Chapter Nine
Nine
He seemed subdued after their conversation in the restaurant.
Lost in even deeper thought than he had been over the singing.
In fact, he didn’t even say anything about her taking a picture of the sunset lowering over the endless trees they were headed toward.
He heard her make a little sound over it, and said nothing.
And nothing about the hotel she had chosen for their first overnight stay.
No complaining about the bright, modern decor.
No rolling his eyes over the chipper person in reception. No grumbling over his too-fancy room.
He just accepted everything, in this silently brooding sort of way.
But she hadn’t the faintest clue why. It almost made her want to poke at him, to get some kind of reaction. Rip off the Band-Aid on his emotional damage before it got any worse. Allow it to continue and eventually he’d explode, and she simply couldn’t afford that.
Tomorrow was the big day.
His first public appearance of the tour.
Things needed to get off on the right foot. And especially with rumors swirling on social media that she was going to be there. His mystery woman, his lady love, his special someone. The muse, some of them referred to her as; half of them excited over the idea, half of them skeptical.
I heard it’s just a stunt, she read some variation of, about ten thousand times.
Which wouldn’t have usually worried her, considering even stunts had their value.
All you needed to do was seed enough chatter, enough doubt, enough promise of something.
But at the same time, it was an awfully large hole he’d dug for himself, telling everyone that he thought love was a joke for babies.
And he was never going to be great at selling anything else.
He couldn’t even manage a convincing goodnight to her.
He stopped just before he went into the room adjacent to hers, a key card poised to swipe, hand about to push, and caught her eye. And just as she was about to say the word he cut in. “Well then,” he said, with one brusque nod. Before he disappeared inside.
He was really something.
And he was even more of that same something, in the morning.
She knocked on his door and he didn’t answer, even though she knew he had to be up.
In college he had risen so consistently early people suspected he never slept at all.
Yet still, he made her try again, and again.
She was honestly starting to wonder if he’d died from being talked to, and even more so when she realized the door wasn’t locked.
One last firm rap on the wood and it just swung open a little.
It made her heart stutter in her chest in a way she didn’t like.
She strode into the room just to shut it up. Though it was the sound of the shower and him rattling around in there that really did it, and she knew it. He was alive, and now she was just standing in his room. His still pin-neat room, as if nobody had even been here at all.
The only sign was his laptop, open on the dresser right next to her.
Slightly turned her way, too, like it was just waiting for her to look at it.
And she did want to, if she was being honest. Beck had only texted her the night before asking if there were any signs Miller was writing.
Apparently, his boss was deeply concerned that even if they fixed this massive clusterfuck, there were no books on the horizon.
That Miller had given up.
And if what was on the screen was any indication, they were right.
The man couldn’t even seem to manage a dedication now.
His first, in the book If I Was Enough, had contained the words I dwell in the dimmest hallways of my haunted soul without her.
But this one, whatever it was going to be, just said, I can’t I can’t I can’t, under the heading.
After which she couldn’t help scrolling.
Just a little. Just to see what came beneath chapter one.
And this was what she got:
It was Wednesday. A cold Wednesday. A cold rainy Wednesday.
That was when he went grocery shopping. He bought bread.
Plain bread. Then he went home. He ate the plain bread.
He went for a run. Everything was normal and fine and fuck fuck fuck what the fuck am I doing help me I don’t know how to do this anymore I don’t want to do this anymore.
“Shit,” she whispered under her breath. And it was good she did do it under her breath, too, because that was the moment the shower thunked off.
In fact, for a whole and horrible second, she thought he might have heard her anyway.
He didn’t make another sound, after killing the water, for what felt like an age.
But then, blessedly, there was the rustle of a towel and the slap of skin on tiles, and here was her chance.
She fled before he could find her here, unearthing any further evidence of his disenchantment.
Though the evidence was even greater once she found him in the lobby.
He hadn’t dressed smartly, like she’d suggested.
He was in the same uniform he had been wearing since that day she had climbed the fence at his survivalist compound in the woods.
Worn denim shirt, worn jeans, worn boots.
Tartan jacket, with fleece innards and about a thousand pockets.
Hair a tousled, tangled, ragged mess, stubble and sort-of beard and mustache even more grizzled than usual.
He honestly looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, even though she knew he hadn’t.
And he didn’t say hello, either. He just stayed exactly as he was, body shoved deep into a seat, paper folded over to the story he wanted to read.
It wasn’t even a decent paper, either. It was just some weird local sort of thing, probably full of stories about people found with a thousand raccoons living in their basement.
But of course it meant he didn’t have to speak.
Or even really acknowledge her when she went over their schedule for the day. She told him what his fake beloved was going to do, based on everything Daisy had stressed to her. And he just shrugged. “Fine,” he said at the end of her carefully prepared speech.
But he didn’t look fine once they got to the makeshift greenroom in the town’s convention center—plastic-covered couches, musty smell, a sad table loaded with jugs of orange juice and some wilting sandwiches—and suddenly there she was.
The pretend love of his life.
All glowing and golden, like some upgraded version of Daisy. Hair thicker and more lustrous, clothes slicker and more stylish, smile coated in glossy red and so perfect it made Daisy want to press her Vaseline-glazed lips together.
And of course she was already acting the part to perfection.
She called him darling on seeing him. Pulled him directly into an embrace, of the sort that Daisy had warned him would happen.
She had told him that Louisa was going to act the part from moment one, in case anyone was watching too carefully.
And he had agreed, definitively. She had even asked him twice, to make sure.
Yet nobody would have ever known it.
He seemed to go completely rigid the moment she made contact. As if she’d stabbed him in the gut, instead of putting her arms around him. And even after he’d managed to get ahold of himself, he didn’t seem able to reciprocate. In fact, it looked like he didn’t even know what reciprocation was.
His arms stood out stiffly from under hers, like a human forklift.
As if he was about to lift her body and deposit it onto a warehouse pallet.
Then he seemed to realize that was weird, and sort of curled his hands in the rough direction of her back.
But for some ungodly reason, they couldn’t seem to make contact.
They just hovered there, five inches away.
Two bizarre claws, vaguely groping the air.
If the events coordinator—Lesley with a Y, she had informed them both as she swept them through a very glassy reception area to some very functional hallways—had been able to see what she could, it would have been curtains, unquestionably.
And she could tell by his eyes that he knew it.
They were filled with a sort of furious panic—aimed at her, and only her, over the shoulder of the woman he was supposed to be in love with.
Then, even more startling, he mouthed two words very distinctly. Help me. Like he hadn’t agreed. Like he hadn’t told her he could do it. You promised me it wouldn’t be a big deal, she thought at him, but it was too late for that now.
The only way out was through.
So she bustled up to them, and did her best to smooth things over.
“Oh, these two lovebirds,” she said, as she oh-so-subtly separated everybody. And it worked, too. Lesley beamed, revealing lipstick on her teeth, and Louisa beamed back, revealing nothing but perfect blinding whiteness, and Miller hid his horror behind a drink he suddenly needed.
But even that wasn’t enough.
Because about ten minutes before he was due to go onstage—just after shaking the hand of the moderator of his talk, a cutie patootie called Joan something or other in a T-shirt with a quote from one of his books across the front—he said he needed the bathroom.
And she knew exactly what needing the bathroom meant.
It was the reason she followed him five seconds after he had fled. The reason he went left, when he was supposed to go right. The reason he stopped in the middle of cutting across the stage and turned to her as she barreled toward him, then held up his hands like someone under arrest.
Not guilty, your honor, she could almost hear him saying.
But he was guilty, and not just of wandering off.