Chapter 24
Eleanor
“You got the job?!” Shay exclaimed that afternoon as I stood in our apartment doorway fiddling with my fingers. “Oh my gosh, we have to celebrate!”
“Um, yeah. I got the job.” I hadn’t really come to terms with it, actually. For the most part, I had walked around dazed and confused since I’d left Greyson’s house, wondering if what had happened had actually happened or if I was having some kind of psychotic break.
“I’m sorry, are you not happy about this?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Before the interview you were ecstatic at just the idea of it! What changed?”
“Oh, a lot,” I muttered as I walked into our place and shut the front door behind me. We’d been living together for the past two years now, and I couldn’t imagine living with anyone else. Shay was the yin to my yang.
I headed straight for the fridge and pulled out a cake. I could always count on my cousin stocking us up with the best sweets.
She did work at a bakery, after all. Even though it wasn’t her dream job, she loved it there.
During the day, she was at the bakery, and at night, she was on her laptop writing screenplays.
Shay was beyond gifted with the written word.
She could spin words in a way that made one want to laugh out loud and sob all at once.
She was just looking for her big break, and she truly deserved it more than anyone.
Shay was talented beyond compare. I knew for certain someday she’d make it big in the film industry.
One day, her name would be at the end credits of a blockbuster film.
I plopped down on the couch with a slice of cake and two forks. Shay sat down beside me and eagerly accepted her utensil.
“A lot as in . . . ?” she questioned.
“Well, I found out who my employer is,” I said.
“Oh my gosh, is it Beyoncé?!” she squeaked. “I was just telling my mom how it has to be someone famous with the amount of money they offered up.”
“It’s not Beyoncé.” I laughed, thinking it was funny how my cousin and I had the same thought process. In many ways, it was almost as if we were twins. Our minds were always on the same page. “But it is someone we know . . . or, well, knew.”
“Shut up. What?! I’m freaking out now. Who do we know that has that kind of money?”
“Greyson.”
“Greyson who?”
“Greyson, Greyson. Greyson East.”
Her mouth dropped open, and she gasped. “No. Way!”
“Thank you! That was my reaction too. I guess he’s the CEO of his father’s whiskey company.”
“That’s insane. That is beyond insane,” Shay remarked. “Holy crap. So how was it? What did he say when he saw you?”
“Um, nothing, really. He hardly spoke. It was weird, Shay. He was so . . . different, the complete opposite of the boy we used to know.” The Greyson I knew was so open and willing to express himself in every way possible. He spoke with such hope in his voice and dreamed of a bright future.
The Greyson I’d seen in the library of a mansion was different.
He was someone completely new, and I didn’t have a clue how to feel about it.
“That’s so crazy. You guys were so close for a while, up until you moved to Florida with your dad.”
“Yeah. Honestly, he had such a big impact on me, but today he acted as if he didn’t even know who I was.”
“But he hired you. That has to count for something, right?”
“Maybe . . . I just wish you could’ve seen him. He was so . . . cold.”
“Cold like mean? Or rude?”
“No, not exactly . . .”
Greyson hadn’t exactly been rude or mean toward me.
He’d just . . . been. It was hard to explain his whole demeanor.
Calling Greyson mean felt disrespectful, yet calling him kind felt absurd.
He’d just felt quietly intriguing, as if there were a million thoughts shooting through his mind, but he never let anyone else in on them.
“He’s just not the person I knew, that’s all. I’ll just have to get used to it, I guess. Either way, it’s going to be weird working for him.”
“Oh, gosh, working for your first love—I couldn’t even imagine that.”
“I’m still trying to picture it myself.”
Shay and I sat on the couch and settled in to watch some bad reality TV together.
Once a week we canceled all plans to binge terrible shows we DVRed.
Our favorites were the dating competitions because they were so ridiculously over the top.
Give us marathons of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, and we’d be happy for days.
Yet that afternoon it was a bit hard to let go of my thoughts.
A big part of my mind couldn’t stop thinking about the new Greyson East. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like working for a man who’d defined such a big part of my life.
It had been over fifteen years since we said goodbye, a decade and a half of growth and change, ups and downs, and moving on. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about the boy that cold man used to be. I couldn’t help but think back to our first hellos and final goodbyes.
I wondered if he was thinking about them too.
* * *
After Shay and I finished our TV binge, I headed to my bedroom to call my father. I sat on the edge of the bed with my cell phone in my left hand and a glass of wine in my right.
“Hello?” the deep voice said before he coughed a bit and cleared his throat.
“Hey, Dad, it’s Ellie,” I said, shutting my eyes. “I was just calling to check in on you.”
“Oh yeah, Ellie. I was going to call you, but I figured you were busy. How’s everything been?”
I grabbed a pillow and hugged it close to me as I bit my bottom lip. “Well, yeah. I mean, everything is good. How are you feeling? Did the stomach bug pass?”
“Oh yeah. It was weird, but I’m feeling a bit better. My head was in the toilet all day and night, but I’m good now.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Have you been taking your insulin each day?
I know you forget sometimes.” He’d been living with type two diabetes for quite some time now, and he was the worst at dealing with it properly.
I used to get into screaming matches with him to try to get him to eat healthier.
It got so bad that I would find soda cans hidden under the bathroom sink.
I tried everything to get him to eat better, to lose weight, but it was a useless effort.
You couldn’t force a man to better his life if he didn’t want to change for himself, and every time I pushed him, our relationship suffered. That was why I’d left all those years ago. He had gotten fed up with my attempts to help and pushed me away.
I just had to learn to love him from a distance even if that meant me worrying day in and day out about his well-being.
“Yep, taking it every day like I’m supposed to,” he said.
Lies.
I knew it was a lie, too, because I knew my father.
We both went silent, which was pretty normal.
He never said much, so neither did I. I often wondered if our silence was due to the fact that we didn’t have anything to say or because we’d waited too many years to ever speak up.
Perhaps our heads were filled with deep, meaningful conversations we wished to have with one another and we just didn’t have a clue where to begin.
That was OK, though. At least we still had the phone calls every once in a while.
Even so, sometimes I missed the words.
He cleared his throat. “OK, well, hey, I gotta get to cleaning up a bit around here. Thanks for calling, Ellie. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Oh, OK.”
“And Ellie? Thanks for the money you sent me. You didn’t have to do that, though. I wish you’d stop, but yeah, thank you.”
“Always, Dad.”
“We’ll talk later, all right?”
He always did that, ending the conversations early, which was probably for the best. Otherwise, I would’ve just held on to the cell phone, listening to his erratic breathing and wishing we weren’t the people that we were.
“All right, Dad. I love you.”
“Yeah, you too. Buh-bye.”
He hung up without giving me the words I needed to hear most, the ones that might’ve given me a bit of comfort.
I love you too.
It was hard to believe there had been a time when my father and I were close.
Time had the ability to change relationships in ways we never thought possible.
Death did that to people—turned their souls into something new.
Sometimes, it was for the better, and other times it was for the worst. Over time, life forced people and their relationships to shift.
Some days, I wished I could ever-so-slightly shift my father back toward the man he used to be.
I missed that man every single day of my life, and I secretly prayed to Mom that she’d help him find his way back to me.
I fully believed in my mother’s love. I thought her love was so strong it could somehow beat death. I felt her love around me at all times.
I really hoped Dad felt her presence too.
Still here, Ellie.
Those words from her were tattooed on my heart, and they kept it beating.