Chapter 7 #2
At the moment, she was no closer to finding that life than she’d been the night things blew up with Brendan.
The one thing she knew for certain was that she wanted to be on Gansett with Nikki for a while longer, even if she felt like a third wheel with her and Riley.
They’d both said they wanted her to stay, so she would take them at their word and give it at least another month in her favorite place before she had to confront The Future.
She felt like those words should be up in lights on a marquee somewhere since they hung over her like bright beacons, reminding her she was off course without a compass to guide her back to a path that made sense.
Nothing made sense anymore, except her sister, who’d been by her side always—until she wasn’t and everything fell apart.
Not that she blamed Nikki for that. She didn’t.
Not at all. When Jordan had decided to give her marriage one more chance, Nikki had strongly objected.
So much so that Nikki had quit as Jordan’s manager because she’d had enough of the toxic waste dump that Jordan’s marriage had been.
If Jordan had one thing to do over, she would’ve let her sister talk her out of joining Brendan on his tour to try one more time to save something that hadn’t been worth saving.
She knew that now. Hell, she’d known it then and had done it anyway.
She had to own that, not that she blamed herself for how it had ended.
However, she’d put herself in that hotel room that night with a man she knew was unstable and addicted to Xanax and God only knew what else.
It’d been a fool’s errand to try to bail the Titanic.
The only reason she had for trying one last time was that after having grown up in the midst of a nasty divorce, the last thing she wanted was the same for herself.
So she’d tried to save that which could not be saved.
One thing she’d learned was that marriage took two people to make it work, and if one of those two people was unwilling to do the bare minimum, it was never going to last.
That was what she’d said to Brendan that last night in Charlotte.
That she couldn’t keep them going all on her own.
He had to want it, too, and if he didn’t, that was fine.
But she couldn’t go on anymore with the way it had been, competing with his fans, his groupies, his phone, his bros and his drugs for bits and pieces of his attention like a pathetic dog looking for a bone from someone who had no fucks to give.
Apparently, that’d been the wrong thing to say, because the fight had turned physical after she’d said that, and the next thing she’d known, his manager, Davy, had been punching Brendan while someone else got Jordan out of there until EMS came.
And thus her disaster of a marriage had come to a swift and dramatic end that the entire world had seen unfold on social media and the entertainment sites that had gone crazy over Zane’s arrest and subsequent trip to rehab.
His rabid fans had blamed Jordan for all his troubles, claiming he’d never had drug issues until she came along, which was one hundred percent false.
He’d had a reliance on Xanax for as long as she’d known him, which she’d na?vely believed was no big deal. It wasn’t heroin, right?
Well, it might as well have been for the damage it’d done to his life and their marriage.
What’d started out as an occasional use to combat anxiety and insomnia had spiraled into a thirty-pills-a-day habit that involved a lot of enabling by the people around him, who’d seen to it that he got his pills when he needed them—or else.
Jordan had witnessed him fire a longtime employee who’d balked at getting him more pills after he’d filled a prescription the day before.
She’d never seen that guy again, and the others around Brendan had learned to go along or suffer the same fate.
So they’d done his bidding until it’d gotten so bad that he was slurring his words and staggering around when he wasn’t onstage.
They timed his intake to keep him sober to perform. The rest of the time, he was out of it.
She’d been shocked to realize how bad his dependence had gotten when she caught up with the tour in Houston following the publication of the sex video that had left her completely devastated and had led her to leave him for a time.
He’d apologized profusely for making the tape she hadn’t known about in the first place and for something so private between them being made public.
He said he’d done it only to try to get her back, which was ludicrous reasoning.
With the benefit of hindsight, she couldn’t believe she’d given him another chance after that nightmare—and all because she hadn’t wanted to be divorced.
Everything about him, the video, his addiction and her life as a celebrity wife, was ludicrous, and it was all in the past now, where it would stay.
A shrink would have a field day with how she’d satisfied her need for male attention with a malignant narcissist drug addict star to fill the void left by a father who’d never given her or Nikki much of anything other than heartache.
To make matters even worse, she’d allowed her husband’s fame to propel her from small-time model to big-time reality TV star, which had seemed like such a great idea at the time.
Brendan had encouraged her to take the offer to helm an inside look at the life and marriage of a rapper’s wife.
“It would give you something to do while I’m on the road,” he’d said, striking at one of her deepest insecurities—what went on when she wasn’t with him.
She’d reached the point where she simply couldn’t bear to travel two hundred days a year and had expressed a desire to be home more often.
He’d acted like the show would solve all their problems, when in fact it had only made them worse.
They hardly ever saw each other, and when they did, they were unable to recapture the connection that had brought them together five years earlier.
Back then, when they’d both been starting out in the business as models, they’d relied on each other to get through the lean times and had quickly formed what Jordan had assumed was an unbreakable bond.
She knew better now, and was determined to do better, if not for herself then for Nikki, who’d suffered through more drama than any sister deserved.
Jordan walked to the window that overlooked the coast and the ocean in the distance and thought about the last few disastrous months.
Her whole life, she’d been searching for the kind of family so many of her friends had, the kind with two parents who loved each other and their kids more than anything.
She’d never had that, and it was what she’d wanted to build with her husband.
But there was no room in his wild, carefree life for a wife or kids or a home.
He was too busy chasing the music and the money and the fans and the women and the drugs.
She had few illusions about what he’d been up to when she wasn’t with him on the road.
Especially in the end, when the drugs had taken him over.
He wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to resist the massive temptation he encountered every night.
The day before it ended in spectacular fashion, his tireless manager, Davy, had subtly suggested she might want to go home until things “settled down” with her husband.
Of course she hadn’t taken his advice, because she’d still been so certain she would be the one to “fix” him, to bring him back from wherever it was he’d gone the last couple of years.
Now she knew better. The only person who could fix the man who’d become Zane was Zane.
And though she missed her sweet Brendan, the man he’d been before the birth of Zane, she was wise enough now to know that her Brendan no longer existed.
He was gone, possibly forever, and the last few months had been about finding a way to accept that.
Nikki had once told her that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results. She’d tried insanity—repeatedly—and that hadn’t gotten her anywhere but bruised, battered and brokenhearted.
It was time to get off the crazy train and find a new plan. If only she knew what that plan might be.
A knock on the door preceded Nikki into the room. “Thought I heard the shower. How’re you feeling?”
“Better. The sleep helped.”
“Glad to hear it. Riley picked up your prescriptions.” Nikki put the bag on the bedside table. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine. I’m sure you have better things to do than babysit me on a rare day off.”
“I’m not just babysitting you. I’m also making dinner and doing some cleaning. It’s all good.”
“Get whatever you want to replace the furniture and carpet, and put it on my card. You still have it, right?” Nikki was making a “regular” salary these days compared to what she’d earned as Jordan’s manager, and she didn’t want her sister to have to pay for the damage.
“I do, but—”
“No buts. It would make me feel better to take care of that after everything you’ve done for me. You and Riley invested so much time and money in this place that we all enjoy. The least I can do is make this right.”
“If you insist, but no one is blaming you for the freak thing that happened when you were here alone. It wasn’t your fault. In fact, Riley is blaming himself for leaving the flue open and not burning a chimney-cleaning log at the end of the winter like he should have.”
“It’s not his fault.”
“Right, and it’s not yours either. It happened, and we should focus on how lucky we are that Mason saw the flames and got here as fast as he did.” Nikki’s voice caught, and she waved a hand in front of her face. “Sorry. I just can’t stop thinking how close I came to losing you.”