24. Skye
— ? —
Skye
The Malibu house feels different.
I stand in the foyer with one suitcase - the same suitcase I left with what feels like a lifetime ago - and try to recognize the space.
The week before I came back, I called Francesca Massey and told her to withdraw the divorce petition.
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, “You’re sure?
” I was sure. Not because I trusted him yet, but because I wanted to give myself the chance to trust him.
It’s still the same house. Same ocean views through those ridiculous floor-to-ceiling windows. Same Italian marble that used to make my footsteps echo like accusations. Same cathedral ceilings that swallowed every sound I made.
But it’s quieter. Emptier. More like a home and less like a showpiece.
Or maybe I’m the one who’s different.
“Guest room,” I say firmly, my fingers tightening on the suitcase handle. “To start.”
Jayden nods. He’s standing a few feet away, giving me space, and I notice he hasn’t tried to take my bag or guide me anywhere. He’s just… waiting. Letting me lead.
“Whatever you need.”
“I mean it.” The words come out sharper than I intend. Defensive. “I’m not ready to share a bed again. Not yet.”
“I know.” His voice is steady. Patient. “There’s no pressure. No expectations. We’re doing this at your pace.”
I search his face for the lie. The calculation. The moment where he’ll slip back into the man who decided what was best for me without ever asking what I wanted.
I don’t find it.
He looks tired. Not the glamorous exhaustion of a man running an empire, but the real kind. The kind that comes from sleepless nights and hard conversations and doing the work nobody sees.
I expect to feel awkward. Trapped. Like I’m walking back into a cage I fought so hard to escape.
Instead, I feel something that might be hope.
It terrifies me.
“Let’s go to the beach,” I say suddenly.
He blinks. “Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“But you haven’t even unpacked-”
“It doesn’t matter.” I set down my suitcase right there in the foyer. “I want to see the ocean.”
He studies me for a moment. I watch his jaw work, watch him physically stop himself from suggesting we be practical, that we settle in first, that we do things in the logical order.
Then he nods.
“Okay. Let’s go see the ocean.”
***
Not just any beach. Our beach. Millbrook Beach, California. An hour’s drive from Malibu, but worth every minute of silence in the car, every mile of coastline blurring past the window, every heartbeat that brings us closer to the place where everything started.
We park in the same lot we used when we were teenagers. The asphalt is cracked now, weeds pushing through in stubborn green clusters. The wooden sign marking the beach entrance is faded, the letters barely visible.
I slip off my shoes before we even reach the sand.
The path down to the shore is exactly how I remember it - sandy, winding, lined with scrubby coastal plants that smell like salt and sage. My bare feet remember every curve. My body remembers the way the ground slopes toward the water, the way the sand shifts from packed to soft.
And then we’re there.
The ocean stretches out before us, endless and eternal, waves crashing against the shore with a rhythm that feels like breathing. The sun is setting. Orange and pink and gold spilling across the water like someone knocked over paint cans in heaven.
“I forget how beautiful it is,” I say, and my voice comes out small against the roar of the surf.
“You haven’t been here in years.”
“Neither have you.”
“I know.” He stops beside me, close enough that I can feel his warmth but not touching. “I kept meaning to come back. And then…” He shrugs, and the gesture carries the weight of a decade of choices. “Life got in the way.”
“Life, or work?”
“Same thing, for a while.” He looks at me, and the setting sun catches his eyes, turns them liquid gold. “I don’t want it to be the same thing anymore.”
We walk along the water’s edge. The waves lap at my feet, cold and shocking, and I gasp a little at the temperature. He reaches for my hand - hesitant, asking permission with the gesture instead of words.
I let him hold it.
His palm is warm against mine. Familiar in a way that makes my chest ache. How many times did we walk this exact stretch of sand, fingers intertwined, talking about futures that seemed infinite?
“I opened the Foundation again,” I say, watching our feet leave parallel tracks in the wet sand. “New board. People I chose myself.”
“I heard. Congratulations.”
I glance at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “You’re not mad? That I didn’t ask for your input?”
“Why would I be mad?” He sounds genuinely confused. “It’s your foundation. Your work. You don’t need my permission.”
I stop walking. Turn to face him.
The wind catches my hair, blows it across my face. He reaches up, tucks it behind my ear with gentle fingers. The touch sends electricity skittering down my spine.
