Chapter Thirty
The buzz of my phone on the nightstand rattled me awake.
Groggy and dazed, I flipped it over.
The number twenty-seven next to Maggie’s name forced me up.
“What the fuck?” I whispered.
A slew of other notifications decorated the screen, but I ignored those, scrambling to open Maggie’s texts.
Maggie:
Scarlett Carson. Call me immediately.
Maggie:
Seriously. Call me.
Maggie:
If I don’t hear from you soon, I’m getting my ass in my car and driving to Nashville.
I didn’t finish reading her texts. Instead, I peered to the other side of the bed where Stetson lay peacefully sleeping, one arm rested above his head, the other reached out toward me. I snuck out of the bed and into the living room before dialing her number.
“What in god’s name is going on? Are you okay?” I asked, hearing the phone click on the other end.
“Me!” she shouted, forcing me to pull the phone away from my ear and ultimately putting her on speaker at a low volume. I didn’t want to wake Stetson, and I surely didn’t need him hearing whatever crazy shit Maggie was about to share. “Did you not see my text?” she asked, her voice breathy.
“Which one? You only sent about a hundred of them.”
“Okay, so that’s a no. Go look at the article I sent you.”
“Article?”
My fingers shuffled across my screen until I saw the link she’d sent.
STETSON WALKER HAS A NEW LEADING LADY AND SHE HAS SECRETS
Everything blurred.
I blinked, trying to force the words staring back at me to change, to morph into something else. The sinking feeling made me sure that I was going to fall straight through the floor.
My fingers were shaky as they scrolled. Right under the obnoxiously large text was a photo of me backstage, hidden—although not enough—behind a curtain and another one of us kissing after the show.
I wasn’t trying to hide, but I also wasn’t trying to be seen.
What the fuck.
“Maggie…” My voice trailed off as I started to read the venom-laced words.
“Have you read it?”
“Reading it now,” I replied.
Her silence scared me the most.
I tried to read, but really I ended up only skimming because I knew exactly what I was looking for.
Adoption.
There it was. The story of how seventeen-year-old me put a baby up for adoption. They’d used my story to paint a picture that couldn’t be further from the truth. They used words like selfish, irresponsible, and my favorite: failed bride looking for her next groom.
“How did they—” Tears welled in my eyes, building quickly before spilling over in a constant stream.
“I don’t know, Scar. But they did. And they dug until they found exactly what they were looking for. I’m guessing Stetson has no idea about any of this.”
“No,” I snapped. “And Maggie, you don’t even know how bad this is.
Especially after last night and with everything he’s told me over the last couple of weeks…
And the new album and all the good shit he’s trying to do.
He can’t have this kind of negative publicity.
It’s exactly the shit he’s trying to move on from. ” I shuddered. “Shit.”
“Last night? What happened last night?” she asked.
Ruby’s innocent face flashed into view.
“I… I don’t have time to get into it right now,” I rushed out as my eyes scoped out the apartment, taking a mental note of all my stuff.
“I need to pack up my shit and get out of here before Stetson wakes up. I’ve gotta figure out what I’m going to do, but I can’t do that here. I’ll call you when I get home.”
“Okay. Be safe, Scar. I love you. We’ll figure this out.”
“Love you too,” I said, quickly clicking off my phone.
I dropped my head into my hands, sinking to the floor with my back pushed against the wall. The tears hadn’t stopped. I was so angry. Angry at the low life who wrote this, angry at anyone who gave them information, but mostly angry at myself for having this secret in the first place.
I knew everyone kept telling me I deserved happiness, but how could that be true when every time I thought I’d been given the opportunity to be happy, life kept proving me wrong?
My shit was everywhere, but I did my best to grab it all and get the hell out of dodge. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I couldn’t face Stetson.
Not now.
Fortunately, Stetson had scheduled the plane to take me back home around noon, so when I showed up at the airport and got out of my Uber a little past ten, Harry was already there.
“Hey, Harry, would you mind leaving a bit earlier than scheduled? Something came up and I need to get back to Quincey Falls.” My heart pounded as I waited for his response, knowing that if we delayed this too long, Stetson was bound to show up.
“Um, sure. Of course, Ms. Carson. Let me just finish getting the plane ready and we can be out of here in about ten minutes,” he responded.
Thank god.
“Perfect, thank you.”
The flight was short, and thankfully so, because the uneasiness I had sloshing around my stomach almost forced me to run to the bathroom.
By the time I got home and parked my car outside of my apartment, Maggie’s old Bronco was already stationed in the spot next to mine.
My head fell to the steering wheel. “What a fucking mess.”
I trudged up the stairs and rounded the corner to see Maggie standing with my door wide open, waiting for me. I stopped, dropping my bags and immediately finding myself in the comfort of her arms, tears barreling down my face.
“This absolutely sucks,” I said, pushing my face into her shoulder.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it’s about to get worse before it gets better…”
“What do you mean?” I asked, pulling myself from her grasp.
“I mean that I got ahold of the reporter whose name was on the article, and I know who told them about the adoption.”
“Who?”
“Delilah,” she said.
Her name permanently residing around us.
Maggie continued. “He told me that she didn’t know much, only that you gave up a baby for adoption when you were seventeen. But that was clearly enough for him to run with it.”
My mind wandered back to the night at the bar when I put Delilah in her place, before that, she’d made some one-off comment about me keeping secrets but at the time I thought she was talking about Stetson.
Obviously, I was wrong.
No wonder she’s taking a month-long vacation. She’d lit a match and planned to be somewhere else to watch it burn.
“I’m not even surprised. She’s the fucking worst and eventually I’ll deal with her, but I’m ultimately the one to blame and now everything is a mess, Maggie.
I just want to crawl into bed and never get out,” I said in between sniffles.
“Last night, everything felt too good to be true, and I should’ve known it was.
I told you I didn’t deserve this kind of happiness and I was right.
Now I have a massive shit storm to deal with, and this time it doesn’t just affect me.
It affects Stetson too.” The sudden pang of remorse almost took me out as soon as his name left my mouth.
Maggie wrapped her arms around me. “It’s okay, Scar. We’ll figure this out. We always do.”