Chapter 15
Chapter 15
They finished the last script for Queen’s Kiss on a Friday, but Scarlett put off leaving Musgrove until Monday. She made some excuse about that being an even sixty days for her rental car, but Scarlett and Jaime both knew she was lying.
The truth was she wanted one last long weekend with him, and she didn’t want to have to admit that out loud. Jaime accepted her lie gracefully, and she was grateful he pretended.
See, they were perfect for each other.
Except ... she was kinda beginning to worry they were actually perfect for each other. Or at the very least, that no one else would ever be as good for her as Jaime was. He just took such good care of her. He made her laugh like no one else, and he challenged her like no one else, and he made her come like no one else. What exactly was she holding out for, if not that?
Oh, right. Someone whose heart she hadn’t pulverized.
That was the long and short of it. Every time Jaime hinted Scarlett could stay as long as she wanted. Every time she began to think maybe Musgrove wasn’t the worst place on earth and it would be nice to continue seeing Evelyn regularly. Every time he made some mention of something they’d do together in the future and then shot her a look, as if to say Go on, contradict me , Scarlett began to wonder if she could pull this off. Could she tell him what had gone down seventeen years ago, and was there even the slightest hope he might see her side of the story?
There was only one sure way to find out. She had to tell him what she’d done.
Ever the coward, Scarlett waited until the last possible moment. Jaime sent the final scripts to his contact at Videon, and Scarlett had said goodbye to Evelyn. She’d even packed her bags and stowed them in her rental car.
But as they stood there in his vestibule, eyeing each other as if waiting for the other to say it, Jaime was the one who took the plunge.
“I’m glad you came.”
“I am too.” Whatever came next, however Jaime responded to what she was about to say, Scarlett would be glad for these months in his house. She would be glad for the nights in his bed.
“I’ve been thinking about the last time you left. Specifically your idea that our breakup was just a problem of timing.”
“You’re adding that just . Timing is everything.” The line would be more convincing if Scarlett didn’t sound as tense as she felt.
She’d wanted to have this conversation. She would’ve initiated this conversation if he hadn’t. But the icy finger of premonition—the one that sometimes came to Scarlett while she was playing a match—poked her in the belly button. This would be the moment she would want to reset the board to, if everything went spectacularly wrong.
She and Jaime were on the knife’s edge here, and it was beginning to slice into the soles of her shoes.
“Scarlett.” Jaime’s expression wasn’t playful or sexy. It was stone-cold deadly serious. He was about to put his heart on the line here. “You had to know this was coming.”
Yup. She didn’t answer him.
“The last few days ... they’ve been amazing. And while I said I would be okay with it if a short fling was all it was, and I would be, I keep wondering why this has to be the end. What would be wrong with trying to give this, to give us , a go in the real world?”
What, indeed.
Scarlett licked her lips. She wasn’t a God-fearing person, but she did believe in karma. She could only hope that she’d banked enough of it to make this next move pay off.
Please. Please please please.
“You’re not wrong. But there is context that you don’t have, and you should. So before I answer you,” she said, “I have to tell you about something I did before I left town last time.”
Scarlett took a moment to memorize his face. His empty house and the way the trees in his front yard swayed in the sunshine and the breeze. The way she’d felt here.
Then she began telling him what she should’ve a long time ago. “When we moved here, it was to get away from a boyfriend of Alma’s. Alma has ... flaws. But the one thing she won’t put up with is drugs.” In all honesty, her mother couldn’t care less about pot or mushrooms. But pills and anything involving a pipe or needles were a serious no-go for her. “He worked at a lumberyard, and he’d hurt his back. The doctor gave him a prescription for oxy.”
Jaime went still. Very still.
“I’ll spare you the details, but it was the first time I’d seen ... a lot of things.” The first time she’d stumbled across someone who had OD’d, for starters. The first time she’d seen someone promise to get clean before relapsing. The first time she’d realized all those antidrug campaigns were actually important, under the cringe.
It had been an ugly slap to the face, and she’d never truly recovered from it.
“For all that I was never really innocent, it was like finally giving up on Santa or something. I became aware of some stuff, up to that point, I hadn’t known about. And when Alma couldn’t take it anymore, she dumped him, and we moved here, to Musgrove.”
“You never told me that.”
“Well, it wasn’t very pretty.” It wouldn’t have made for good conversation over chicken salad and sweet tea at the country club.
“Did he show up again or something?” Jaime pressed.
