Chapter 23
23
I t took only a few minutes to get all three of Sadie’s old roommates together on a conference call. Sadie, seated on the couch, let them know they were on speaker and that Ginny, cross-legged on the floor, could hear too.
“Hey, Ginny!” Trish said. “Long time no see! What are you up to?”
Ginny told them about her job cleaning mansions for Monique’s realty company, and Trish, Abby, and Carly each gave a sentence or two update about their lives.
Before Sadie could broach the topic of Grant and their college years, Trish brought him up herself. “Sooooo, are you calling to dish about your new crush? I’ve been loving all the pics on social media. My grad school friends can’t believe I know two stars!”
“You two are so cute together!” Abby gushed. “And I drooled over what you wore to the Indian temple festival. I’ve been sewing up a new design with your outfit as my muse.”
Sadie blinked at the phone in her hand. A live chicken might as well have popped out of the device and flown across the room. “Wait…you guys think we’re cute together ?”
“So cute,” Carly said, “but it’s not like we didn’t know this would happen eventually.”
Now Sadie knew they were pulling her leg. “Very funny. I never even liked him.”
“We know,” Carly said, “You hated him so much.” She laughed, and Abby and Trish joined in.
“And it about killed Grant, I think,” Trish said, still laughing. “But I guess good things come to those who wait!”
Sadie mouthed “What the…” to Ginny, who shrugged in reply from her spot on the floor. Sadie felt her palms go sweaty and rubbed them on the collar of her robe. Had she entered the twilight zone? “Come on. You guys all dated him, and he broke your hearts. The Golden Dumpster, remember ?”
“I guess he did, sort of. It was more of a friendship thing, though,” Carly said.
“Yeah, much as I didn’t want it to be, it was like hanging out with your cool brother,” Abby said. “The person he actually wanted to be with was you.”
“What makes you say that?” Sadie said. A queasy feeling began roiling her stomach, as if a nest of vipers were waking from sleep.
“Well, let’s see,” Trish said. “The first thing I noticed was, he never wanted to go out to eat just the two of us. I mean, he would if I insisted, but he always preferred to make dinner at our place for everyone or bring take out back to the apartment for everyone.”
“Same with watching movies,” Carly said. “At first, I just thought he liked doing group stuff. And since Trish had already dated him, he had done a fair amount of group things with us, so it didn’t strike me as odd. Plus, he’s a super social person.”
“I thought the same,” Abby said, “but then I noticed all the little things, like how his eyes followed you wherever you moved in the room. And whenever he’d tell a funny story, he never looked to see how I’d react. He always looked right at you, Sadie.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Carly said, “he so totally did that! And when you didn’t laugh enough, he’d get that puppy dog face of his.”
Peals of laughter burst from Sadie’s phone, but her friends’ descriptions still weren’t adding up. Sadie had no memories of him paying extra attention to her. He’d treated her like everyone else. She pressed them further, looking for the magic words that would crack their fairy tale. “But, Trish, you had so much trouble studying after you broke up. You worried you’d lose your scholarship and get kicked out of your program.”
“Eh, I was nineteen. Looking back, he let me down as nicely as he could. And it didn’t affect my scholarship or my grades. Look at me now – in grad school on a free ride.”
“Smarty pants,” Ginny said.
“Abby,” Sadie spluttered, desperation beginning to show in her voice, “you made us watch Bridget’s Diary over and over again while you emptied box after box of tissue paper!”
“And the local liquor store of Moscato,” Carly said.
“Ha! I still watch that movie all the time. Acting like I was all broken up about Grant was just an excuse to get you all to watch it with me.”
“Oh, aren’t you sneaky!” Carly said. “I should have used my broken heart to get attention too.”
“But…but…you needed therapy, Carly,” Sadie said. “You didn’t think you could ever trust men anymore after Grant broke up with you.”
Carly’s voice climbed an octave of embarrassment. “Did I say that? I guess I did milk it some then.” She sighed. “Yeah, I needed therapy, but that wasn’t from Grant. I’d been hurt by a lot of men in my life, starting with my dad. But I’m married now to the most wonderful human being in the world, and soon we’ll have a little snuggle baby. Come to think of it, I should thank Grant for being the thing that finally got me to get the help I needed for so long.”
Sadie rubbed dents into her cheeks. Her friends weren’t budging from their story. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Tell you? Oh my,” Abby said. “Your head revolved three-sixty if we even mentioned his name!”
