Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The house echoed when Lacey wasn’t there.
Maybe it echoed when she was there, too, but it felt cavernous without her.
Sam signed for the dining room table he’d ordered back in November, and locked the doors behind the delivery drivers. He stared at the table, made from native Oregon trees he couldn’t remember the names of, and wanted to throw every empty chair out the window.
It was one of many Christmas surprises he wouldn’t be able to give to Lacey.
The most important one, the one he’d been most excited to give to her, was sitting on his nightstand mocking him.
It was her engagement ring—or her wedding ring, he didn’t know what to call it since they were already married—but not the paper one that Jenna had made for them. Those had fallen off somewhere between the chapel and the hotel. This ring he’d called around Portland until he found a jeweler that could quickly bring the vague idea he had in his head to life. Then he’d paid for them to drive it down to Crane Cove so Lacey wouldn’t be suspicious. It had been easy to sneak it into the house because she’d been so consumed with recital week.
He’d wanted a ring that looked like the sun. So he’d gotten one. A round center stone, surrounded by a halo of marquis cut diamonds in various sizes. It would have looked stunning on Lacey’s finger.
The plan had been to give it to her on Christmas, but that wasn’t likely to happen. He didn’t know when—or if—she was coming home. Fuck, she’d brought up getting divorced. She would get her money from her mother’s estate, her job with Jenna, and she’d be gone in the wind. Once she had her own money, what did he have to offer her that he hadn’t already given? This was why he’d never wanted to be in a relationship again. He had tried so hard, and in the end, it meant nothing.
There was an invisible weight on his chest that made it hard to breathe. He’d have been better off if a semi-truck had been parked on his sternum.
He hadn’t said goodbye to Lacey. He’d slept on the couch in the TV room and she’d left before he came upstairs. There wasn’t a note or a text. She was just gone.
Daisy whined and pawed his leg.
“Right. Dinner.” Sam wasn’t hungry, but Daisy was. When would it occur to the dog that Lacey wasn’t coming home?
He wanted to sleep. If he was asleep, he didn’t have to deal with any of this.
As Sam portioned out Daisy’s dinner, his phone started to buzz on the kitchen counter. He nearly dropped her bowl in his rush to get to it. Maybe it was Lacey.
It was Jenna.
“What do you want?” he snarled. This was her fault, wasn’t it?
“What happened to hello?” Jenna asked, and didn’t wait for the answer before saying, “And why aren’t you being supportive of your wife?”
“Who says I’m not being supportive?”
“When I asked Lacey what your reaction was to the news, she said you didn’t have one. That you said ‘Cool’ and walked away.”
“I didn’t say ‘Cool.’”
“Close enough,” Jenna snapped. “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Sam snapped back, “except that one of my best friends went behind my back, and now my wife is leaving me.”
“Went behind your— Sam, I didn’t go behind your fucking back.”
Sam clenched his fist to try and stop his hand from shaking. His muscles were quivering with pent up emotion. “Why didn’t you ask me first?”
“Ask you?” Jenna shouted. “I don’t have to ask you , Sam! This is your wife’s career, not yours. She is an autonomous person who can make her own damn decisions. I’m so fucking sick of men thinking they can control what women do. I’m fucking disappointed in you, Sam. There’s a lot of guys I’d expect this backwards, reductionist, misogynistic, downright Neanderthal behavior from, but not you.”
“She’s my wife,” Sam insisted, though he felt like he was running up an icy hill—getting absolutely nowhere and only hurting himself.
“And I will support her in not being your wife if you can’t pull your head out of your ass.”
Jenna hung up before he could issue a rebuttal.
Who the hell was she to tell him how to handle his marriage?
Two long, lonely days later, Sam could see Jenna’s point. Or points. He was pretty sure there’d been multiple, but it all boiled down to him being an unsupportive ass.
When she’d told him about the tour, Sam had been shocked, but when she mentioned divorce, he’d shut down. It had been easier than trying to voice his complex swirl of emotions.
He’d stewed in his wrongness. Sat in his own mental filth. If it hadn’t been for Daisy, he would have stayed in bed and rotted. But she needed him. She required that he get out of bed, feed her, and take her to go potty.
