Chapter Six
IT TAKES ME an hour to drive my BMW i5 back into Los Angeles. The house is huge and empty. I breathe a sigh of relief that Eva’s not here, but it’s mixed with that old pang of regret that echoes through all the things lost between her and me. It’s an empty house filled with What Might’ve Been.
Floor to ceiling windows reveal Los Angeles below—a sea of glittering, colored lights. It seems so quiet. Beautiful, even. Eva wanted this house in the Bird Streets neighborhood in the Hills overlooking Sunset because she said that’s where “the real ones” lived. Leo’s a neighbor. So is J-Lo. That sold it for Eva.
I hate it. It’s like a glass box—modern to the nth degree; all hard angles, clean lines, and modernist furniture that look stylish but isn’t welcoming or inviting. The only thing I like is the view. You can sit in the infinity pool and watch the city happen below.
I think about doing just that, but after spending all night in the hot tub with Rowan Walsh, the pool is going to feel cold. And empty.
I wander the huge, multi-level house to the master bedroom. Most of Eva’s shit is still here—she only took the basics for her prolonged sleepover with that fashion guru, Laurent Moreau. Typical. We’ve been over for weeks, but no one has moved out. It’s going to be a fight for the house. If we even get that far. Sometimes it feels like Eva and I are enmeshed, tangled up in knots that I can’t untie.
I put my head under the spray in our cavernous shower to wash off hot tub chlorine. Rowan’s face floats across my vision. She’s fucking beautiful. I dig her short bangs marching a straight line across the middle of her forehead with razor precision. Light blue eyes ringed with darker blue that are both unflinchingly honest and intensely private. She seems like the kind of person it would take years to fully know. Marathons of questions. But if she let you in fully, it’d be a kind of privilege.
I dry off and put on flannel sleep pants and a V-neck T-shirt. I grab my phone and sit on one section of our multi-sectional couch in the living room.
Nothing from Rowan.
Maybe it was a dick move to grab her phone number from the crew list. Maybe she felt like that wasn’t playing fair. Or maybe she just didn’t feel for me what I felt being with her. Like I could breathe for a fucking second without a crushing weight of regret on my chest. Or anxiety rolling in my guts; always on high alert for whatever the hell Eva was going to do next.
That anxiety kicks up to see I’ve yet another missed call from Eva and a new voicemail.
I listen to a snarky rant about how I’m too chickenshit to talk to her. That I need to man up.
My convo with Rowan echoes back to me in comparison. She was so damn easy to talk to—honest, funny, and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about my fame. She also didn’t push it when I opted out of the Oscars question. Eva grows instantly suspicious if I decline to share my every thought with her.
With resignation, I hit call because there’s one artifact of this broken relationship I have to salvage.
Eva picks up in two rings.
“Well, well, well. Look who’s deigned to call me back. Finally.” I hear a man’s voice, tinged with a French accent, speaking in the background. “It’s Zach,” Eva tells him, her tone muffled. “I’m going to take this on the balcony.” She comes back on, full volume. “So? Sent the fan club home? I hope you’re not fucking groupies on our couch. It’s Italian.”
“You’re screwing another man,” I remind her. “Like, as we speak.”
“We’re just friends.”
“Friends, my ass.”
“You leave me no choice!” Eva cries, her voice suddenly cracking. “You ripped my heart to shreds, Zach. I’m just trying to survive.”
I rub my forehead where a headache is starting already. “That’s bullshit, Eva. You can’t stop with the slapping—”
“Because you make me so crazy! I don’t know how else to get through to you. You just threw us away. Again.”
“I tried, Eva,” I say, though I know it’s useless to reason with her. And stupid. Like agreeing to take another ride on a broken rollercoaster that’s about to fly off the rails. “I tried and it didn’t work. It’s over.”
Eva’s tears evaporate, and her voice is hard again. “Whatever, Zach. If you say so. It’s your world. We’re just living in it.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” I take a deep breath. “Look. Let’s attempt to keep this civil—”
“I want the house.”
“Fine. I don’t care about the house. Take the house.”
“Because award-winning Zach Butler will just buy another ten-million-dollar mansion two doors down? I’m not a charity case, you know. I’m doing just fine.”