God, how Scarlett wished that had been it. “No. But watching that play out clued me in to some things I really wish it hadn’t. Taught me lessons it would’ve been better not to learn. After that, Alma was more careful about who she dated and became friends with. Like, if somebody came into her orbit and Alma got a whiff of something druggie, she’d eject them.” Her mom hadn’t done much to keep Scarlett safe, but she’d been amazing with that. “I think she knew the area was swimming in illegal stuff back then. But sometimes, before she’d realize someone was into bad stuff, I’d meet them. And a few times, when they found out that I knew you —I’d get static about your last name.” That was the simplest way to put it. If you hadn’t been bitten by this particular radioactive spider, there would be no way to explain the spine tingles their responses had set off in her.
“And?” Even after everything, Jaime was still unbitten.
“About the fourth time it happened, I knew that your dad was their dealer.”
The pause that followed was endless. This was where Scarlett had expected the explosion, and it hadn’t come.
Maybe she was going to be able to thread this needle. Maybe he would understand.
At last, Jaime sighed. “Yeah, well, the cat’s out of the bag on that one.” There was a slight edge to his voice. Even now, even after all the work he’d done, Jaime was understandably still a little bitter about it.
“Jaime, I’m the one who let the cat out of the bag.”
He almost laughed. “What?”
Scarlett had come to the edge of the cliff, the moment where she had to tell him the truth after all this time. He’d either accept it, or he’d hate her. But she couldn’t put off telling him what she’d done for a single second longer.
Shaking her hands out, wanting to dry her clammy palms, she spit out, “I called the crime tip line and left a message about your dad. He was arrested two weeks later.”
The words hung between them for a good twenty-five seconds. Scarlett’s heart counted the beats, the low, deep breaths that didn’t quite fill her lungs fluttering over them.
Across from her, Jaime’s response was only ... silence.
Scarlett had been expecting Jaime to react like she would’ve. At this point, he would’ve had to peel her off the ceiling.
Instead, he was blinking. His cheeks had colored and his inhales were harsh, but he wasn’t yelling.
She’d take not yelling.
“I’d seen what oxy could do. Since this was happening to people I knew, to a community I knew, I had to act . You were ... more protected than I was. I was fairly certain your dad wasn’t dumb enough to sell to people in your social circle. But mine, or my mother’s, was fair game.” Which was its own kind of awful math, but Scarlett didn’t want to get into that. “Because he wasn’t dealing to people you knew, you weren’t going to see what I was. You weren’t going to put the pieces together, not for a long time.”
His family’s ignorance wouldn’t have lasted forever. That, Scarlett knew for sure. Their peace had been temporary, and someone would’ve eventually ripped it away from them.
After a few more beats, Jaime finally responded. “What the fuck?”
Well, at least Scarlett knew that he’d heard her. She’d been worried for a second that he’d shut down.
“I know you’re mad,” she said needlessly. He deserved to be mad, at least about the fact that she hadn’t told him sooner. It had been a mighty big secret to keep. “But when you have time to process this, you’ll realize—”
“What the actual fuck?” he repeated. “You called the cops on my father?”
“It was the anonymous tip line.” It was a pathetically technical defense. Scarlett didn’t doubt she had done the right thing. Not for an instant. But she knew how it looked, and more importantly, she knew how hearing this must feel.
Except the sympathy she had for Jaime was playing tug-of-war with the sympathy she had for herself. It hadn’t been easy to put his father’s crimes together at eighteen. It hadn’t been easy to feel like she was the only one with this information. It hadn’t been easy to know what to do about it.
She didn’t blame Jaime for being pissed at her, but after he was done being pissed, she would appreciate it if he could see what it had looked like from her side of the tracks.
“I was a kid who’d realized that this so-called pillar of my community was a fucking ghoul. What would you have done?” she snapped.
Jaime’s jaw worked. Yeah, he didn’t have a smart comeback for that, did he?
“From what I understand, he did it to make a few bucks. Do you know how obnoxious that is? I have actually gone to bed hungry, Jaime. My mom and I spent nights in our car. And there was your dad, with his big house and his boat and his perfect family, selling some pills on the side just to get more stuff.”
“That’s not ... I mean, obviously it was sick. He was sick, and—”
“He did the thing I reported. It was a harmful thing. This wasn’t about the grass being too long or some nonsense. Don’t make it sound as if I’m a dictator on the HOA board reporting people for leaving their trash cans out on the street. People actually, literally died because your dad sold them drugs. You do realize that, right?”
That was a low blow. The second Scarlett said it, she wished she could take the words back. Jaime had never pretended his father wasn’t guilty, and the bulk of his artistic work had been about making amends.
“Of course I do,” Jaime gritted out.
Scarlett pushed her hair back from her face before taking and releasing a long breath. “I know this is a lot to get used to, and I regret how surprising this must be.”
