by Cara Colter
But now he took it, his features set in grim lines. He held up a finger to her, answered and went out the door of her apartment.
He came back in seconds later. “I’m sorry,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve got an emergency. I have to leave.”
“An emergency?” she whispered, feeling shattered by her own longing, by the fact what was happening between them had not been so sacred that the phone could be ignored.
“An urgent family matter.”
She stared at him, trying to figure out the incongruity of using a quack tone for an emergency. And yet, there was no doubting the gravity of the situation. His face, so familiar to her, was completely closed, set in the ferocious, impenetrable lines of a warrior called to action.
“What family?” she stuttered.
“My mother.”
She tried to absorb that. All this time together, and except for the odd reference to a bad childhood, she had not even been aware his mother was still alive. In fact, the afternoon that he had arrived at her apartment shortly after the kitchen fire, she was positive he had implied his mother was deceased. She felt the shock of him blocking that part of his life from her.
“I have to go.”
But her sense of loss and recrimination needed to be put aside for the time being. He looked so shattered. He looked as if, whatever this was, he should not be alone with it.
“I’m coming with you.”
He started to shake his head, but she could see he was rattled, that he both wanted her support and didn’t. She scrambled off the counter and went and changed quickly, her evening as a princess as over as if she was Cinderella, midnight had come and she had turned back into the ordinary girl she really was.
His steps were long and urgent as he shepherded Bree outside. In their rush to get into her apartment, he had forgotten to dismiss the limo, and it idled at the curb waiting for him. Now, they got in and he gave his own address. There they switched to one of his own cars, ignoring the soulful sounds of Beau, from inside the house, crying that he knew they were home.
The car Brand chose from his six-bay garage was an Italian four-door Maserati, but it might as well have been a pumpkin for how the magic had drained from the evening. He was silent and grim, barely acknowledging her as he scrolled through his phone, looking something up with urgency.
And then they were driving through the seediest part of Vancouver, streets lined with dilapidated buildings with people huddled in the doorways.
He stopped in front of one. It was a no-parking zone, but he ignored that. A sandwich board announced Tonight and Tonight Only, Elvis Impersonations.
He was storming through the door, Bree hard on his heels.
The room was dark, and had only a smattering of people sitting at tables. It smelled bad, of smoke and spilled beer.
The stage was illuminated, though, and an Elvis gyrated across it, belting out “Hound Dog.”
He did remind Bree of that horrible man she had met on e-Us.
She looked at Brand, arms folded across his chest, as he scanned the tables. The performance, the club and the Elvis impersonators sitting around waiting for their turns might have been funny in an absurd way, particularly coming from the ball to this, but it was not funny. Bree glanced at Brand’s face. She was not sure she had ever seen such terrible torment in one person’s expression before in her life.
He spotted something and moved across the dark room. Bree, not sure what to do, or what exactly was going on, followed.
Brand slid into a chair at a table occupied by a lovely woman with gray hair. She turned and smiled at him, put her arm on his sleeve, then turned back to the music, rapt. Brand, though he hardly seemed to know Bree was there, pulled out the chair beside him and nodded at it. Bree took it.
The song ended with blessed abruptness, as if someone, having suffered quite enough, had pulled the plug on the karaoke machine.
“I’m glad you called me, Mom,” Brand said quietly into the sudden silence.
Mom.
“I was trying to get up my nerve to go on,” his mother said, and then, her voice sad, she added, “But it’s not me anymore, is it?”
“Maybe not,” he said gently.
“But don’t throw out my posters just yet!”
Her posters. All this time, Brand could have told Bree, but nothing. Not a single word, even though there had been opportunities.
“Hello,” his mother said softly, noticing Bree. “I’m Diana. I used to do a great Elvis impression.”
Almost shyly she took a bag out from under the table and spilled its contents out for Bree to see. She fingered the white, metal-studded fabric almost lovingly.
“I was good, wasn’t I, Brand?” she asked, her tone wistful.
“Yeah, Mom,” he said. “You were good.”
Bree’s mind felt tumultuous as snippets of conversations came back to her. Somehow I didn’t figure you for an Elvis kind of guy. What’s your favorite Elvis song? Must I pick only one? Impossible.
“Bree,” Brand said, his flinty eyes intent on her face, “meet my mother.”
Bree looked to him, and then to the woman. She extended her hand. “Mrs. Wallace?” she said uncertainly. “My pleasure. Bree Evans.”
“Diana.”
Lively eyes, dark like his, scanned her face, a certain shrewdness in them. “I suppose I should go home now?”
“I think that’s a good idea, Mom.”
They left and he put his mother in the front seat, and Bree took the back. They drove through the city in complete silence to a lovely building, which, even in all its loveliness, was clearly some sort of institution.
“I’ll call you a cab,” Brand said grimly.
“I’ll wait,” Bree said, just as grimly.
He looked as if he might argue, but his mother got out of the car, and looked as if she might be considering going anywhere but in. The weariness on his face was heartbreaking, and he just lifted a shoulder, got out, put his hand on his mother’s shoulder and guided her to the main door.
It was nearly an hour before he came out.
His face was gray with exhaustion. He slid into the seat beside her.
“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said. “She was quite agitated. I stayed with her for a while until she settled. It’s an assisted-living place, not a jail. My mother’s bipolar, with schizophrenic tendencies.”
He sounded like a doctor, clinical, rhyming off facts.
“The medication takes away her upswing, and the voices. She misses both. She can be very good at hiding the fact she isn’t taking her medication. I probably should have picked up on it.”
Bree heard self-recrimination there. He’d been too involved with her. It had distracted him.
“I’ll drive you home now. There was no need for you to wait.” They drove away.