“Honestly,” Trish said, “the three of us didn’t even talk about it amongst ourselves till graduation, and it didn’t matter anymore at that point. We all thought he’d get over you.”
“Boy, were we wrong!” Carly said, laughing.
An unraveling sweater enjoyed more stability than Sadie. The more she pulled at a thought, the more the foundation of her entire past—and her present—wobbled. “So…so none of you are upset with him at all? Not even about dating you just to be near me, assuming that’s what he did?”
“We were college kids,” Abby said, her very tone sounding like a shrug, “and he was so smitten.”
Trish let out the next sigh. “If only someone would be that in love with me.”
“No hard feelings here, either,” Carly said. “You have our full blessing. But it was nice of you to check in with us and make sure.”
Sadie slapped her hand against her thigh so hard her palm stung. “Blessing? That’s not why I’m?—”
Ginny spoke up. “Hey, we gotta run, but great catching up with you guys. Hope we can get together in person soon.”
“Seems like we will!” Abby said before humming the “dum dum dee dum” intro to The Wedding March.
The discussion devolved into an argument over who’d be Sadie’s maid of honor, but Sadie wasn’t listening. In slapping her thigh, she’d felt something in her bathrobe pocket. In her anxiety over her sisters showing up, she’d completely forgotten Grant handing her a small package as he’d left. She reached in and pulled out a white paper bag no bigger than a credit card. Unfolding it, she tipped its contents out onto her hand. Nestled in her palm were the perfect little earrings he’d found for her at the Indian festival. The ghost of an inhale passed her lips.
The sun, finally finding a route through those low clouds, threw a bright beam of light through her apartment window and across her palm, setting the bejeweled earrings alight. Sadie’s face crinkled like an apple doll’s with the pain of it. Every glint an accusation, every sparkle a guilty verdict. The most generous, thoughtful, patient, kind, and fun-loving person she’d ever met had loved her. Her.
What had she done?
Ginny ended the call. “So,” she said to Sadie, “no lies detected in terms of your ex-roommates.” She spotted the earrings in Sadie’s hand. “Hey, aren’t those the ones you were trying on in that picture?”
Sadie answered while gulping back a series of sobs. “I’d decided I couldn’t afford them. He must have snuck back and bought them for me while my henna dried.”
A waterfall erupted from Sadie’s eyes and, instantly, Ginny leapt beside her on the sofa. She wrapped one arm around Sadie’s shoulders and stroked Sadie’s hair with her other hand. “There, there. It’s all gonna be okay.”
“He loved me all this time, Ginny. Why didn’t I see it? Why did I make things up that didn’t even happen?” Shuddering sobs interrupted her words. “I convinced myself my friends were so hurt, and it wasn’t even true. It wasn't true. Why did I do that ?”
“I think I might—” Ginny started to say, but Sadie cut her off.
“I can’t even blame it on our spinster pact, because we didn’t have it then.”
“Well, no, but?—”
“But I’d had that terrible break-up with Charlie, and Aunt Lydia had been lecturing me about the dangers of men all my life. What Charlie did confirmed what she’d always said. I must have made some subconscious choice not to fall for Grant or even notice how he felt about me.” She pulled in a gooey sniffle as she wiped at the tears coursing down her face, but they were soon replaced by fresh ones. “There was something there between us even that first day we met by accident in his room, but I convinced myself I hadn’t felt it because of Great Aunt Lydia and cheating Charlie!”
“That may be true,” Ginny said, her voice gentle, “but forcing yourself not to have feelings for someone is different from actively loathing them.”
“I didn’t loathe him until he started dating my friends and breaking up with them!”
Ginny’s eyes looked pained as she sucked air in through her teeth. “I don’t think that’s quite right.”
“It is. I'm telling you.” Sadie shrugged out from under Ginny’s arm. “You weren’t there.”
“But he said you wouldn’t even talk to him, and that’s why he dated Trish, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, you talk to everybody. You like everybody. It drives Monique and me crazy sometimes how you do that. If you wouldn’t even talk to him no matter how hard he tried, you must have disliked him right away, or thought you did, and that was months before he’d hurt anybody you care about.”
