Chapter Thirty-Four #2
I nod, proverbially very much shitting myself. A week—that’s all I have, until my name is tied to Rhett’s forever. But there’s nothing I can do about it now.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “Listen, I have to…” I stumble to my feet and gesture out of the bathroom. I run down the hall and skid downstairs to the kitchen, where Norbert is drinking a green juice.
“Georgia!” he says happily. “Want some? Best way to keep up your strength.” He holds out the green juice to me, but I shake my head.
“Norbert,” I start. I try to arrange my face into the most pleasant smile imaginable. “Can I use your phone? Today is my mom’s birthday and I really want to call her.”
It’s a thin lie, but he smiles fondly at me.
“Well now, strictly speaking I shouldn’t, but …
Why not bend the rules for your dear mum?
” He reaches into a pocket of his cargo pants and hands the phone to me under the counter.
“I’ll give you some privacy then. You best go outside, away from all the…
” He gestures around to the cameras in the high corners of the room.
Even if we’re not mic’d, you never know who’s watching.
“And be back quick—don’t want Lainey to catch on. ”
“Right. Thanks so much,” I say. I take the phone and start to leave the kitchen, but he calls after me.
“Ah—the password’s one, two, three, four!”
I chuckle and dart outside to the patio, then run down the steps to the beach. Collapsing in the sand, I fold my legs under me and watch surfers pop in and out of the waves for a minute before swiping open Norbert’s phone and typing in Serena’s number.
She picks up before the first dial tone ends. “Hello?”
“Serena, it’s me,” I say.
“So, did you like the piece?”
I ignore this, gritting my teeth. “How could you do this?”
“You lied to me,” she says silkily. “When I saw that picture of you and Rhett in Nashville I almost couldn’t believe it.
But then it all made so much sense—what you said in Italy, about not publishing the stuff on him.
And I know you tipped Roland off. Why else would he suddenly go public?
You can’t expect me to give up the whole story—I had to go with the piece I still had. ”
“So you just decided to ruin my life?”
She laughs. “Seriously? I’m hardly ruining your life. You’re going to blow up after this.”
“Serena, just … just stop,” I say. I curl my toes in the sand and twist my hair around a finger, pulling tight. “I’m done. I’m done with this.”
“Seriously?” She scoffs, and it sounds so much like Addison that I wince.
How could I not have realized what she was really like in all the years of our friendship?
Maybe I’d been so caught up in her glow that I didn’t notice the shadows.
“You’re choosing Rhett—a guy—over everything you’ve worked so hard for? ”
“He’s not just a guy,” I snap, but my voice catches at the thought of Rhett. “Besides, that’s over now.” I’m reaching for a familiar comfort from her, one that I know now is not to be trusted. But something in me wants it all the same.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“What—of course I’m sure,” I say. Is she just trying to push the knife deeper?
“Because…” she trails off, her voice softening. I close my eyes in the silence, the sea spray brushing my eyelids. “I talked to him.”
My eyes fly open. “What?”
“I asked Rhett for a comment before I went live with the story.” I picture her flipping her dark hair over her shoulder, shrugging. “He told me to go to hell, so there was that.”
I laugh a little imagining it.
“He said to print all of it,” Serena continues. “But not the part about you.”
My mind flies back through everything that’s happened since I woke up in Italy to find the other side of the bed empty. It’s nearly impossible to believe that after everything, Rhett would still want to protect me, but my brain latches on to it and won’t let go.
“He said he didn’t want to get you involved in his mess,” Serena says. “He fought pretty hard, I’ll give him that. But how could I give up something that juicy?”
“So you’re about to expose me as some celebrity mistress?”
She pauses, and I can hear Presley mewing in the background. I can’t wait to see him when I’m home.
“It sounded like he really cares about you, G,” she sighs.
There’s no reason I should believe her, but it’s all I have—one last shred of hope for a relationship I thought was already dead.
“Okay,” I say, my voice hollow. “Thanks, I guess. And … What you said about me choosing Rhett over everything we worked for? That’s not true. I can have both.” She doesn’t need to know how I’m planning to do it, but she’ll find out soon enough.
“And how are you going to manage that?” she asks in a bored tone. I imagine all the things she’d say if I told her—how she’d try to threaten me out of publishing, how she’d point out that my credibility will be tainted if people find out about me and Rhett.
“I don’t know,” I lie as Presley mews even louder in the background. “All I know is that I won’t publish as Gracie again.”
That much, at least, is true.
“Okay, well call me when you’re home so I can drop off Presley.” She sounds a little sad, like she’s actually mourning our travesty of a friendship.
“Bye, Serena.” And it hurts, letting her go. Like a compartment in my heart is shutting forever.
“Bye, G,” she says quietly.
I hang up first and close my fist around the phone.
The people I really want to call are my parents.
I want to tell them that I’m sorry Lainey wouldn’t let them come, that I miss them.
But I don’t have much time. I walk slowly back up the cliff to the mansion and let myself back inside, where I find Norbert in the kitchen, now making a smoothie.
“How about some of this?” He holds out the blender, but I shake my head, setting his phone on the counter.
“Where’s Rhett? I—” I stop, realizing I have no lies prepared. “I have to talk to him.”
“He just left, lassie,” Norbert says. “He’s performing downtown tonight. At some club—I think it’s called the Orange Lizard?”
“The Pink Iguana?”
Norbert points at me. “That’s the one.” He gives me a wave and leaves the kitchen with his smoothie.
As soon as he’s gone, I rush upstairs and make sure Monica isn’t in the bedroom before rifling through my suitcase and pulling out my best makeshift concert outfit: those same jeans from last year and a paisley-patterned tube top.
If what Serena said is true, if there’s any hope of salvaging what we have, I have to talk to Rhett.
I just hope I’m not too late.