. “He said that I’d hurt you.”
“Oh my God,” I breathed. “And—”
“And then he took me out of the scholarship competition. He—I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what happened, Lila. That one moment, that one thing changed my whole life.”
“I’m—I’m so sorry.”
“He was lying, wasn’t he? He was—I knew it then. He had to be.” Adam raked a hand through his thick hair. “I always thought that. I didn’t want to believe him. But then I kept wondering…what if he had been telling the truth?”
“Jesus Christ.” I crossed my arms. It might have been seventy-five degrees outside, but suddenly the tropical air felt as cold as a northern wind. “I never said anything like that to my dad. I swear it. You’re right. He lied.”
A rueful smile crossed Adam’s face, but his shoulders slumped.
He sighed. “He told me to leave. To never contact you again. So, I didn’t. Not right away, at least.”
“Then why did you want to see me now?”
“Because in the end,” he replied, his voice falling softer, “no matter how many times I justified it, I couldn’t stay away.”
I believed him. Truth was, plenty had happened to degrade my memory of the father I’d once revered.
Dad wasn’t anything like the man I’d grown up trying my hardest to please.
How stupid I’d been to trust him, to think he placed my mother and me over everything else.
My father had been a liar, a cheat, a thief.
And telling Adam I’d accused him of sexual assault wasn’t too far off the list of possibilities for my father’s behavior.
But getting confirmation of it all still hurt. A lot.
“My father lied to you,” I murmured. “To you, and to me. He lied.”
“Sounds like it.”
“I believe you,” I said, making sure to keep my eyes locked with Adam’s. “And I didn’t accuse you of sexual assault.” I held the paper up and ripped it in half. “And I believe you. I do.”
“Thank you. If given the choice, I would have tried to see you again. My life…well, it derailed there for a bit.”
It sure didn’t seem like it, given where he was in life just ten years down the track. Especially compared to my circumstances. Maybe it had caused my life to derail too, now that I thought about it.
“You know, we knew each other for only a few weeks,” I started, thinking about all of it, about how little I really knew him.
Sure, we’d had a connection, and I’d had a schoolgirl crush, but it hadn’t really gone any further than that.
And I’d been stupid to think it would. “We were kids. And clearly—”
“Clearly your parents wanted to keep us apart.” He sighed. “I see that for sure now.”
“My father went too far. He shouldn’t have made up an accusation like that.
It’s very serious.” I grimaced, pushing down the disgust brewing in my stomach.
“I’m so sorry.” I thought back to the boy I once knew, the one who’d been so hopeful about his future, despite all the setbacks and challenges he’d faced.
How much he’d had to overcome. “But you do seem okay.”
Grimacing, he shook his head a few times. “You don’t know how hard it’s been. What I had to do to survive.”
Oh, yes, Adam, I do. Absolutely. More than I ever want to tell you.
“Try me,” I said, pushing away my own disgust about the recent things I’d also done in the name of survival. “What happened?”
Adam ran a hand through his thick hair. “When I lost that scholarship, I didn’t have any other options.
I had no savings, no money. It was too late in the school year to get enough loans for school, and no one would give me one me anyway.
” He shook his head and looked away. “So, that’s why I enlisted. ”
My heart broke a little to hear the heaviness behind those words, but I decided to focus on the positive side of it all. “You served our country. That’s a good thing.”
He scrubbed his face. “You don’t know anything about Kandahar. Not everyone who serves wants to be there.” He waved a hand. “I’m not saying I regret doing it, because I don’t, but I do resent that my life situation forced me to do it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I had one choice. The military or the street.”
I studied him for a long time, feeling a whole mix of emotions push through me—nostalgia, sadness, regret, and the bittersweet happiness that came from seeing someone from the past I’d cared about. “It’s good to see you again, Adam. I’m glad you stopped by.”
He smiled at my comment, and it seemed genuine. “It sounds to me like we have a lot to talk about.”
“We do.” I thought of my sad current state, and the pathetic way my life had turned upside down when Dad died. Nothing about my present-day life resembled anything I’d had just a year ago.
“That has me thinking about something.” Adam stepped closer to me again. “Have dinner with me.”
“Have dinner with you?”
“Please. Are you busy tonight?” He smiled again, this time one of those charming, disarming smiles, one he used to give me when he was working at the pool. “Have dinner with me.”
I had a thousand things happening between the morning and this evening, but I couldn’t resist Adam, even if I’d tried.
He was too cute, too like his former self, and I was, well…
I was desperate. Desperate to hang on to what I’d once had, to any remnants of my former life, when things hadn’t been so shit-tastic.
“We can just talk,” he added. “Catch up like old friends.”
Friends.
Adam had never been only a friend. But I suppose friend was better than nothing. Friendship was a start, and I had precious few real friends in my life now. Not that I planned on telling Adam what a shamble everything had become. Even he wouldn’t understand that—I hardly understood it myself.
“Okay,” I said. “Dinner. Sounds like a plan.”
