18. Evan
18
EVAN
“ W e’re going to need to bring in a second event coordinator if this keeps up.” Serena pinched the bridge of her nose, rubbing it like she was trying to ward off a headache. “I mean, I’m not complaining that we have all these new requests after the wedding, but I don’t know that we have enough manpower to cover all of it.”
“I’ll have to look into that,” I agreed, though my heart wasn’t in it. “Things are going to be pretty busy going forward.”
“You know, those properties you were looking at in Rhode Island and that second place in Cape Cod are still on the market,” she pointed out, sort of playful. “I know you were thinking about making an offer. With all this new business coming in, nothing’s holding you back now. You could take your empire as big as you want so long as you promise to keep me on in some capacity.”
I offered a sincere, if weary, grin. “Believe me. There are a lot of things I could do without, but you are not one of them. ”
My phone buzzed with a text, and the sight of Aria’s name on the screen pushed everything out of the way for now. I turned back to my Mac, where Serena chatted with me over Zoom. “I need to get going. I have another meeting here in town. When I’m back in the office, we’ll go over all these new inquiries.”
“And the information on those other properties?”
“We’ll see.” It was almost unthinkable but no less true. I could hardly remember why it had ever seemed so important, having a certain number of properties under my belt by the time I turned thirty.
What difference would it make? Would I be any happier? Would it fill some void in my life?
I grabbed my phone and pulled up Aria’s text like it was a life jacket on a stormy sea. It had been a few hours since I reached out to ask about Valentina, who’d been completely MIA since the wedding. By Friday morning, I had decided enough was enough. I needed answers. If I couldn’t get my response from her, Aria seemed like the natural person to turn to.
Aria: Meet me at the café in the lobby of my building. I’ll be down there in fifteen.
Thank fuck. I was afraid for a minute there she would stonewall me the way her sister had. It had been a long, ugly five days since Valentina handed me my ass outside the country club. She hadn’t said anything I didn’t need to hear. That didn’t make the memory easier to bear or the wounds easier to deal with.
I’d hurt her so much worse than I had ever imagined. I could hardly stand to look at myself in the mirror, knowing she had loved me, and I broke her heart.
She had never told me that. There was so much I never knew .
I wasted no time getting across town to the apartment building on Central Park West, where Aria and Miles had been living there together for a couple of months.
The café off the lobby was busy, full of customers craving their caffeine fix. Aria hadn’t come down yet, so I picked up a cup of black coffee for me and an oat milk latte for her after hearing her order one the morning after the wedding. She was still nowhere around by the time I took a seat at a two-top by the window overlooking the street.
Valentina would hate knowing I went to her sister for help. Nobody wanted to know the people in their life went behind their backs to talk about them. She had to understand this was all the result of caring so damn much about her. I lived and breathed Valentina since the engagement party. Nearly every fucking, waking moment was all her.
And if she refused to? Well, that would be par for the course.
A head full of blue hair bobbed on the other side of a line of customers, and a moment later, Aria broke through, spotting me at the far end of the room. The worry lines between her delicate brows told an entire story before she reached the table.
“Thanks for coming down to talk to me,” I offered. “I got you an oat milk latte if you’re interested.”
“Oh, thanks. That was thoughtful.” She dropped into the chair across from mine and opened the lid of her cup. “So. My sister. You’re not the only one she’s basically shut out of her life all week. I get, like, one-word texts from her, and only when I ask her to let me know she’s still alive.”
My heart sank. There I was, hoping I was the only one she had blocked out. “It’s my fault. She’s mad at me. I made a huge mistake. ”
“You’ve made mistakes before,” she pointed out, smirking. “What’s so different this time?”
Her smirk faded as silence unfurled between us. The longer it took me to come up with a reasonable explanation for what had gone down, the more serious she became. “What did you do?” she eventually asked in a whisper, the way a person asked a question whose answer they weren’t sure they wanted to hear.
