Chapter Thirty-Two
THE MOMENT HER NAME went onto a call sheet, Maximo found her.
That was the cruelty of it, the private joke the universe told at his expense.
She had hidden herself perfectly, right up until she started to do the one thing she'd been put on the earth to do, and the instant she stepped into a spotlight the man who had lost her could see her again, from very far away, behind glass, the only place he had any right to stand now.
He didn't go to her.
He had thrown away the right to walk up to her and say her name, and he knew it to the bone, so he took the only road still open to a man like him. He moved the whole world for her from behind it, out of her sight, where his help couldn't touch her and neither could he.
The small indie with no money suddenly had money, routed through three companies that carried his name nowhere.
A distribution deal that should have died in a drawer got a second reader who owed someone a favor.
A festival slot opened where none had been.
He made calls that ended and keep me out of it entirely, and he watched the machinery turn, and he made very sure that not one dollar of it could ever be traced back to the man she'd run three thousand miles to be free of.
She would think it was luck. He needed her to think it was luck. If she ever once suspected his hand in any of it she'd walk away from the whole thing to spite him, and she would be right to, and he would deserve the walking-away.
So he gave her the future and kept his fingerprints off it, the same way he'd given her the best cardiologist in the country and the quiet security detail and the safe corner of every room she'd ever stood in, unseen, unthanked, exactly as he had earned.
It was the only way he was allowed to love her now.
From the far side of a country, in the dark, spending a fortune she'd never know about on a life he would never get to be in.
She was forbidden to him still, too young and carrying his sister's heart, and losing her had not changed either count.
None of it ever once slowed the wanting.
It wasn't enough. He knew to the marrow that it wasn't enough. A man could buy a girl the entire sky and still have no standing to walk out under it beside her.
But it was the last language he had left that wouldn't hurt her, so he spoke it, night after night, fluently, into the silence of a city she didn't live in anymore.
Be happy. Be well. Be everything, and never once know it was me.
And he called that loving her because it was the closest thing to it a coward had left himself.