“The old you would have tried to help,” I say carefully. “Would have offered to make calls, pull strings, get involved.”
“The old me wouldn’t have noticed you didn’t want that.” He meets my eyes, and there’s no defensiveness there. Just acknowledgment. Just truth. “I’m trying to be better at listening. At letting you lead.”
I study his face. The lines around his eyes that weren’t there when we were kids. The gray at his temples that makes him look distinguished instead of old. The set of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the way he looks at me like I’m the sunset instead of something he owns.
I’m looking for the lie. The angle. The manipulation.
I don’t find it.
And that’s almost worse, because it means I have to actually trust this. Trust him. Trust that people can change, that love can survive what we did to it, that we can build something new on the ashes of what we burned.
“Come on,” he says softly. “There’s something I want to show you.”
***
He’s set something up further down the beach.
A blanket - not some expensive designer thing, just a simple woven blanket in faded blues and greens. A cooler. Wildflowers in a jar - the same kind he’s been sending me every single day since the day I left, showing up on my doorstep like clockwork, like a promise he’s determined to keep.
“When did you do this?”
“The day you told me you were moving back. I’ve had a kid named Josh refreshing that blanket every morning since. He thinks I’m insane.” He shoves his hands in his pockets, and for a moment he looks seventeen again. Nervous. Hopeful. Terrified I’ll say no. “I know it’s cheesy.”
“It’s extremely cheesy.”
“Is that bad?”
I look at the blanket. The flowers. The way the setting sun makes everything glow like something out of a movie - and not one of his movies, not something polished and perfect, but something real. Something earned.
“I haven’t decided yet.”
I sit on the blanket. He sits beside me, keeping a careful distance between us. Opens the cooler and pulls out two bottles of beer - cheap, the label faded and familiar, the same brand we drank when we were seventeen and didn’t know the difference between good beer and bad.
“Oh my God.” I take the bottle, turn it over in my hands. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything.” His voice is quiet. “I just stopped showing it.”
The bottle is cold against my palm. I twist off the cap and take a long drink, and the taste is exactly how I remember - slightly bitter, slightly warm, entirely perfect because of everything it represents.
We drink in silence. Watch the sun sink below the horizon, painting the sky in shades of purple and deep blue. The first stars appear, faint pinpricks of light against the darkening canvas.
“I finished the screenplay,” I say eventually. “All three acts. It’s done.”
He turns to look at me. “Can I read it?”
“You can read it when it’s polished. Right now it’s a mess.”
“I don’t care about mess.” He sets down his beer, gives me his full attention. “I care about seeing what you made.”
Something shifts in my chest. Because the old Jayden would have wanted to see it for business reasons. Would have been calculating its market potential, its award-season timing, its franchise possibilities.
This Jayden just wants to see what I made. Because I made it.
I pull out my phone. Navigate to the file. Hand it to him with hands that aren’t quite steady.
“Don’t laugh at the dialogue.”
“I would never.”
“You laughed at the dialogue in college.”
“I was an idiot in college.”
He starts reading. I watch his face instead of the ocean. Watch the way his brow furrows in concentration, the way his lips move slightly as he reads, the way he gets absorbed in the story and forgets about everything else.
This is the man I fell in love with. The one who could disappear into a story like nothing else existed. The one who saw magic in words and believed in the power of narrative to change the world.
I thought he was gone forever, buried under a decade of business meetings and profit margins and “let’s circle back on that.”
But he’s here. Reading my screenplay on a beach at sunset, looking like he’s seventeen again.
“This is good,” he says after what feels like forever, still scrolling. “This is really good, Skye.”
“You’re not just saying that because you’re trying to win me back?”
“I’m saying it because it’s true.” He looks up at me, and his eyes are bright with something that might be pride. “You have a gift. You’ve always had a gift.” He sets down the phone, turns to face me fully. “You should have been doing this the whole time. I’m sorry I let you forget that.”
I want to argue. Want to say that he didn’t let me forget anything, that I made my own choices, that I can’t blame him for the ways I shrank myself.
But that’s not entirely true, is it?
He created the world where shrinking was the only way to survive. He built the empire that had no room for my dreams. He loved me in a way that slowly, gradually, made me invisible - not through cruelty, but through neglect.
And he knows it. I can see it in his face.
“Thank you,” I say instead. “For reading it. For… caring.”