Chapter Twenty-Three #3
Freshly showered, hair in a soft hotel towel, body swaddled in a fluffy robe, I curled up on Brooks’s bed.
Skye had had one of those days when she needed to rehash every single detail afterward, and her father was all ears.
Her muffled voice still rang from the other end of the hotel suite by the time I’d made it through my entire hair-wash routine and unlocked my phone.
Shopping with Skye and burning a minuscule hole in her dad’s credit card had taken my mind off it all afternoon, but as I opened my socials and emails, I already dreaded the fallout from our run-in at the gazebo.
Except…nothing.
Well, not nothing. Cassie had followed me and sent a message so long, my eyes glossed over at first sight. I’d have to read that another day. And an email waited for me in my official inbox, the one I only used for music things, not newsletters and giveaways.
I blinked at the name. Jackie Armstrong was one of the best music journalists in the country. I didn’t even check the subject line before opening. I just wanted to check the email address. It wasn’t some scammy-looking one with tons of numbers. Just her name and the URL of her podcast.
“You ran into paparazzi?” Brooks asked, voice low, quietly shutting the door behind him.
“Just one paparazzo, technically.” I clicked the phone screen off and sat up.
“Where?”
“At the gazebo in the town center.”
“Are you okay?” He sat down on my side of the bed, hands wrapping around my ankles. “Skye said she didn’t see much, just that you told her to hide behind a newspaper and handled it.”
“I’m rattled,” I admitted. “It’s kind of weird. Sheila Benson is one of the people who pushed me over the edge the night I texted you, and today she acted as if nothing was wrong. She looked after Skye when I confronted the guy and offered us a ride home after.”
“Hold on, hold on. You confronted him?” Brooks’s shoulders stiffened.
I sighed and pressed the heels of my hands over my eyes.
I didn’t want to relive this whole afternoon right now but if he didn’t hear it from me, he’d know about it before breakfast through the town’s gossip mill.
I’d much rather he heard my account, because it wasn’t just about some photographer chasing a quick paycheck and harassing us in public.
It was yet another man who thought he could get away with invading my privacy, my personal space.
“Fuck.” Brooks rubbed his chest furiously after I was done relaying the events of the afternoon. “Are you sure nobody filmed it?”
“Not completely, but as sure as I can be. It was like they walled me off from curious onlookers.”
“While being curious onlookers with front seats themselves.”
“Brooks. I don’t think—”
“No, you didn’t, did you?”
“Excuse me?”
“I spent the entire day poring over every single thing I could say or do wrong in the courtroom, Adriana, and now I have to deal with this? Since when do you get violent? In front of my daughter? How am I supposed to explain that to a judge?”
I flinched at the use of my full name. “You don’t have to deal with anything, Brooks.
” I climbed off the bed and whipped the towel off my hair.
I dumped it on the ground alongside the bathrobe, and I grabbed my skirt and crop top from earlier and jumped into them commando.
“In case you stopped listening halfway through, he was literally escorted off by the police.”
“Do you think he cares? You hurt his ego and fucked up his camera. That man’s not going to leave you alone.”
“Well, he didn’t leave me alone today either, yelling at me across the town square that he’s ready to follow me all day.”
Brooks flinched. “I get it, that sucks, but you can’t—”
“What do you get?”
“The harassment.”
“Yeah? Has anyone ever made you feel unsafe to the point where you considered that maybe, just maybe, giving into their pandering would be easier than dealing with the alternative?”
He stayed quiet.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” I scoffed. “He was screaming those things in front of Skye. Your twelve-year-old daughter was witnessing me, a figure of trust and respect in her life, getting harassed in public. The last fucking thing I’m going to do is sit down and take it and teach her that this kind of behavior is in any way acceptable. ”
“Of course it isn’t, but that hardly matters when she’s going to get shipped off to Switzerland.”
“Switzerland doesn’t have a coast,” Skye mumbled. Her face was barely in the room, only her nose and chin poked through a slim gap between door and frame. “So technically, you can’t ship me off to Switzerland. You would have to fly or drive me.”
I pulled the door open, anger deflating from my chest at the sight of her big eyes watering and her hands kneading the hem of her blanket hoodie. I opened my arms for her, and she collapsed against my side, hooking her hands into my top and fumbling with its hem.
“Nobody is sending you to Switzerland, honey,” I said.
“Then why did you say that?” She levelled Brooks with an accusatory glare.
“I guess now’s as good a time as any. We have to talk through it before the hearing.
” He stood but awkwardly hovered two feet away from us, arms raised as if he wanted to join in on our hug but wasn’t sure how to.
“Look, your grandparents love you very much, and they loved your mom very much. They have requested to get custody of you. That means they want to take over raising you. I would still be your dad, okay? They just think they can do a better job raising a kid because they’ve done it before, and they found this boarding school in Switzerland—”
“I don’t want that,” Skye immediately jumped in.
“I know, honey,” I said and hugged her against my side, “that’s why your dad has been working so much lately. He needs to prove that he can raise you.”
“But you’re already doing that. Why do you need to prove it?”
“Why don’t we order room service, and we can talk you through the whole thing bit by bit, and you can ask all your questions over dinner? Sound good?”
Skye nodded and I gently loosened her hug from my hips.
“I think I’m going to go home, actually.
I’ll let the two of you talk about this in peace.
” Before I knew what I was doing, I leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to the top of Skye’s head.
Not only had that been way more familiar than I had meant to be—but it was also a display of affection that I had taken on from Brooks. He was rubbing off on me.
Clearly, however, I hadn’t been rubbing off on him. Not in the ways that mattered.
“Adriana, you don’t have to go,” Brooks said. The words sounded wrong. Not just because he’d used my full name, but the way he’d said it. Voice lower. Slightly heavier twang. Stage voice. He was pretending. He didn’t want me here.
Brooks was moving heaven and earth to protect his little family—but I wasn’t part of that.
“Don’t worry, I know my place,” I said and turned.
The second my car door fell shut behind me, the sobs started quivering from my lungs. Every split second of the last few hours played on loop behind closed lids. The worst part was that the paparazzo wasn’t even the one who’d caused the gut-wrenching pain today. Brooks was.