24. Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-One
Rose
I slammed the door when I got inside the Airbnb, making Juno jump. My heart was in the depths of hell and I felt like I’d ruined everything.
No, I knew I had.
“Is everything okay?”
“He wants Lila,” I muttered, falling face-first onto the couch. “He turned me down so nicely because he’s too hung up over her .”
“Oh,” she said slowly. “So, you can reach out to him as Lila—?”
“No,” I said. “No more lies. Going back and forth feels awful .”
“You’re protecting yourself.”
“With lies? This is wrong, Juno.”
“But there isn’t another option.”
“Of course there is. I could have told him—?”
“No,” she said. “Do you know how much that would upset people?”
“People? Like who?”
“Your mom, for one.”
I opened my mouth to tell her Mom wouldn’t know, but then I paused. “How do you know my mom would be upset?”
“I—?”
“I haven’t told you anything about her.”
Juno sighed. “You didn’t, but she did when she tracked me down.”
“How?”
“It started when I went looking—?”
“No. I didn’t want you to go looking.”
“What if you had a husband and kids and they needed protection? I wanted to know the whole story and I found out about a woman named Linda Hill in Canada. She was the reason you’ve been leading a double life, right? You wanted her to have peace.”
“Yes, which is why I didn’t tell you.”
“I didn’t plan to do anything with the information. I only called her to see if she was a real person.”
“You called her? She never answers the phone.”
“I know. Her voicemail told me all I needed to know.”
“What does her voicemail say?”
“I don’t know if you want to hear this. Or if I want to call again.”
“I do.”
Juno pulled out her phone and brought up her contacts.
“You have reached a number that is no longer in service,” Mom said in a bad impression of an official phone notice. “The woman here has moved on and cannot be found!”
“Oh, boy,” I muttered. Her anxieties over my life were obviously getting worse and it seemed splitting myself into two hadn’t been enough. But what else could I do? I was trying my best, yet I still messed up somehow.
“Yeah. I was done after that.”
“So, how did she find you?”
“She has a private investigator looking into every call she receives and that investigator somehow tracked down both my phone number and my social security number, which she recited the second I answered the phone.”
“She what ? How does she have a private investigator?”
“You didn’t know? I assumed you pay for it.”
“No, I don’t pay for it. I give her a decent amount of money to live off of, but that’s it.”
“And how much is a decent amount of money to you?”
My cheeks heated. I knew I was privileged with more money than I could ever use, so I spoiled my family with it, but I also had no idea how much was too much. “Like twenty thousand?”
“A year?”
“A month.”
Juno’s eyebrows raised. “Well, we figured out how she can afford the private investigator. And why you pay me so much.”
“I’d rather other people be cared for, but I didn’t think she’d do this with the money.”
“Unfortunately, that’s not all of it.”
“What else could there possibly be?”
“When she called me, she told me to make sure no one else found out about Rose Hill. If they did, she’d tell you to fire me. I thought it would be best if I listened so you didn’t get stuck with someone who didn’t know your secret.”
“So that’s why you were against me telling Barry.”
“I still am.”
“What if Barry doesn’t tell?”
“What if he does ? You’re right, this was wrong, and maybe we should have gone back to LA once you broke it off with him, but what’s done is done, and if he knows, then he might speak out, especially if he’s mad.”
“He wouldn’t—?”
“Have you seen him angry yet? Like truly angry?”
I had, and it was when he’d found out about his father. He’d kicked me out then. But he still didn’t tell anyone.
I closed my eyes, feeling the now-familiar wave of guilt. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Sleep on it,” Juno suggested. “And then you’ll feel better.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever feel better,” I muttered. “All of this is so wrong.”
“It’ll work out.” Her voice was soft, meant to be comforting. But I didn’t think anything would make me feel better.
Not when I’d fucked it all up with the perfect guy.
I went to my room, still feeling uneasy about this whole thing. The correct answer was to tell him, I knew that.
But what if he told everyone?
Maybe you deserve that.
When the thought hit me, I fell on the bed. I did deserve it. I deserved every ounce of his anger and I didn’t know if my self-preservation was enough justification to keep lying to a man who’d done nothing wrong.
I tried to think of Mom and how she would react. That usually snapped me back into line, but even the fear of that was nothing compared to the guilt I felt. I’d promised her I would never do this, but my guilt was morphing into something else.
Conviction. Painful, righteous conviction.
Barry
In my dream, the bar was different. The pink and teal neon lights faded together and I had a drink in my hand, something I’d never done since my first year owning the place. I took a sip, expecting alcohol, but all I got was fizzy tartness and fruit.
Cranberry juice and soda water.
“Don’t steal all of it,” a lyrical voice said. “It’s my favorite.”