Sadie scoured the timeline in her head but couldn’t disagree. She had disliked him before he’d dated Trish. She even remembered chiding Trish for going out on her first date with him, calling him a “shallow” business student not good enough for brilliant Trish. “I guess that’s true,” she said to Ginny, “but I don’t know why, because you’re right. I didn’t have to hate him the way I did, and I didn’t have to hold that grudge for all these years either. It’s not like me.”
“Sade, listen,” Ginny said. She reached out and took Sadie’s hands into her own, then gave Sadie a gentle tug so they’d face each other more directly on the couch. “You’ve not been ‘like you’ for a while now, you really haven’t.”
Sadie gaped at her older sister through tear-sparkled eyelashes. “What do you mean?”
Ginny stared at their joined hands as she gave Sadie’s fingers a reassuring squeeze. “You haven’t been yourself since we lost Mom and Dad, and it’s pretty clear you still blame yourself.”
Tears fell again down Sadie’s cheeks, but they were quiet, steady tears now. Resigned, familiar tears. “But I am to blame. They were on their way home from a graduation party of one of my friends.” She shook her head, her eyes screwed tightly shut. “I wish I’d never graduated.”
“You had to graduate,” Ginny said. “You know you did. The person at fault was the drunk teen who got behind the wheel of that car. Mom and Dad could have been coming from the grocery store or the movie theater or anywhere. Your graduation was a coincidence, nothing more.”
“I know that in my head, but…in my heart…” She gave Ginny’s fingers a return squeeze before pulling her hands away and setting them back in her lap. “What does any of that have to do with Grant and me?”
“Well, Grant isn’t the only guy you decided to dislike in kind of an unfair way after we lost Mom and Dad.”
Sadie tried to think who Ginny could be referring to. “I literally haven’t disliked anyone but Grant.”
“There was Charlie from Romeo and Juliet .”
Sadie sat up straight in protest. “Charlie? He cheated on me, remember?”
Ginny screwed her mouth sideways, looking nervous to say what she was about to say. “But did he? What I remember is that you broke up with him first.”
“Okay, technically, we were on a break, but still, he didn’t have to?—”
“You told us you were done with him. Monique and I were so confused, because he was trying to be there for you after the car accident, and you just kept shutting him out. Finally, you broke up with him, and then a week later you were furious he was dating that other girl.”
Sadie opened her mouth, but as each potential response formed in her head, she realized it was all lies. She couldn’t refute what Ginny was saying. “So, in other words, I’m an evil person who deserves to be alone the rest of my life.”
Ginny rested her palm on Sadie’s shoulder. “You’re a human being who suffered a sudden, unspeakable loss at a critical time in your life. You blamed yourself to make some sense of it. But, Sade, there is no making sense of it, and you definitely can’t make sense of it by never letting yourself find love. Punishing yourself won’t bring them back.”
“Is that what I’ve been doing?” Sadie said quietly. For a long time, she’d felt like a small animal pacing behind grey, featureless walls that extended into the sky. Had she built those walls herself?
“You haven’t made a single new friend, let alone dated, since you graduated. The only time you leave your house is for work or meeting us at Rick’s. You were the party girl, but lately I'm a social butterfly compared to you.” She shook her head, her jaw tight. “Seriously, sis, that’s not our Sadie. I mean, you really did date half your graduating class—and not only the cute ones. Some of them were, well…woof.”
Sadie tried to smile at the joke, but her lips weren’t in the mood.
Ginny reached both her arms over her sister’s shoulders and pulled Sadie toward her until their foreheads touched. “Monique and I didn’t just lose Mom and Dad that day,” she whispered, her voice breaking, “and we miss you.”
“I miss me too,” Sadie whispered. She allowed herself a long, slow breath in and out, and then another, and another. It was the third breath that filled her with something substantial, something that had been absent a long time, as if this new air had traveled from the core of the Earth, from the core of everything. “I need to let them go, don’t I? I need to accept they’re gone and, whatever role I played, it happened, and I can’t go back and change it. All I can do is go forward the way they’d want me to live.”
“That’s right. And what they’d want is for you to find a love like they had.”
Sadie made the slightest move with her shoulders, and Ginny released her. They both leaned back against the sofa, side by side.
“All I’m doing by punishing myself,” Sadie continued, “is hurting other people—good people. I hurt Grant all through college. Then I tried to hurt his career, and when he poured his heart out to me this morning, I accused him of horrible things and sent him away—down the back stairs!” She cringed, the memory a thousand bee stings to the heart. “I was awful to him.”