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter. “I’m just trying to make this as clean as possible. Take the house and everything in it but…” I suck in a breath. “I want the ring back.”
“What ring?”
“The engagement ring. My great-grandmother’s ring.”
A silence.
“The one I gave you in Yosemite?” I press.
The first time I proposed. The one that counted. Not the one in Mallorca you wanted later, with a huge diamond and a photographer snapping pics to sell to People magazine.
“Eva?”
“I don’t know where it is, but I’ll—”
“You lost it?” My headache kicks up several notches. It’s a mystery that I’m even surprised.
“I didn’t lose it,” she snaps back. “It’s in with all my jewelry somewhere.”
I jump off the couch and head back up to our bedroom.
“Look, I have to go,” Eva says. “Unlike some people, Laurent cares about my well-being. He’s taking me for a little getaway. For my mental health. Are you going to be around in a week or so?”
“No,” I say, stepping into our mirrored walk-in closet that’s the size of a small bedroom. Eva’s side is all designer clothes and a huge vanity littered with perfumes, lotions, and jewelry—most of which I bought for her.
“Oh right, you have the Oscars,” she sneers. “God forbid you miss a chance to be worshipped and adored.”
“Yep, that’s me, the attention whore,” I mutter, rummaging through her stuff. “I’m going to Alaska for another shoot.”
She scoffs. “And you can’t take one day for us to sit down and talk?”
“Remind me again who’s going on a getaway with the fashion asshole?”
“Laurent isn’t the asshole in this scenario,” she says. “He actually gives a shit about me—”
“I’m hanging up now, Eva. As soon as you tell me where you put the ring.”
“Find it yourself, Zach.”
The line goes dead, not because Eva is out of stuff to yell at me about, but because she can’t stand it when I hang up on her .
I toss my phone on the ottoman that sits between our two sides and dig in earnest through a mountain of tennis bracelets, rings, and a $100,000 Van Cleef & Arpels watch Eva had to have, and that I’ve seen her wear maybe once. This stuff should all be in a safe. Or better yet, auctioned off for charity.
I’m starting to panic that Eva’s lost the ring—a family heirloom—when I see it tangled in a string of pearls. It’s a white gold Victorian-era ring, with a round diamond surrounded by a halo of smaller diamonds—the only thing of value my great-grandmother retained when she immigrated to the States from Wales in 1905. Since then, it’d been passed down, mother to son or son-in-law. My fraternal twin brother, Jeremy, vowed to never marry so it was passed to me. Mom called it a good luck charm because there’s been no divorce in three generations.
And I nearly cursed it.
Eva said she loved the ring but never wore it, claiming it was too delicate. Even back then, I knew she was disappointed that the center diamond wasn’t the size of Mt. Everest. The giant oval solitaire I bought her in Spain was more her speed.
I ease a sigh of relief and evict a ruby ring from its black velvet box and tuck the antique ring there instead. I contemplate packing my shit and getting out of the house now, but it’s late and my head is thundering.
I’m in the kitchen rummaging through cabinets since not one bathroom in this godforsaken house has Advil, when my phone chimes a text.
“It hasn’t been enough drama for one night, Eva?” I mutter. But it’s from Rowan.
You’re probably crazy busy and don’t need/want my friends gawking at you, but I’m having a birthday party on the 26 th .
And just like that, my headache vanishes.
Will there be a pi?ata? I type. Pi?ata or no dice.
It’s a BYOP situation. 8pm.
An address follows and I Google Maps it. Not far but not close either—up the 10, to Wildwood near Topanga State Park.
Your dad’s cabin? I type.
It’s not the Four Seasons but you won’t get splinters.
I smile and reply, I fly to Anchorage the next a.m. Ungodly early. You have a couch I can crash on until my ride shows up?
The spare room is all yours.
I’m thinking this is the first thing outside of work that I’ve looked forward to in a long time when another text comes in.
Come or don’t. No big deal.
My smile widens.
I’ll be there. Thanks for the invite.
She doesn’t reply but that’s okay. I leave it alone. It’s enough that Rowan Walsh isn’t done wanting to know me either.