My eyes snapped up and I saw Lila in front of me. She gave me a heart-stopping smile and grabbed the drink out of my hand. Her hair looked different today—a slightly lighter shade of black.
“Did you dye your hair?” I asked.
“Come on, you’d know I’d never do that. My hair has been the same for over a decade.”
And it had. She’d never shown a sign of roots or an outgrown haircut. She’d always been the same. She’d always been Lila .
She handed back the drink and the song turned into the one we’d written together. The angsty rock song about Blaze wasn’t dancing music, but she laughed as if she had entirely moved on from the pain I’d seen her in. She twirled, and in the shifting light, her hair had red strands.
When she stopped, the red was more prominent, but like this, she didn’t look like Lila at all.
I blinked, thinking I must have been losing my mind. When I opened my eyes, Lila would be back.
But then she wasn’t.
It was Rose.
Her red hair glistened in the light, just like when she came out of her house to see Wilfred with me. Her lips weren’t painted red like Lila’s, and it hit me how similar they were to the pop star’s.
My eyes went to Lila’s, and I realized they also had the same shade of hazel.
“Come on, Barry,” Rose said, but her voice mixed with Lila’s. “Come dance with me.”
My legs followed of their own accord and the horror rising in my chest did nothing to stop me. Her hair was red in the pink lights and freckles danced on her skin. In the green, it was darker and she was the pop star I longed for.
But she was somehow both.
“You’re the only one I’m like this with,” she said, two voices somehow one.
And I couldn’t say it back because I was opening up to two women.
But now I was dreaming that they were one.
I woke up, breath heaving. It was nearly noon the following day, and I’d never been known to sleep this late—yet I felt the opposite of rested. My dream played in my mind on a loop, one that didn’t allow me to think of anything else.
I might finally be losing my mind. Because there was no way Rose and Lila could be the same person and my brain had to be playing a cruel trick on me.
Slowly, I got up, trying not to think of my cursed dream. I desperately needed to find something to do, so I worked on social media for the bar, which I usually never touched.
Then I went downstairs to meet Liam, who had come in early for deep cleaning, to ask if he needed help opening his station. When he said no, I went to Audrey, hoping for something to do.
She didn’t need me either.
“Your woman is here,” Liam called out right after the bar opened.
My eyes found her immediately. Her hair was braided today and my dream flashed behind my eyes.
Same shade of hazel.
Same lip shape.
“Hey,” I said, giving her a weak smile.
She chewed on her lip. “We need to talk.”
“We do?”
She nodded, one firm bob of her head. “And considering it took me almost a whole day to sneak out to meet you? We only have a few minutes.”
I eyed her. She didn’t look like herself. Her shoulders were straightened and she stood tall at her full height. I’d always seen Rose with slumped shoulders.
She reminded me of the version of her and Lila I’d seen in my dream.
“Let’s go to the rooftop.”
“No one can hear anything from there, can they?”
“It’s never been a problem before. Are you okay?”
“Not at all, but let’s do this anyway.” She gestured for me to lead.
I followed and Liam wiggled his eyebrows at me. Everyone expected me to end up with Rose. They hadn’t even met her and they liked her.
But I’d told her no.
After my dream, I didn’t know if I regretted it. I didn’t know anything.
“Oh, God,” she said once we were alone on the rooftop. “I don’t even know how to begin.”
“What’s going on? I’ve never heard you like this.”
Rose let out a humorless laugh. “You definitely have.”
“No, I don’t think that’s true.”
“It’ll all make sense in a few minutes.” She let out a quivering breath. “But I guess I should start by saying that I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“What?”
“All of this. And once you know, you’ll be mad, which I deserve, but . . . before you are, know that I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“What, did you contact Todd or something?”
“It’s not about your family.”
“Then I don’t think you can do anything to make me mad.”
“I doubt that,” she said. “You know, when I was a kid, I dreamed of being a pop star.”
I blinked at her change of tone. Her voice now sounded clearer, more lyrical.
Like Lila.
“You . . . what?”
“I did.”
“You look like a very famous one, so maybe I can see it.”
“Lila Wilde, huh?” Her smile was sad.
“I guess you’ve heard that before?”
“No, but that’s by design. No one’s supposed to look at me and see Lila Wilde. That was the point of it all. And no one has looked long enough to see her in me for a long time.”
My mind spun as my dream popped into my head: red hair fading into black. My heart kicked up in speed as I started to draw one very impossible conclusion.
“You’re not about to tell me you are Lila, are you?”
She looked down and reached into her bag, pulling out a black wig. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
I stared for a second. “This is a joke, right?”
“No. Unfortunately, this is very real.”