Well, that was some formal PTA-style bullpucky. God, Scarlett despised herself right now.
“Are you sorry?” The question was like an anvil crashing onto the floor between them.
Scarlett was shocked shattered boards weren’t flying everywhere, like in an old cartoon.
But she wasn’t sorry she had done it, only that his knowing she’d done it was rearranging his world. “I am not.”
Jaime pulled back, his expression furious. “What I want to know is why you did this. You always have an angle, so what was the angle?”
Wow. Scarlett ought to walk away. They should call a break and finish this conversation when they weren’t both so wound up. But the fact that she was wound up was why Scarlett couldn’t make herself do that. Her reasons had been good , and if he could just see that, maybe he could understand.
“I did it for you.” Which was true. It was one of the many reasons she’d done it, but it had been an important one.
He flinched. “Like hell you did.”
“You would’ve put it together sooner or later, just like I did. You would’ve put it together, and then you would’ve been faced with the same choice I was: what to do about it. I made that call so that you wouldn’t have to.”
“So it was a favor ?”
It had been a sacrifice, actually. She’d given up a power piece, and she’d gotten nothing but a broken heart in return. But Jaime couldn’t see that, not now and maybe not ever.
“It was a lot more than that.”
“Bullshit.”
Scarlett wanted to sob. She wasn’t much of a crier. A foot stomper, yes, but not a crier. She only shed tears during moments of immense emotional turmoil.
This conversation qualified, but she wasn’t going to do it now. Not in front of Jaime.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Involve me in this decision?”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d believe me.”
“You could’ve convinced me. Why didn’t you even try?”
When she’d watched The Devouring Sun , she’d realized he had accepted his father’s guilt. But back then, when he and his dad had been so close, it hadn’t been hard to imagine that Jaime would’ve rejected the accusation out of hand. “This seemed ... cleaner. More humane.”
“It was cleaner for you maybe, but we were together, Scarlett.”
“We were kids.”
“Don’t do that—don’t downplay it. Our relationship was real. It wasn’t teenage bullshit. You admitted when you invited me to Tokyo, you meant it. Making a decision like this entirely by yourself—that’s not something you do to someone you care about.”
How the hell would I know? Scarlett wanted to shout. Alma never consulted Scarlett or anyone else before she decided to move to Wheeling or she quit her job or she dyed her hair orange. From early on, Scarlett had learned it was easier to act than to talk things through with anyone.
So of course she hadn’t taken this discovery to Jaime. It wasn’t a large box she needed him to heave up to the attic. Whatever he said about it now, it would’ve been messy. Things had been easier because Scarlett had handled it—and kept it to herself.
“You ought to have told me,” Jaime was saying, “and together we could’ve—”
Scarlett held up her hand. This was beginning to stink like three-day-old garbage in August. She had to get out of here before the stench got all over her hands, all over them . Besides, she had some crying to do.
“I’m going to run. I have a flight to catch.”
Before this conversation, she’d hoped the earthquake she was going to unleash might not crack the foundation of whatever they’d been messing with the last few days. But no relationship was that strong. That wasn’t how human hearts worked. And even if they had given things a go, it probably wouldn’t have lasted. They might as well end things here, and end things honestly. It was what he’d said he wanted from her.
Scarlett’s success in chess had come because she took bigger risks than other people. If you wanted to play for real and you had started from nothing, you had to. Jaime had started with everything, or near enough to everything. He couldn’t understand what all this had cost her.
Maybe that was the real problem, the real reason they’d broken up earlier and why they were breaking up now. He saw the wagers she’d made for him as pennies, when she knew they were gold.
After a long minute, he wrenched the front door open, indicating that Scarlett should leave. “Go. It’s what you’re good at.”
And there it was.
So, with her head held high and her chin wobbling, Scarlett Arbuthnot left Musgrove, Virginia, heartbroken for the second time in twenty years.
After Scarlett left, Jaime flipped the dead bolt on the front door with a muttered “Fuck.” His heart was going so fast, the beats came on top of each other, with no spaces in between. His lungs couldn’t keep up with the pace, and his throat and eyes were burning.
If Scarlett had slapped him with a two-by-four, she couldn’t have surprised or hurt him more. He might not ever catch his breath again.
In telling him this story , Scarlett had ripped the tablecloth clean out from under the dishes. But she’d done more than that. She’d gone and toppled the table, too, and then she’d kept digging, destroying the subfloor, the foundation of the house. Wrecking all the assumptions he’d built this new version of his life on.
Dad had been the one responsible for his own downfall. He’d acted alone, and so he alone bore the weight of it. That was the story Jaime had been telling himself from day one.
