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 get the call standing in the diner in my apron.
I've booked the lead.
And I stand there in the middle of the lunch rush, phone shaking in my hand, the best news of my whole scrappy life pouring straight into my ear, and I do what I've done my whole life, the one reflex nobody ever managed to train out of me. When something wonderful happens, you call the person you love. So I reach for my phone to call the one person on earth I want to tell.
Then I remember I don't get to. That I never really got to. That the whole time I lived in his beautiful silent home I was only ever borrowing him, same as I'm borrowing everything else that beats and breathes in me. So I put the phone back in my apron pocket, and I go take table nine their fries, and I let the best day of my whole career be completely, perfectly, and entirely alone.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THE MOMENT HER NAME went onto a call sheet, Maximo found her.
That was the cruelty of it, the private joke the universe told at his expense. She had hidden herself perfectly, right up until she started to do the one thing she'd been put on the earth to do, and the instant she stepped into a spotlight the man who had lost her could see her again, from very far away, behind glass, the only place he had any right to stand now.
He didn't go to her.
He had thrown away the right to walk up to her and say her name, and he knew it to the bone, so he took the only road still open to a man like him. He moved the whole world for her from behind it, out of her sight, where his help couldn't touch her and neither could he.
The small indie with no money suddenly had money, routed through three companies that carried his name nowhere. A distribution deal that should have died in a drawer got a second reader who owed someone a favor. A festival slot opened where none had been. He made calls that ended and keep me out of it entirely, and he watched the machinery turn, and he made very sure that not one dollar of it could ever be traced back to the man she'd run three thousand miles to be free of.
She would think it was luck. He needed her to think it was luck. If she ever once suspected his hand in any of it she'd walk away from the whole thing to spite him, and she would be right to, and he would deserve the walking-away.
So he gave her the future and kept his fingerprints off it, the same way he'd given her the best cardiologist in the country and the quiet security detail and the safe corner of every room she'd ever stood in, unseen, unthanked, exactly as he had earned. It was the only way he was allowed to love her now. From the far side of a country, in the dark, spending a fortune she'd never know about on a life he would never get to be in. She was forbidden to him still, too young and carrying his sister's heart, and losing her had not changed either count. None of it ever once slowed the wanting.
It wasn't enough. He knew to the marrow that it wasn't enough. A man could buy a girl the entire sky and still have no standing to walk out under it beside her.
But it was the last language he had left that wouldn't hurt her, so he spoke it, night after night, fluently, into the silence of a city she didn't live in anymore. Be happy. Be well. Be everything, and never once know it was me. And he called that loving her because it was the closest thing to it a coward had left himself.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THERE WAS A LETTER.
Maximo had carried it, sealed, for two years, moving it from drawer to drawer the way you move a thing you can't throw away and can't bear to face. Mary had written it in the loopy careless hand she never grew out of, and left it where he'd be sure to find it because she was the kind of girl who planned for a dramatic exit she never once truly believed would come. Across the front she'd put three words that had kept him from opening it every single day since.
Max. Just in case.
Just in case. She'd written it light, like a joke, and he still hadn't read it because reading it meant she was really gone, and the sealed envelope was the last place on earth she was still a little bit alive.
She hadn't been his by blood. His father had married her mother the year Maximo turned twenty-four, a grown man with his own company and no use for a family, and a gap-toothed nine-year-old with a crooked-star necklace and no fear of him whatsoever had walked into his life and decided, without consulting him, that he was hers to boss. He let her. He spent every year since being exactly the brother she'd drafted him to be, the way you become the thing someone that certain has already decided you are. Not one drop of shared blood between them, and she'd been more his family than anyone who could claim it. That was the part nobody who reached for the word stepsister ever understood. He had chosen her. Of every person alive, she was the one he'd picked to keep.