Chapter 32
Real Life
MITCHELL
Igot the text when she was in the bathroom later, up in the pool house.
This time, tomorrow wasn’t a million miles away. This time, tomorrow was here and immutable.
But I was going to be a million miles from Winona. From her soft scent; her smooth skin; that Newfoundland lilt I could listen to for hours.
“Mitch?” Winona looked up from where she’d just hopped back into the bed beside me. Her eyes seemed darker than they had before. She wasn’t smiling. Did she know? Could she sense what was going on?
“Hey, Firecracker.”
But then her lips split and that pretty grin came out, and Winona stretched out over top of me, her hands entwined in mine. “I’m gut-foundered,” she said.
She was covering every part of me, but somehow she still wasn’t close enough.
“Aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.” I smiled at her, my heart pitching.
I wasn’t hungry. All I wanted to do was hold her.
I wrapped my arms around her, trying to absorb her into me by osmosis. To imprint in my brain all the pieces of her I loved.
I loved the scar on her left pinkie finger—a pumpkin carving accident, she told me.
A little lower, the pink line on her palm she’d gotten with me.
The tooth next to her front two, which was slightly smaller than the rest. I loved the way her hair dried wild when she got out of the pool.
And that smile that made my chest ache. I loved how she was passionate about everything she talked about, but especially about Heartbreaker Trades, and all things Newfoundland.
Since that day in the library, she’d seemed lighter. She hummed while she brushed her hair, like a Disney princess, and she did this thing when she was reading where her tongue stuck out of her teeth.
I’d known her for two months. Two months, three days, seven hours, and maybe… thirty-five minutes. That time had changed my whole fucking life.
And now it was all about to end.
I told her it didn’t have to. Late at night I whispered into her hair that I’d figure out a way. But none of the ideas I’d floated to myself made sense.
“Actually,” I said, “I am gut-foundered.”
Winona grinned. “Then let’s go eat.”
We hunted around for our strewn clothes.
My phone had a string of texts on it when I found it again. All from Sal, needing confirmation I was on my way.
I considered putting her off one more time. For the love of God, tell them we’ll meet stateside. I need this last week in this fairytale world with Winona like I need air.
I knew once I got to work there would be no going back.
The world would know where I was, and every piece of that life would grab onto me, need me, turn me into theirs and not hers.
I’d been counting on this last week so this wouldn’t have to really be goodbye. I’d been leaning on it, like crutches.
But I knew it wouldn’t stop there. I needed a year. A lifetime.
I knew what Sal would say if I texted, though. It was the same thing she’d said in earlier emails when I’d put her off again and again. They won’t take anything but proof of life after this, Mitchell. Real, in-the- flesh proof.
But as I closed the car door after Winona slid into the passenger seat, another face appeared before me. That was the face that had me quickly jotting out a last message to Sal to have the jet fueled and waiting for me in Greenville tomorrow morning.
It was my mother’s face.
Mom was the reason I’d launched my research foundation five years ago. It was her face, with its always loving and now vacant smile that I saw now. The “I’m sorry. Have we met?” The pain of her being there but gone.
We had the power to save people from that fate with the work Zynstyr was doing. Was I really so selfish that I’d deny the world a lifesaving treatment to spend more precious hours with Winona?
Yes. If she asked me to, yes. I would. I’d burn everything down for her.
But she’d never let me.
“What do you want to eat?” I asked her, running my thumb along her cheekbone, trying to memorize every contour, every angle. “More Thai?”
She laughed. “No. Though it would be fun to see Arthit again.”
Arthit was the chef at the restaurant in Birmingham. He had a shaved head and sleeves of tattoos and looked at her a little too warmly.
I snarled, grabbing her by the shoulders and planting a possessive kiss on her before starting the car.
Winona gave me that devilish giggle that always made me smile.
Then she pursed her lips and said, “There’s a local place in town.
Betsey’s. They make the best club sandwich you’ve ever tasted.
Crispy local bacon, plump red tomatoes. Sourdough so tangy your face puckers up like this.
” She made an adorable face, like she’d sucked on a lemon.
I would have laughed, but my heart was cracking in two.
“As you wish,” I said, brushing the hair back from her forehead before forcing myself to face forward. If I didn’t, we’d never leave.
Winona was right, the sandwiches were delicious. We lingered in the booth long after we’d finished eating.
I told Winona about the lawyer I’d lined up for her to help navigate the technical registration of her collective and everything that came after, on the advice of my foundation’s legal counsel.
I’d found the best one nearby, up in Montpelier, and had paid them enough to cover her costs for the next five years.
I told her all that so I didn’t have to tell her about the text just yet, or how forty-eight hours from now I’d be overseas.
I knew it was a cruel deception. But maybe I was still a selfish man when it came to her.
As we walked out of the diner, I handed the keys to Winona.
She raised an eyebrow. “You want me to drive?”
“I want you to give me a tour of this town. I’ve been here eight months and I think I’ve barely scratched the surface. I want a tour from my favorite local.”
My favorite everything.
So that’s what we did. Winona drove us around in that ridiculous car.
On my request, she took me to all the places that mattered to her: the red bridge where she said she and her brothers used to make wishes with pennies when she had no money for Christmas.
To the Rolling Hills resort, which Blake always talked about and my future sister-in-law owned, but I’d never seen.
To O’Malley’s pub, where we stopped inside so she could show me its sticky floors and temperamental jukebox where she played me Jolene and serenaded me on the dance floor.
Each place we went was another piece of Winona, this time outside her person. I loved every moment, every point of her finger and quick jerk of the wheel to stop somewhere else.