“What if we say seven?” He spread a hand. “I’ll pick you up here, okay?”
“Great,” I said, still staring in his eyes. “Seven it is.”
He seemed pleased and we said goodbye. I waited for a while before I went back inside the house, closing the knotty front door behind me and sinking to the tiles with my back propped up against it.
From there I had a view of the open floor plan, and the living room, kitchen, and dining room.
The house didn’t look at all how it had been when Adam worked here.
All the paintings had been sold, along with the sculptures, silver service, collective antique furniture, and museum-quality tapestries.
The contents had brought a few hundred thousand dollars.
I shut my eyes, hating the memory. Selling all that had been one of the worst periods of my life, and it had hurt to find out how little it all brought in comparison to the debts owed.
Even worse had been the looks that came on the day I used that money to pay off some off my father’s outstanding bills.
Those people had practically laughed me out of the room, not knowing how much it had taken to scrounge up the cash.
Thank God Adam hadn’t insisted on coming inside.
He’d have been horrified to see the house so bare, just like I was every morning when I stumbled down the stairs. I’d allowed myself to save only a small fraction of the items in the house, just the minimum to keep some vestige of life going.
No, I could never allow Adam to see any of this. Just like everyone else, he wouldn’t understand.
Adam
That went better than I’d expected.
Not that it went particularly well, but at least I knew the truth now, and at least I had an explanation for the afternoon in Mr. Montague’s office, when everything had seemed too strange and out of whack, so different from what I’d believed.
That bastard had lied to me.
In fact, he’d gone further than that, according to his daughter.
He’d lied to her too, forging a letter to confuse and upset her.
What an asshole. What a mind job. What a waste.
He’d set us both on a path that day with one sweep of his hand, one moment of passing judgment.
It must have been nice to have that kind of power.
But at least now I had the answer to the question that had haunted me for years. Lila and I had been kept apart by something—someone—other than her.
I pressed a button on the Bentley’s steering wheel and directed the car’s computer system to call Preston. He picked up with a laugh. “Do I even have to guess what this is about?”
“No.” I sped up as I wound through Palm Beach’s idyllic downtown. “I went by her place this morning and we talked.”
“Good.”
“And she told me her father had lied to me that day.” I tasted bitterness in my mouth. “That he made up that sexual assault accusation.”
Preston scoffed. “Could have guessed that one.”
“How?”
“You were seventeen. She was fifteen. I doubt her father would have wanted her derailing her studies at Hempstead for a guy from the wrong side of Boca Raton. So he did what the rich do. He neutralized the threat.”
I stopped the car at the next red light. “And you never thought of telling me this?”
“Would you have listened?”
Fuck, he had a point. Stubbornness was one of my best and worst qualities. “No, I wouldn’t have.”
Preston laughed again. “Besides, you threw some epic parties in the process, while you were trying to prove once and for all that you’d reached whatever pinnacle of prestige you failed to have back when you were a teenage foster kid.”
I flinched at his blunt assessment. “I’m sure Palm Beach won’t notice a lack of celebrations at my house.”
“They will. It was refreshing. Less old people in tuxedoes for one.”
“Glad to have provided the distraction.” The light changed to green and I moved along the streets again, drawing closer to Ibis Isle and the unexpected sanctuary my home had become. “Lila and I are having dinner tonight.”
“Sounds like you’re getting exactly what you wanted after all—the chance to start again.”
“Ten-year odyssey coming down to this.”
“Still think she’s worth it?”
I scoffed. How could he even ask such a thing? “How many times have I talked to you about her over the last decade?”
“I think you brought her up the first week I met you.”
“You’re right. I did.”
I met Preston in boot camp the summer after high school, still hurt, raw and angry about being screwed out of my chance at college, as well as the sexual assault accusation.
We’d bonded over chemical warfare training, when a few seconds in the gas chamber on post had left us both reeling.
He made a lighthearted remark about puking his guts out, and I knew instantly we were going to be friends.
“But here I am.” I spread a hand. “The obsession paid off.”
“Just be careful, man. It’s been a while since you knew her. People change.”
“Whatever,” I said, deciding to change the subject as I guided the car through Ibis Isle’s gated entrance. “Now what about the new headquarters? Are we still a go for the walk-through?”
“We’re all set.”
“Excellent.”
We spoke more about the sale, and a few other details the Manhattan team needed for us to prepare for the InstaPost IPO and expansion.
It was scheduled for noon on Saturday, but that didn’t matter.
I still had hours of work ahead of me, time spent answering emails, on conference calls, a review of the next quarter sales projections, and more.
But I wasn’t as burdened as I had expected to be.
I was buoyed. Dinner with Lila would be a much-needed reward for the long afternoon of work ahead.
After ending the call with Preston, I called Café L’Roque in the center of town and made a seven thirty reservation for the restaurant’s most private table.
If I was going to do dinner with her, I wanted to do it right.
I was Adam Greene, after all. And she didn’t know who she was dealing with.