Chapter 25
Bailey
I wake with a jolt and sit up, then look at the clock numbers glowing beside my bed.
It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning, and I can hear someone coming upstairs.
Scratch that. Someone is already upstairs.
They’re in the hall. Right outside my—
A light switches on outside the door.
“Rhett?” I call out.
“It’s just me,” he says, gently, poking his head in. Light floods in from behind so I can’t see his face, but I recognize his voice.
I’m not awake enough to remember why regret would be sinking into me like an anchor, but then it hits. The realization of what I did right before going to bed wraps itself around my stomach before completely bottoming it out.
Sitting up, I pull the thick, knit blanket all the way up to my chin like it might somehow block me from doing what I’ve already done.
I gave him the book.
Now, it’s four a.m.
He probably hasn’t slept.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.” His voice is thick, like it’s been carried across the silence of the house through a pit of gravel. “I was just grabbing a sweater from my room. You can go back to sleep.”
I nearly lay down, but my heart is thumping so loud that I wonder if he might be able to hear it from way over there.
Before I can utter a word, the door latches shut, and my room is dark again. I hear his footsteps head back downstairs.
I curl onto my side, but my eyes stay wide, staring at the wall. Tracing the faint outline of the lampshade with the clock numbers glowing beneath it as if they’re hell-bent on keeping me awake now — like my thoughts won’t already do that job just fine.
Has he been reading this whole time?
Did he finish it?
When Hollis had tried pointing out the similarities between Heartbreak and our summers in Cedar Shores, I’d told her that yes, a lot of what I’d written was based on what we all shared here.
But our experiences at the lake were just used as inspiration and nothing else.
I’d insisted that this one was all a work of fiction, just like all my other books.
But I have no doubt that Rhett will recognize himself in this one.
Reading it would be like looking in a mirror for him — easier to spot if you’re the one holding the other half of the memories I laid out.
So much of what I took from our time here and put into the book were conversations and moments that only he and I shared.
There’s no way I’ll be able to fall back asleep now. I need to see how far he’s gotten into the story, or if he’s stopped reading a few chapters in, just like he did last time he tried to read one of my books.
I roll off the mattress. The floorboards creak beneath my feet.
It must have started raining at some point. It’s hitting the roof, and a deep, rolling thunder sounds off in the distance.
Keeping the light off, I stop to listen at the top of the stairs to see if he’s still walking around down there, but besides the rain, the house is silent.
When I’m halfway down, I hear him.
“Bailey?”
I exhale the breath I was holding and finish the rest of the steps, then turn at the bottom, unsure of what I’ll see.
He’s sitting on one of those sunny plaid chairs in the sunroom off the kitchen, but he gets to his feet when he sees me come in.
Rhett’s face looks as if he’s run an emotional marathon while I somehow slept the last few hours.
“Hey,” he says, though I wish it were more.
“Good morning,” I answer.
“I don’t think it’s morning yet.” He barely smiles, but when he does, his face is missing my favorite part — those tiny traces of humor it usually has when I walk into a room, and the accompanying look in his eye that says he’s happy to see me.
Instead, he looks dazed and exhausted.
He follows my gaze to the book. It’s already closed and sitting on the end table beside him without a bookmark to indicate the spot he might have stopped reading.
Before I can ask, he answers.
“I finished it,” he says, studying me like he might find whatever answers he needs there.
I press my lips together, waiting, but nothing else comes out of him.
“There’s a reason why, at first, I didn’t want you to read this one,” I tell him. My stomach churns like a whirlpool.
“Why?” He blinks, looking for confirmation of what he’s probably already figured out.
We stand in silence, but I’m not sure what else to say. If he hated it, it’s too late to take it back from him. And if he didn’t, that’s good, too, but either way, he has to say what he’s thinking if I’m ever going to breathe normally again.
“Look, Rhett, I’m sorry if you—”
“Tell me how you wrote this,” he interrupts, then he rethinks the question and changes it. “No, first tell me if this is about what I think it is.”
