Chapter 26
CHAPTER 26
ABIGAIL
I couldn’t get over how betrayed I felt. It had been almost twenty-four hours since Simon had stood up and delivered my pitch, and I was still fuming.
I honestly couldn’t believe he’d done me dirty that way. The past had proven just how low he would go, but this had simply proven once again that we never would’ve worked out anyway. He would always be selfish, the kind of guy who cared about his success above anything else.
Simon Astor was a total dirt bag, and as I walked into Hazel’s house for brunch with the girls, I vowed that I would never let him in again. My friend’s apartment was bright and cheerful, filled with memorabilia from sports games she’d been to and accolades for her own accomplishments as an athlete, and I drank in all the positive vibes I got from her place as I made my way inside.
Her walls had been painted a pastel yellow and her drapes were open to let in the gorgeous sunshine outside. Hazel never dwelled. Perhaps it was because she’d learned early on that getting hung up on a race she’d lost wouldn’t help her win the next one.
Whatever it was, the girl had turned her apartment into a place where victories were celebrated and losses were mourned, but left behind. I’d always appreciated that about my fiery, fiercely loyal friend, and I didn’t appreciate it any less today.
I smiled, even though my lips had some trouble remembering how to make the shape. “Good morning.”
“Hey, you.” She frowned as she shut the door behind me. “What did Simon do this time?”
“How do you know he did anything?” I asked mildly, not really in the mood to talk about it. “Maybe I’m just tired.”
“Nah.” She followed me to her open concept kitchen, sliding another champagne flute out from between the rails mounted under her exposed shelving. “You’re wearing your Simon-fucked-up face, so what did he do?”
Eden had been waiting for us at Hazel’s kitchen counter, sitting sideways on her stool with one arm on the granite top and clutching a mimosa in her other hand. “She’s right, you know. Whenever he does something to make you mad or sad, it’s like the light goes out in your eyes. That’s how we know. You always look like he’s killed off a part of your soul when he messes up, the bastard.”
“All he killed this time was my belief that he could ever be a better person,” I admitted. “Without even meaning to, I think I was starting to give him a chance to prove himself, but he somehow stole my Fit Gal pitch and presented it like it was nothing.”
Eden’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious? He stole your pitch?”
“Yep.”
Hazel winced. “That’s really low. Shocking, actually. I can’t believe he’d do something like that.”
“Neither can I,” Eden mused out loud. “Are you sure that’s what happened? He never struck me as a thief.”
I dropped into a stool of my own and accepted the mimosa Hazel handed over. “Well, I’m sure that he presented my pitch and that I didn’t give it to him, so the only way he could’ve gotten it is if he stole it somehow, though I don’t know exactly how he got his hands on it.”
“Is this a bad time to mention that we’ve been invited to Josh’s birthday party tonight?” Hazel picked up her drink and sipped it with a neutral expression on her face.
Immediately, my head started shaking. “I’m not going. You two are welcome to go without me, but I can’t risk it.”
“Benny invited us,” Hazel offered. “Does that help? It’s got nothing to do with Simon.”
“Josh is his best friend,” I reminded them both. “Why are we even invited? We haven’t seen those guys for years.”
“Yeah, but Josh and I kind of hit it off when you guys were filming that commercial the other day.” The tips of Eden’s ears turned pink. “I’m really looking forward to seeing him again.”
My eyes widened. “You and Josh? Wow. I didn’t see that coming.”
She sent me a shy smile. “Neither did I, but it happened anyway. He’s much less cocky now than he used to be and we’ve been talking every day since. Please come with us?”
“I love you,” I said emphatically, “but there’s absolutely no way I’m going anywhere Simon will be, and I can guarantee that he’s going to be at Josh’s party. Even if it was Benny who invited us.”
“We’ll stay away from him,” Eden assured me. “Simon is a tool bag for what he did, and if I see him before you do, I’ll be sure to poke him in the eye, but Josh isn’t Simon.”
“Sure, but those guys have always been a package deal. You don’t get one without the other. We don’t even know if Josh had something to do with this. I just told you that I don’t know how Simon got hold of my pitch. It’s not impossible that his friends might’ve helped him.”
Hazel glanced between the two of us, concern in her eyes as she slowly nodded. “That’s true, but we’ll never find out if we don’t go. We need to do this, Abi. We need to go there, stay the hell away from Astor, and try to find out from the others if they know what happened.”
As I looked at Eden, I felt my resolve to send her into that lion’s den by herself crumble. I didn’t trust any of those guys as far as I could throw them right now, but if Josh was getting his claws into my best friend, then he’d have to get through me first.
Plus, I was the one who’d brought these dicks back into our lives. I wouldn’t let Eden get caught in the crossfire if there was some kind of underhanded play going on over at Astor and Co to cheat their way to the top.
“Fine, but one word from Simon, and I’m out.” I brought my glass to my lips and drained the whole thing in one go, then turned to Eden. “Accepting for a moment that he’s not playing you, I would like to hear more about you and Josh. I’m sorry I wasn’t exactly excited when you first mentioned it.”
She smiled. “Relax. I get it. Josh works with Astor and Co, and the Astors are pitch thieves. I’m not really sure I know how I feel about that right now either, but I really do like him.”