What Scarlett had said was a rogue wave, tearing up the beach and eating up every sandcastle along the way. Now, Jaime had to find a way to live with a new truth: Dad had fucked up, and he’d made all the bad choices. But Scarlett had been the one to tell the cops.
Scarlett. The girl Jaime had loved. The one person he could imagine building a life with.
And she’d done it without telling him. They’d talked every day back then, fallen asleep on the phone together every night, and she hadn’t so much as hinted that she had some life-changing information he might be interested in. If she’d been a spy, she couldn’t have pulled this off more smoothly.
The cold-eyed betrayal of it—that’s what was going to linger.
Why the fuck had she told him about it now ? She’d gotten away with it scot-free. Why blurt it out decades later?
For good measure, Jaime engaged the security chain on the door. He hadn’t even thought he needed a security chain—he effectively lived in the middle of nowhere. Who was going to rob him? But the builder had insisted it was a standard feature, and now, Jaime was glad for it.
He’d given Scarlett a key at one point, and he couldn’t remember if she’d returned it to him. In the tumble of the last few days, when they’d started sleeping together again and when he’d been thinking that they were building a new life together—as if he could build a life with the woman who’d torched his family—getting his key back hadn’t seemed important.
If anything, ten minutes ago he would’ve been begging her to keep it, thinking her using a key to his house meant she saw a life here. A life with him.
Jaime slammed a fist against the door. If there had been five other locks there, he would’ve used them all. He might even brick himself inside, reverse “Cask of Amontillado” style.
It wouldn’t have helped, though. All the masonry in the world wasn’t enough to keep out the story Scarlett had relayed: she had called the cops on Dad and hadn’t shared any of it with Jaime. However she tried to justify it, whatever objections she might have to those terms, that was the outcome of what she’d done.
Jaime dug his phone out of his pocket, intending to call Evelyn. But after a few wobbly steps, he dropped his phone on a side table in the den instead.
Dad had ruined their lives. Jaime knew that. He did.
But.
But.
But for the love of fuck, did Scarlett have to report his father without telling Jaime? Without asking if that was what he wanted?
Scarlett would always be a maverick. Whatever choices she made, she would always make them for herself. He knew that now.
All Jaime could do was fall through an endless, shitty void.
He scrubbed a hand over his face. It was good she’d left. Never mind that ten minutes ago, he desperately didn’t want her to leave. He’d never wanted her to leave. Now, he was thrilled that she had. If she were still here, he’d be hollering.
No, he shouldn’t call Evelyn. Not until Jaime had managed to shed his rage. Fury was unpredictable. Destructive.
He’d been so mad at his father in those early days after his arrest, and he’d quickly realized that he needed to get a handle on it and amalgamize it into something productive, because if he didn’t, it would eat him alive. He’d chosen taking care of his family and fishing what remained of his dreams out of the trash.
He could make the same choice now. As hard as it was and as pissed as he was, he didn’t have to give in to those feelings.
Healing was supposed to mean you recognized those harmful feelings for what they were, and with time, you didn’t feel them so much. Jaime had had, like, a lot of therapy. He needed to put all those coping strategies he’d supposedly mastered to work here.
What would mature Jaime do?
He’d go for a long, long hike, and when he got back, he’d be too tired to rage himself into ulcerative colitis.
That was the best he could do, at least for the moment.
Jaime filled several water bottles. Then he put them into a pack before grabbing his sunglasses, hat, and boots, and heading out.
A brisk ten-mile loop later, he arrived home as the sun was dipping below the horizon. His legs ached. His abs ached. His heart—it still ached.
It was always going to ache.
Jaime knew it the way he knew that water flowed downhill and he’d have a tax bill to pay on April 15. If you put them in the same room, Scarlett and Jaime were always going to want to be together. But Scarlett was a feral cat who didn’t want to be domesticated. She would never be someone who could bring a partner all the way inside, and Jaime would always be a person who needed that. They weren’t good for each other.
Jaime took a cold, long shower, fixedly not looking at the tub where he’d soaked with Scarlett. No, he stood under the icy water until he was uncomfortably numb, and then, and only then, did he emerge.
Once he’d dressed, he found his phone. No text from Scarlett—which was exactly how he’d wanted it.
But there was a text from Nate. Videon loves the scripts. Let’s talk tomorrow re: preproduction calendar. I’m feeling October. Do you think we’ll be ready to film in nine months?
The last time Scarlett left, Jaime had mourned her—or who he’d thought she was. But she’d been out of sight, if never out of mind.
This time, they still had months and months of work to do together.
All he could do was grit his teeth and get through them.