“What now?” Ginny said after a beat.
Sadie closed her fingers gently around the little earrings still in her hand. She lifted her shoulders one inch and dropped them two. “I have to apologize. I’m going to his place right now, and hopefully he’s home. I’ll tell him how sorry I am, and then he can yell at me, and at least I’ll have that behind me.”
“And what if he doesn’t yell at you? What if he understands?”
“Then he’s a saint among men,” Sadie said, “and I definitely don’t deserve him.”
“Stop it,” Ginny said, unfolding herself and standing up. “You’re doing it again.”
Sadie let out a rueful laugh. “Fine. If he’s understanding, we’ll talk, okay? And I won’t push him away because…Ginny…” Her voice shrank inside her mouth as the words came out. “I think I’m in love with Grant. I think I have been since the day I saw him.”
“I think so too,” Ginny said, holding out a hand to help her sister up. “But I’m driving. You’re in no state for it.”
In between explaining to Ginny where and when to turn, Sadie tried to organize in her head the things she needed to say to Grant. Apologizing for the past six years came first, and especially for the past few weeks of their fake dates. If he didn’t slam the door in her face, she’d confess that she, too, had felt something that day in his dorm room, that her feelings had grown as she’d gotten to know him through his dates with her roommates, and that their three fake dates had sealed the deal.
“This is it,” Sadie said, pointing to the small parking lot in front of his building, “and that’s his car, so he’s probably home.”
Ginny pulled into a spot near the blue convertible and gave Sadie a thumbs up. “You got this.”
But as Sadie tried to get out of her car, the wonky seatbelt wouldn't let go. “Argh! I’ve got to get this fixed.”
A limo zoomed in behind them, and a woman in a long, tan, trench coat emerged from the greenery outside Grant’s apartment and strode toward it.
Sadie slid down in her seat. “Get down,” she barked. “You can’t let her see us!”
Confused, Ginny looked at the woman. “Why? Who is that?”
“Get down,” Sadie said as she half yanked, half pushed her sister down until her head sat below steering wheel level. “It’s Julia.” Saying her name felt like a hot poker to the gut.
They waited until the limo pulled away.
“Now go?” Ginny said, sitting up and giving Sadie quizzical eyes.
Sadie shook her head as she sat up too. “It’s too late. Grant is over me. He’s already moved on—like Charlie did—and with someone who will help him with his career rather than destroy it.”
“Even if that’s true—and you don’t know that it is—you can still apologize.”
“And I will, but he was just with Julia. I can’t possibly do it right now. It would hurt too much. Seeing her here makes me realize I can’t ever see them together again, ever.”
Ginny bit her lower lip lightly. “That’s going to be tricky when you’re all in the same movie.”
“It is,” Sadie said. “Let’s go.” She motioned for her sister to take them back to her place. As Ginny pulled away, Sadie took out her phone and dialed Ronny’s number.
“Ronny Widner,” came the voice on the other end.
Sadie steadied herself. She had no choice. She needed to start her life over again, but not like this. “Hey, Mr. Widner,” she began. She could hear the falter in her voice.
“Sadie? Is that you?” he said, sounding happy to hear from her. “What’s up? I’m sorry there weren’t any photographers at Be-Seen yesterday. I sent several there, so I don’t know what happened.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I’m calling because, though I sincerely appreciate the offer, I no longer want a part in Surf Summer .”
Ginny made a grab for the phone, but Sadie switched it to her right hand and leaned toward the window while sending Ginny her most serious I-have-to-do-this glare.
“What?” Ronny said. “Do you realize what you’re giving up? This is a huge opportunity, and it’s easy to see how much promise you have.”
“I know it’s a huge opportunity, and thank you for your kind words,” she told him, “but I'm not in the right place for it.”
The silence on the other end of the line threatened to last into the next century. Her own breathing filled her ears as she waited for…what? The scream? The hang up?
“Fine,” Ronny finally replied. “But if you’re going to do something this stupid, you must come and tell me in person, got it? I’ll be home tonight around seven. I’ll text you the address.”
“I—,” she started to say.
“At seven,” he barked, and hung up.
“So…now you’re going to Ronny’s?” Ginny said.
“Yes, and I’ll be fine by tonight. I won’t need you to drive me.”
“Okay, but I'm wondering—what does a person wear to the funeral of their own career?”