For the rest of our brunch, we steered clear of speaking about Simon, but Eden did plenty of talking about Josh and then Hazel told me all about Austin’s latest attempts to woo her. As always, I was so happy that my friends’ lives were so much more peaceful and less tumultuous than mine had been recently.
When I was with them, I could just feel normal. Like I hadn’t somehow been a victim of corporate espionage just yesterday. I’d almost gone to Blake and Ashley about it, but in the end, I’d decided to keep my own nose clean instead.
I was going to win this account and I would do it without outing Simon for the backstabbing competitor he was. After brunch, I left my friends to go over to my parents’ place to help my mom reorganize her craft room.
I’d been promising for weeks and Mom had said she’d have plenty of coffee and my favorite cookies ready for us today. Not feeling much better than I had when I’d arrived at Hazel’s, Mom also only had to take one look at me before her face fell.
“You’re upset,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go make some coffee and you can tell me what happened.”
“I hate that everyone can read me so easily,” I lamented even as I followed her to her craft room, where she’d set up a separate little coffee station to use while she was in here. “Any chance we can just leave it and start organizing?”
“None.” She smiled but then inhaled a deep breath through her nostrils and pulled me into a hug. “Has Simon done something? I haven’t seen you like this for a long time, and now suddenly, he’s back and you look so darn sad.”
I wrapped my arms around her and breathed in the sweet scent of her jasmine body wash, reaffirming my belief that there was nothing as soothing as a mother’s hug. My mom hadn’t always been as close to us as our dad. In fact, all three of us girls were super close to him and Mom had never understood our professional drive and ambition, so she’d often stepped aside for him to have more influence in our lives.
When it came right down to it, however, she had always, unfailingly, been our family’s heart. Dad, London, Liv, and I? We were the legs. The arms. We did the work and we were always busy, but Mom had always been there when we needed a hug. A chat. Advice.
So I opened up to her about Simon, told her what he’d done and how much it’d hurt, and then I begged her not to tell Dad or London about it just yet. I wasn’t ready to hear their I told you so’s .
“Oh no, honey,” Mom murmured as she pulled me in for another hug. “That sounds like something George would do. Not Simon. His father’s always been a real piece of work.”
“Yeah, well, obviously, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I said miserably as I stepped away from her to push the start button on the small coffee machine she had in here. “I have no idea what happened to George that made him as ruthless as he is, but Simon clearly has some of that in him too.”
“Or Simon didn’t do this at all,” Mom reasoned thoughtfully. “Do you remember what George was like before Brooks died?”
I shrugged, watching the machine starting to fill my mug with the rich brown elixir of my life. “Sure. He was always awful.”
“Yeah, but not the way he is now,” Mom pointed out. “I think I remember Brooks’ funeral maybe a little differently than you do.”
“What do you mean?”
She watched me slide my mug out of the slot and walked with me to the sitting area she’d made for herself by the window. A cup of coffee she must’ve made before was already waiting for her on the coffee and she sat down, sweeping her legs in underneath her before gracefully wrapping her manicured fingers around her mug.
“Well, baby, you were seventeen and a little naive, but I saw everything from a different perspective. From the perspective of a grownup and a parent, the minute that boy earned his angel wings, it was like George’s heart just froze. At the funeral, I remember him growling and snapping at people who offered him condolences, acting like the fact he had another son left meant the loss of one didn’t matter.”
My own heart gave another painful pang. Talking about Brooks would probably never get any easier, and neither would thinking about what the Astors must’ve have gone through since—at least the ones who were capable of feeling human emotion. Even so, nothing could excuse what they’d done yesterday and that was what I had to focus on.
“Okay, I’ll admit that I didn’t know about that, but what does it have to do with Simon stealing my pitch?”
“That’s the thing, honey. I wouldn’t just assume it was Simon. Especially if he looked as confused after as you said he did. George started putting a ton of pressure on him as soon as Brooks was laid to rest, and he did a lot of sneaky things back then that Simon got tangled up in. Innocently.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked, tucking my legs underneath me on the couch and glancing at the terraced backyard outside. “Or are you just talking about the way George convinced Simon to leave me?”
“Well, that, but not only that,” she said, speaking slowly, as if she was trying to formulate an admission of sorts. “Lisa and I were in a book club together for years. I never told you about it because we didn’t want you two to think that your moms were conspiring about your relationship behind your back, and after Simon left, I didn’t want to tell you because Lisa honestly didn’t have many answers at the time.”
“But you knew he’d gone to Harvard?” I asked, my heart suddenly thudding in my ears.
She shook her head. “No, baby. Lisa stopped coming to book club not long after that. No one ever found out why, but my point is that while we were spending months reading books together, I also ended up learning her and George’s story. It wasn’t a pretty one. In fact, it was quite dark. I always did feel sorry for her, even before Brooks. George Astor is not a good man, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was somehow behind all this. In fact, I’m rather sure he is.”
I felt my heart sink. As much as I really didn’t want to make excuses for him, maybe Simon wasn’t a total bastard after all. Maybe it was just that he was a good man with a very broken father who was constantly manipulating him.
What he’d done was wrong, but if my mother was right, it wasn’t impossible that once again, there was more to this story. If even my own mom believed that George was behind all of this, then maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to blame it all on Simon.