His wife needed him too. Or, at least, he hoped she did. Because he needed her.
Sam flew to Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, when it was abundantly clear to him that she wasn’t coming home. He was going to storm the castle, and then grovel at Lacey’s feet like the deeply sorry asshole he was.
But when he pulled up in front of Jenna’s house, which looked like Barbie’s Christmas Dream House, he couldn’t bring himself to use the gate code. Or even buzz to be let in. He didn’t deserve Lacey. She was better off without him.
Sam was halfway to his house when the computer screen on his dash lit up with Peter’s name and number. He pressed the phone icon on his steering wheel.
“Why are you calling?”
“And a bah humbug to you too,” Peter responded. “I was calling because I just finished Jordy’s family’s annual reading of ’ Twas The Night Before Christmas ?—”
“You do not do that,” Sam interjected in disbelief.
“I do. It’s for his nieces and nephews. Anyway ”—the word was pointed enough to cut—“Jordy said that Graham said that you bailed on Crane Cove Christmas?—”
“Try saying that five times fast.”
“Stop interrupting. Graham said that you’re in the City of Angels, and I wanted to invite you and Lacey to my parents’ house for Christmas, if you don’t have any other plans. Don’t worry about gifts, we keep things shockingly simple because nobody in my family has the patience to wait for Christmas.”
Sam wondered how long Peter could hold his breath underwater because he didn’t seem to need to breathe when he talked.
“Umm,” he began awkwardly, “Lacey isn’t with me. But Daisy is. Is it okay if I bring the dog?”
“Of course you can bring Daisy! She’s such a good girl.”
Daisy tried to crawl into the front seat at the sound of her name, and Sam had to turn his arm into a barrier to keep her in the back.
“What time should we be there tomorrow?”
“Whenever you want, but no earlier than ten. Grandma should be nice and socially lubricated by her morning cocktail by then.”
For the first time in days, Sam felt like smiling. “Charlotte Parker and Estelle Whitman are going to be in the same room? You should charge admission to the show.”
“Battle of the Hollywood Starlets,” Peter boomed in a faux announcer voice. “Hopefully everyone leaves alive.”
Sam arrived at Peter’s parents’ Los Angeles home at eleven in the morning. He’d truly held out as long as he could, but he couldn’t be alone with his thoughts anymore. The overflowing wastepaper basket, filled to the brim with rejected apologies, was proof of that.
The Parker-Greens owned a mansion in Beverly Hills that, by current celebrity standards, was quite subdued. It felt like a home instead of a showpiece purchased to show off how much money they had in the bank.
Sam parked in the brick paved circular driveway, and he and Daisy walked up to the door. He hoped a holiday with the Parker-Greens would brighten her spirits, because Lacey’s absence was starting to wear on her too.
Maybe he could use that as his opener to talk to her. “Hey, Daisy’s depressed. Coincidentally, so am I. Please come home.” No. That was too guilt-trippy.
The door burst open, even though his finger still hovered over the bell.
“Sam!” Peter shouted, and pulled him into a bone-crushing hug. Daisy danced around their feet, begging to be included. Peter noticed and crouched down to give her love too. “I couldn’t forget about you, sweet girl.” He stood and waved them inside. “Come in, come in. We’ve got White Christmas on, and Grandma is bitching about how much damn mileage Bing Crosby got out of that damn song. Her words, not mine.”
Sam followed Peter through the foyer and towards the kitchen. The interior of the house looked like someone had pointed to a holiday issue of an interior design magazine and said, “Give me that.” Knowing Charlotte Parker, that might be exactly what she’d done.
“Mom, look who’s here,” Peter said as they entered the kitchen, which was a disaster zone.
Charlotte Parker brushed one of her winter blonde curls out of her face with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of flour. At almost seventy, she was still a strikingly beautiful woman, and anyone could draw a line from her to Peter and understand where he got his looks from.
“Oh, Sam, thank god,” she breathed, wiping her hands on the front of her apron that was probably being used for the first time ever. “I got a bit lost in this recipe?—”
Peter’s father, Arthur Green, was watching from the boundary between the kitchen and living room with a mug, probably filled with tea, in his hands and a twinkle in his eye.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t call the caterers,” he said with an affectionate smile. “It’s worked fine for the last thirty-odd years.”