“Us,” I tell him, nodding, without any pause. There’s no use hiding it when it’s so clearly there. “I mean, obviously, you inspired it.”
“And how much of this was true?” he asks.
“So much of it,” I tell him. My voice is breathless, like I’ve been running away from telling him this for the last ten years. “I started writing it the day after you left for training.”
The memory of jotting down those first few pages rolls through my mind. I stretched out across the back seat, resting my back against the car door with a notebook in my lap. My falling tears smeared the ink, almost as quickly as I could write the words down.
I think my dad thought I was crying because my brother had left for training the day before, too, but that was only part of it, of course.
When the pine cones finally stopped crunching beneath our tires, and we pulled onto the main street that would lead us out of town, the shimmering lake in our rearview mirror, my mom had reached back and squeezed my knee, coaxing me to look up at her.
When I did, her eyes told me that she knew it was probably more than just Axel leaving.
She could feel my heart break from the front seat without saying a word, like moms so often can.
Driving away with only three of us in the car marked the end of an era. The end of us being there as a complete family every summer, and the end of my guaranteed time with Rhett Monroe. Nothing but months and months ahead without any promise of him to return to.
“You wrote this whole book after that summer?” Rhett asks, sounding surprised.
“No, only the beginning. I wrote an entirely different book after that summer, but it started with the first few chapters of this book. Then it morphed over time.”
“I don’t understand. How did you know what was going to happen to me? Or between us after?”
“I didn’t.”
The silence draws out again. I don’t know what to say. Or how to act, or where to look.
“Bailey, you’re going to have to spoon feed this to me. I don’t understand, so you’re going to have to explain how you wrote this the way you did when you were only seventeen. And how it’s here in my hands over ten years later detailing almost exactly what happened after that.”
“After you left, I wrote a different version of this book. It was my first draft of it. And it was full of everything that those first couple chapters talk about. A summer love, a first real heart ache, those intense emotions you feel as a teenager while falling for someone for the very first time.”
“Then, it all falls apart,” Rhett interjects, softly. “The guy leaves. She tries to follow him.”
I nod. “The rest of this book — the version you have read tonight — is about what happens after the fairy tale ends. When real life starts and shit hits the fan. How two people can tear themselves apart but—”
“But then they find each other in the end,” he finishes. “Against every odd.”
“Against every odd,” I repeat, “even though they’re two very different people than they were when they first fell for each other,” I add, managing a light laugh, letting it sink in that Rhett has really read it.
He’s read the whole damn thing. “I’d written a very different version of it the first time around,” I admit.
“It started out being exactly what any heartbroken teenager would write.”
“What happened in that version?” he asks. “Before it got changed to this?”
“Well,” I laugh, embarrassed. “I was a senior in high school when I finished the first draft. So, of course, it read more like a cliché. The guy realized the error he’d made in leaving her and rushed back so they could make out a lot and get married.”
He laughs, and I love that he laughs at that. I press my lips together into a grin.
“I bet I’d like that draft, too,” he says. “Sounds pretty damn good.”
I smile. “In theory, but it wasn’t. It was all fluff without any real substance.”
“What happened to that version?”
“That version sat on my computer for years. I was never going to let it see the light of day, but I would read it every now and then while you were gone. Whenever you were out of touch for a while.” I shrug.
“Whenever I missed you, really. It was like a happy little fantasy to return to when I was feeling nervous about wherever you were, or whatever you were going through. Almost like, if I read it enough times, it would manifest itself into reality and you’d come banging on my door. ”
“So, when did that first draft change into what it is now?” he asks, eyeing me more seriously.
I swallow, remembering the heartache that came with Hollis’ phone call. Right after Rhett had gotten hurt. And everything that came after.
“I guess the story started changing when I did. When I started realizing that sometimes love—” I catch myself — “that caring about someone doesn’t always look like a fairy tale. Sometimes it looks horrible at first, or right in the middle.”
“The characters in this book went through hell and back. Separately, and then together,” he says, solemnly.