But each stop was a painful reiteration of why Winona could never leave this place, even if she could fulfill her promise to her mother from away. This was her home. The people were her family. The collective she was launching would keep its roots here.
Winona couldn’t leave, and she’d never be some arm candy on my elbow. That wasn’t her. She needed this life, and I needed to honor that.
I wasn’t giving up on us, I couldn’t. But I didn’t know how to fix it right at this moment.
Finally, as we drove over the bridge for the second time, she looked my way, her expression no longer mirthful.
“Something’s happened, hasn’t it?”
I closed my eyes, then opened them. She could see right through me now.
“I have to leave tomorrow. And there’s no more putting it off.”
I told her about the text. About how the trip to Zurich would likely keep me overseas a few weeks. When I came back, there would be intense, heavy, time-consuming work in Seattle.
She nodded, mouth closed, eyes straight ahead. “Okay,”
But I could see the set of her jaw, the way it pulsed. The way she blinked a few times more than was necessary.
Fuck, I hated this. I wanted to tell her to pull over. To pull her into my arms and make her all the promises in the world.
But I couldn’t do that. Not yet.
“You could come, you know.” My voice was gritted down to nothing. I knew she wouldn’t, but I couldn’t not say it.
She smiled. “You know I can’t.”
She was going to see her brothers in California next week. Then there were a few months left at the hotel job. After that, Heartbreaker. Her life’s dream and her promise to her mother.
Maybe, in another life, our moms could have been friends.
We stopped on the side of the road by the bridge, and walked over the span hand in hand on foot.
It was sunset, and we stood in the middle, watching as the golden orb began to waver on the horizon, lighting the river below in oranges and pinks.
The first of the stars were beginning to show—just white pricks of light against the navy sky, but still a wonder.
“Winona,” I said.
“Yes?”
I could hear the tears in her voice, and clutched her hand harder.
“Promise me you’ll go back to Newfoundland. You don’t need to forgive him, but you can’t let him keep you from your home. From your mom.”
Her mother was buried there, and I knew she wanted, more than anything, to get the goodbye she never got to say.
“I’ll get Sal to set it all up for you. On my plane.”
“On my plane.” She laughed softly. It wasn’t teasing, it was still this incredulity she had sometimes at my ridiculous life. She did it anytime she showed me what she bought on that card, which she didn’t use nearly enough.
“That’s very kind of you, but’s fine, I can go myself.”
But I took her face in my hands. Now that the idea had taken hold, I didn’t want to let it go.
The thought of me being able to bring her to her original home felt like everything, even if it was just a cheap balm for my guilt at leaving.
“Please. Let me do this, Winona. I feel like I haven’t done more than one good thing for you. ”
“One thing!” She laughed, and now she really was crying. “Do you want me to write a list? You’ve swept me off my feet Mitchell. Shown me princes do exist.”
I crushed her to me then, kissing her head and inhaling her scent and wanting to give her all the promises in the world about staying and making her my princess.But then her lips were on mine and I forgot everything except the feel of her fitting so right in my arms.
Before we got in the car she pulled out her phone and took a photo of us, smiling, happy, together. “I’ll need proof to remember it happened,” she said.
“Sell it to the tabloids,” I said. “Let them know I’m taken.”
She huffed. “I just want to show Cher and Sarah.”
I was good with that. They’d been the ones to encourage her to come back to me when I’d been such an ogre. She’d told me Cher was the one she was going to have take over her business, and how Sarah had stood up to her boss because she believed in what Winona was doing.
“I still say her boss is in love with her,” I said. “He’s just fighting it. Pulling her pigtails because he doesn’t know what else to do.”
Winona tucked her phone back in her pocket, looking skeptical.
I reached over and tugged gently on a strand of her hair. “See?”
Her laughter was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
Only a few minutes after I pulled the car back into the street, the car in front of us stopped so suddenly, Winona yelped.
I jammed my foot on the brake, my hand on Winona’s chest in an instinctive and completely useless move, given she was already wearing her seatbelt.
We’d avoided hitting them, but just barely.
“What the fuck?” The car wasn’t moving. I hovered my hand over the horn.
“Wait.” Winona’s brows bunched. “I think—.” She cut herself off as the driver’s side door opened.
A man got out—a big man. He had a beard, and wore a good suit. He was squinting as he walked back toward us.
My stomach lurched.
It was my brother.
I got out of the car. “Blake.”
“Oh good,” he said. “I was worried I was going to be pissing some random dickhead off.”
“Nope,” I said. “Just a known dickhead.”
We stopped a few feet from each other.
“You could have called, you know,” I said.
“Would you have picked up?”
I thumbed my eyebrow. He made a good point.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said instead of defending myself.
Blake nodded. “I heard.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No,” he said, cutting me off. Then he walked toward me and pulled me into the kind of brotherly hug I hadn’t known I’d missed until it was here. “It doesn’t matter, Mitch. We all do what we need to do to survive.”
“Hey, Winona,” he said when he pulled back.
Winona had stepped out of the car and had a hand up in greeting. “Hey Blake.” She straightened her coat, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Cassandra in there?”
The passenger door opened and Cassandra got out. She waved, but walked to Winona, embracing her. But there was something about the way Cassandra pulled Winona quietly aside that had me jerking my gaze to Blake. Something about the desperate nature of that hug.
“What’s happened?” I asked. Something was wrong, I knew it. It’s why he slammed on the brakes.
My chest tightened. “Is it Mom?”
Blake shook his head. “It’s Dad, Mitchie. He’s gone.”