If there was one conclusion I’d come to, it was how pointless denial was. What had I gained from pretending not to understand how traumatic Valentina’s experience must’ve been? Like a coward, I had told myself if she didn’t bring it up, I didn’t need to either. Obviously, it had eaten away at her, not to mention eating away at anything we might have had together.
Still, I couldn’t find the words, and I didn’t want to betray Valentina worse than I already had. Aria made it easy for me. She looked down at her cup, turning it in place and tapping her fingers against the cardboard. “You were the father, weren’t you?” she asked, and the sudden question took my breath away. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about because I think you do. I don’t feel like being insulted with a lie.”
Jumping right into it, were we? That was fine. We needed to. Valentina needed us to. “Yeah. It was me.”
Head bobbing slowly, she murmured, “I’ve noticed the way she’s acted around you lately, deliberately avoiding contact when we’re all together. She ran from you like the plague throughout the reception. I was watching.”
“Which was why you bullied us into dancing together?”
Her gaze met mine before darting away, cheeks going pink. “So you started up again. I thought you might have been hiding something. Now that I know you were the baby’s father, I have to admit, none of this makes any more sense than it did before.”
“I didn’t know you knew about the baby.” How completely insane it was, sitting there, opening up this way. I had never talked about the baby after the phone call from Valentina the morning after the miscarriage.
“She wouldn’t have told me if I didn’t walk in on her almost passed out on the bathroom floor that night.” I heard it all in her voice. How terrifying that must have been for her, for both of them.
“Oh, Jesus,” I muttered, gripped by nausea.
“She wouldn’t tell me who the father was, and I’ve wondered through the years. It’s not like I sat around thinking about it all the time, but every now and then, I would catch her, you know… staring at a baby or a pregnant woman a little too closely. But you know how she is,” she concluded with a sigh. “God forbid anybody thinks she is less than totally fine.”
Guilt plagued me, wrapping its way around my throat in a chokehold. “I should have known she wasn’t fine.”
“You’re right. You should’ve known.” Her nose wrinkled, eyes crinkling at the corners when she winced. “Sorry. You couldn’t have known. We were kids. Both of you did the best you could.”
“That’s not true.” Her features pinched together like she was in pain, but I shook my head anyway. “I could have done better. I should have done more. I took the easy way out and pretended it was for the best. Hell, I saw how upset she got the night of the engagement party when Colton announced Rose’s pregnancy. I could’ve stepped up then, but I told myself too much time had passed. I’ve been making excuses all these years, now more than ever. I don’t deserve understanding or sympathy. ”
“I appreciate your honesty.” With her elbows on the table, she leaned in, hitting me with a hard stare. “She changed after that. I don’t know if you noticed it because you always spent more time with the guys. She’s my twin. She’s the other half of me. I felt her pulling away and… I don’t know. Getting harder. That natural light she had… remember it?”
“I sure as hell do.” The memory of the day we met was as sharp and clear as ever. She had drawn me to her light like a moth to a flame.
“It seems like everything after that was forced. She’s still bright and amazing, but she has to work at it. She may have recovered physically, but emotionally?” Shaking her head, she concluded, “She’s never been the same.”
I saw it all so clearly now that Aria laid it out that way. “What can I do? She hates me. She should, she has every right to. I thought maybe we could move forward, start again, but she may as well have spat in my face.”
“Maybe that’s where you need to leave things,” she suggested in a soft voice. “Some things aren’t meant to be. If being with you is hurting her, it might be for the best to let her go.”
She made sense, but then certain things didn’t follow logic, and this was one of them. “We had something real. I felt it again when we were together these past weeks. That natural connection. If I hadn’t been such an ignorant coward, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now.”
Her mouth pursed thoughtfully as she sat back, picking up her cup and taking a sip. “You’re going to try to get her back, aren’t you?” she asked with a sigh.
“I have to. I can’t let her go without trying.” Gazing toward the park across the street, an idea came to mind. “And I might know how to find her.”