“Because I wanted to do this right. We never get to spend holidays together,” Charlotte huffed, and looked imploringly at Sam. “Help me. Please.”
Sam gave Peter a suspicious glare, but pushed up his sleeves and headed to the sink to wash his hands.
“You called me in as a ringer,” Sam accused after Christmas dinner was in the oven. He and Peter were sitting by the pool with mugs of seasonally appropriate hot cocoa, even if they weren’t weather appropriate.
“It’s called insurance,” Peter clarified, taking a sip of his cocoa and getting whipped cream on the end of his nose. He was lucky that Daisy was inside lounging with Grandma Estelle and soaking up seventy-three years of Hollywood gossip while she got her ears scratched, or he’d have gotten a tongue bath.
“You’re lucky I was in town.”
“There’s always a Plan C,” Peter said, and added, “Dad bought a frozen lasagna from Costco—did I tell you my dad finally discovered Costco? He’s obsessed.”
“He can buy tea by the pound.”
“Never. He still imports it from jolly ol’ England. None of our Yankee swill.” Peter finally noticed the whipped cream on the end of his nose and brushed it off. “Where’s Lacey?”
Sam closed his eyes and sank into his pool chair. “If I tell you some secret shit, can you promise to keep it to yourself and not to freak out?”
“She’s not sick, is she?”
Sam cracked an eye to look at his friend. “No, she’s not sick.”
Then Sam launched into his story. How he’d met Lacey in Barcelona, how he hadn’t recognized her years later, how he’d started that ridiculous rumor and how it had spectacularly backfired but also succeeded at the same time. He told Peter about their fake dating ploy and how he’d slowly fallen in love with Lacey, because how could he not?
“Lacey’s had some really shitty exes,” Sam explained, “and they got her into financial trouble. She had some inheritance from her mom, but she couldn’t access it until after she got married?—”
Peter took a sharp intake of breath. To his credit, it was the first sound he’d made the entire story.
“So when we were in Vegas, I suggested we get married so she could get the money and clear her debt.”
“How did you propose?”
Sam frowned. “I asked her if she wanted to get married?”
Peter sighed heavily, putting his mug on the pool deck and sitting up. “No, I mean what was the proposal like?”
“I…asked?” Sam searched his memory. “I laid out all the reasons why we should get married…which were pretty much all getting her money for her.”
“Disappointing. Continue.”
“When we got back from Vegas, Jenna offered Lacey a job as a dancer on her tour, and she’s taking it. She’s leaving me before the tour starts.” The memory was an open wound, and recalling it was like rubbing salt and lemon juice in it. “I…didn’t react well—actually, I didn’t react at all.”
“Mm-hmm.” Peter steepled his fingers, deep in thought, then asked, “Do you want to stay married?”
“Of course I do. I love her. Why else do you think I jumped on the opportunity when it presented itself?” Sam looked up at the cloudless sky. It didn’t look or feel much like Christmas. “What if she’s done with me?”
“Well, if you don’t do something about it, she will be.” Peter stood, stretched, and started pacing. “Do you want my advice?”
“I don’t think it can get me into any more trouble than I’ve already gotten myself into.”
“Starting with optimism. Love it.” Peter flashed a thumbs-up. “If I was Lacey, I’d be questioning if you really had feelings for me.”
“This is getting weird…”
“Shut up.” Peter turned on his heel and did an about-face. “Your proposal was pragmatic, not romantic. In fact, I don’t remember hearing you once saying that you’ve even told Lacey that you’re in love with her. Have you?”
The back of Sam’s neck grew hot. “I think I might have…once…when we were having sex.”
Peter groaned.
“I don’t know! She never brought it up, and she was always bringing up how we were going to break up. What was I supposed to do?”
“Be bold! Be brave!” Peter’s hands flew while he spoke. “Don’t let her go and leave it all up to fate. Do something big and romantic. If you don’t feel a little bit stupid doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
Sam scooted back in his chair. “I’m a little scared of what you have in mind.”
Peter opened his mouth, stopped walking, and then closed his mouth. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing. Graham had a ball. You could write her a song?”
The idea hit Sam so hard it was like turning on a light and getting shocked by the switch.