Chapter 49 #2
I sit up, dragging the blanket around my waist. “What happened?”
She tries to answer and starts crying instead, the kind that sounds painful because she keeps fighting it. “Celia.”
I soften my voice. “Tell me.”
Grant missed soundcheck in Memphis yesterday. Tessa couldn’t reach him for hours and finally went into his suite with hotel security; she found him sitting on the bathroom floor in the clothes he’d worn the night before, awake but barely responsive, insisting he was fine.
They got a doctor to him, cancelled the show and made him sleep, but whatever was happening didn’t stop there.
He started calling Caroline, telling her he had figured everything out and could buy back the lake house if he spoke to the new owners himself.
He called the man who bought it. Twice. He tried moving money out of an account restricted under the Mercer settlement, told Tessa the tour couldn’t stop because if he stopped moving “everybody wins,” then collapsed in the hotel lobby a few hours later.
“He’s in the hospital now,” Celia says. “He’s dehydrated, his blood pressure is all over the place, he hasn’t slept properly in days, and they think he’s been drinking far more than any of us knew.”
Her voice cracks again. I close my eyes because I already know what Grant has looked like lately: the weight falling off him, hair too long, clothes hanging differently from his shoulders, that exhausted face on the board call. I noticed. Of course I noticed.
“They’re keeping him for a psychiatric evaluation,” she whispers.
“He told the doctor there was no point going home because there is no home.” She makes a small, broken sound.
“He looks so tired, Laurel. He’s lost so much weight.
He barely looks after himself anymore, and I keep looking at him thinking he’s forty years old, he’s a grown man, but all I can see is my son. ”
My body remembers being his wife faster than my mind remembers I’m not.
Get dressed. Find a flight. Call the hospital.
Ask what medication they gave him, if Charles has his records, if Tessa packed what he needs, if Celia has eaten.
Fourteen years of loving Grant Mercer still lives in my muscles, and for one terrible moment my feet almost touch the floor.
I stop.
Beckett sees it happen; Celia hears it in the silence.
“Don’t come,” she adds quickly. “Please don’t think that’s why I called. I would never ask that of you after everything he did.”
Tears sting my eyes. “I know.”
“I’m just scared.”
“I know.”
She cries harder. “He’s my son.” Three words, and suddenly I’m crying too.
“I know, Celia.” She tells me Warren is with her, Caroline is flying in, Charles and Tessa are still at the hospital, the next three tour dates are suspended and the doctors are discussing inpatient stabilization.
Then her voice drops until I can barely hear her. “I don’t know how to help him anymore.”
I press my fingers to my mouth for a moment. “You don’t have to know. Stay with him. Let the doctors know the rest.”
She apologizes again, and this time I stop her. “You can call me when you’re scared. You can tell me he’s sick. You can cry to me about your son.” I have to pause because the next part hurts in a completely different place. “That doesn’t make me his wife again.”
Silence stretches between us. “I know,” Celia whispers. “God, Laurel, I know.” Her next breath trembles. “Maybe I called because you always knew when he was lying about being fine.”
I lower my head and let the tears fall onto the blanket because she is right; once upon a time, I could tell from the way Grant closed a cabinet if his day had gone badly.
I knew the difference between angry silence and frightened silence, between exhaustion and the kind of restless energy that meant his mind wouldn’t shut off.
Loving someone that long leaves knowledge behind even after the marriage is gone.
“Call me when you know what the doctors recommend,” I tell her. “I mean it.”
Celia cries quietly. “Thank you.”
We hang up without saying anything else.
I sit there staring at the dark screen in my hand. Beckett doesn’t ask if I’m okay. He stays beside me and waits until I finally say, “I almost went.”
“I know.”
I swallow. “Part of me still wants to.”
“I know that too.”
I turn to him. “Does that bother you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorr—”
“No. Don’t be.” Beckett rubs a hand over his jaw.
“I’m not going to lie and tell you I’d enjoy watching you get on a plane to sit beside your ex-husband in a hospital.
I’d hate every fucking minute of it. But you loved him for years, Laurel.
You don’t stop caring what happens to someone just because they hurt you.
” He takes a moment before continuing. “If you decide you need to see him, I’ll drive you to the airport.
I’ll be jealous and miserable and probably an asshole in my own head, but that part belongs to me. I’m not putting it on you.”
My eyes sting. Beckett reaches across the space between us and leaves his hand open on the bed. “And if you stay, you’re not cruel.”
I stare at his palm for a moment before putting mine into it.
“I don’t think I should go.” My thumb moves over his as I try to untangle everything sitting in my chest. “If Grant wakes up and I’m standing there, I become part of it again.
Maybe I’m the reason he decides to get better.
Maybe seeing me proves to him that he really did lose everything.
Either way, I’m suddenly important to his recovery, and I can’t be that person again.
” My throat burns. “He needs people who can love him without him making them responsible for what happens next.”
Beckett closes his fingers around mine. He doesn’t tell me I’m right, doesn’t make a big deal out of me choosing him or turn the moment into proof that I’ve moved on. He just brings my hand to his mouth and kisses my knuckles. “Then stay.”
I breathe through the ache in my chest and finally understand what has been bothering me since Celia said hospital.
The board seat, the lake house, the money, the piece of his catalogue he had to sell—those are consequences.
I can live with those. I wanted him to understand that what he did cost people something, and eventually cost him too.
But this is different. A psychiatric ward isn’t revenge, and illness isn’t some prize handed to me because the man who hurt me is hurting now.
I never wanted this for him. I can call Celia, check on Caroline, hope he sleeps and gets sober and finally tells the truth to whichever doctor sits across from him.
I can want him to accept help. I can grieve that a man I loved for most of my adult life has become so lost inside himself that his own mother barely recognizes him. None of that makes him mine again.
I lean into Beckett and his arm comes around me without a word. I’m still here, in my own bed, in my own house, with the man I chose beside me. Grant can be sick without becoming mine to save; I can love the years that were real, pray he survives this, and still stay gone.