Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
I lasted exactly until the front door closed.
A smart girl would have let him go alone. I have never once been that smart about him.
So now I'm here, hanging back between the headstones like the world's worst spy, watching a man I'm not allowed to love kneel down and talk to a grave, and I can't hear the words, and I don't try to. Some things you don't get to have. I decided that in the dead middle of a night once, and I'm holding the line.
But after he's gone, after the gate clangs shut behind him, my feet carry me down the path anyway, left at the oak, to the fresh flowers lying too neat on the grass.
I don't read the name. I gave myself my word, and anyway my eyes are too blurry to be trusted.
I just crouch where he crouched. And because the day has cracked me clean open, I finally say what I've been carrying around unsaid for two whole years.
"I don't know who you were." My hand finds my chest, the heart that was never mine to start with, thudding away. "But somewhere out there, somebody died and gave me the rest of my life. And I never got to say it, so I'm saying it to you because you feel like a good place to say it." My voice breaks right down the middle. "Thank you. Thank you for all of it. I promise I won't waste a single beat."
The flowers say nothing.
The grass says nothing.
And the name on the stone, six inches from my blurry, careful, downturned eyes, goes right on saying Mary.
Chapter Eleven
I NEVER DID TELL HIM I followed him to the cemetery.
That's my secret now, folded up small and tucked in right next to all of his, and I've decided the very least I can do with it is make sure the man laughs out loud at least once a day, whether or not he has budgeted for it.
A smart girl would take the hint that a busy billionaire is not, in fact, sitting around waiting on bad deli coffee. But this smart girl (you know me by now) has decided his office is a place I keep happening to be.
I come after auditions, still wearing whoever I played at the reading, and I bring him the bad deli coffee he claims to hate and drinks anyway, and I sit on the edge of a desk fancier than everything I own put together and narrate my callbacks until something in his jaw lets go.
The staff catch on faster than he does.
"Morning," I tell the receptionist, who long ago stopped asking whether I have an appointment.
"He's in a mood," she warns me, waving me through with the tired fondness of a woman who has firmly picked a side. "Although it lifts about ten degrees the second you get off the elevator." She lowers her voice. "There's a pool going on when he finally cracks. My money's on you, honey."
Over by the good conference room, two people in serious suits are having a conversation they believe is private.
"—no, the girl. The actress. His girlfriend."
"I heard fiancée."
"I heard she moved in ages ago—"
And here comes Maximo around the corner with his briefcase, walking straight into the middle of the sentence like a man into a clean glass door.
"She's not my girlfriend." Fast. Too fast. The speed of it could strip paint off a wall.
The suits scatter. I slide off the reception desk, delighted to my bones, and my traitor heart picks that exact second to swell for a man who swears up and down he feels nothing at all.
"Wow." I press a hand over my chest. "That was quick, Mr. H."
I only break out Mr. H when I want to watch him twitch. He's Maximo the rest of the time now, has been since the day he handed me the name to keep. But one well-aimed Mr. H still gets me the exact twitch I'm after, and right on cue, there it is. "You rehearse that in the mirror?"
"Get in the car."
"'She is not my girlfriend,'" I mimic, staggering after him like the wounded party I am. "You didn't even let the man finish. He was building to fiancée. You stole his whole arc."
"Jassy."
"I'm just saying, for a guy who claims to feel absolutely nothing, you sure deny it—"
"I have a meeting."
"—fast," I finish, ducking into the elevator beside him, beaming at his reflection in the doors. "You deny it awfully fast."
He doesn't answer. But I watch his reflection while he watches the numbers, and I watch that muscle in his jaw do its guilty little dance. And I think about the smile in the kitchen. The shoulder he didn't move. The flowers laid too neat on a grave.
He denies it fast, my Maximo.
And I know something now that I didn't at the start. You only ever deny a thing fast when the slow, honest answer is the one that would cost you everything.