She knew he had no intention of coming in, that the moment was gone, possibly forever.
She knew he was tired. But it still had to be said. “You don’t think we have things to discuss?”
“Must we?”
“Yes. Why didn’t you tell me, Brand? Why didn’t you trust me with this?”
He was silent. They pulled up in front of her building. He nodded to the door, as if he expected her just to get out!
“You let me believe your mother was dead.”
He looked truly astonished by that. “What?”
“That day at my apartment, when we were drinking the cheap wine, you said she would have considered it champagne. Would have. Past tense.”
“Because she doesn’t drink anymore, not because she’s dead!”
“All this time you could have said something. Anything. That day in the kayak, I asked you about you and Elvis, I said I got the impression you didn’t like Elvis that much. Some might say a perfect segue for you to
tell me about your mom. But no. Nothing. Not a word.”
“Pardon me for not revealing all my secrets to you.” His voice was cold.
“But I revealed all mine to you, Brand,” she reminded him softly. “I told you about my baby. I shared my deepest loss with you. I trusted you with it.”
She thought this reminder of her own vulnerability would soften him, but his silence was cold. It made her more grimly determined to have her say.
“It’s not that your mother is ill that hurts,” she told him. Her tone was quiet, but she was not sure she had ever felt so angry. “It’s that you didn’t trust me to do the right thing with it. To be the right person.”
Again, he was silent for a long time, and when he turned to her, her heart stopped beating, and her breath stopped the steady rise and fall of life. What she saw in his eyes was an unfathomable coldness. Cruelty.
She saw everything had changed. She saw he would not see her again.
“No,” he said harshly, “I didn’t trust you with it. Goodbye, Bree.”
Stunned, she got out of the car. In a moment of fury, she slammed the door so hard his car rocked. Still, he did not squeal away. She wished he would have. Instead, he waited to make sure she got to the door. She kept her shoulders straight, her spine proud, as she put in her door code. It was as he drove away that she dissolved, and let the first tears fall.
All this time, she realized, she had given more and more and more trust to him.
And he had given her none in return. He had not even trusted her to be understanding about his mother’s fragile, broken condition.
Had he not known her at all?
“All men are rotten,” she decided furiously. “All of them!”
* * *
Brand drove away after he saw Bree was safely inside her building. He felt sick for what he had just said to her, that he didn’t trust her with it.
The truth was, he had not trusted himself with it.
He had allowed himself to be distracted from the truth of his life, to pretend that he could have what other people had.
He had allowed that dangerous thing called hope to creep into his world.
This is what Brand had managed to avoid facing after the enchantment of the last month—that he brought a long and horrible history with him, running down his line from two sides. A selfish man who had such a cold heart he had abandoned his wife and, worse, his son.
And then his mother, his poor long-suffering mother, who would sometimes get better for long periods of time, only to fall back into her delusions, an intensifying of her obsession with Elvis usually providing the first red flag that she had abandoned her medication, that she missed the “ups” and missed the “voices.”
But this time, he hadn’t noticed. He’d been too busy. Selfish and cold, just like his father.
This is what he knew for sure.
He loved Bree Evans with a love that nearly took his breath away. He loved how funny she was and how brave. He loved how she made the most ordinary of things shine as if they were lit from within. He loved the wonder in her face when he invited her into a world where money could buy anything, and her equal wonder over a dog romping joyously through a mud puddle. He loved her loyalty and her creativity and how smart and how inventive she was. He loved how she had hope.
This is what he’d forgotten that day he had decided that she could not hurt him. This is what he had so selfishly put aside: that he could hurt her. That’s what he had forgotten in that totally self-centered moment of wanting what he had seen shining in her.
All the things he had never had: a safe harbor, future children laughing.
She deserved those things. The truth was this: both conditions his mother had could be inherited. If he had either, they would have shown up by now. But that did not make his children safe.
Is that what his father had thought, when he walked away and never come back? That he could barely deal with one person with mental-health issues? What if his son had those issues, too?
Brand could not bear it if he was the one who crushed in Bree, for all time, those things that mattered so much to her. How could he create the kind of home she’d enjoyed as a child? How would he learn those skills when he had never experienced the security and stability of a good home? Nothing in living in a car, and stealing creamers from fast-food restaurants, and walking in the door, listening to see what Elvis song his mother had on so he could judge her mood, had prepared him for the kind of life Bree desired so desperately and deserved so richly.
Really, the most loving thing he could ever do for her?
He had just done it.
He had said goodbye. Not just for tonight. Forever. It had felt as if he was ripping his own heart out saying that to her, keeping his face cold and cruel in the light of her hurt and her wanting and her hope. Especially her hope.
As he drove away through the rain-filled night, it felt as if he had entered a pit of impenetrable blackness such as he had never known before, and in a way he welcomed it, like a man facing his absolute reality and coming home to the place he’d always known that he belonged.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
BREE WOKE UP the morning after the ball knowing exactly how Cinderella had felt. She had almost had it all. And then, at the ring of a clock at midnight—or the quack of a phone, as the case might be—it had been snatched away from her. She was lying in her bed waiting for that familiar despair to creep over her, to steal her breath and her strength and her desire to get up.
Instead, as she was lying there, scanning her feelings, she was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t feel despair at all. She felt really, really angry.
“All men are rotten,” she repeated to herself. She liked it. It would be her new mantra!
She got up and looked in the mirror in her bathroom. Her eyes were ringed with black from last night’s cry, but as she washed up, she was aware she was done crying, and that she had something very important to do.
She dressed in slim-fitting jeans and a plain cotton blouse, and then threw her beautiful new cloak over top. She filled up Oliver’s water and food dishes, then she put on sneakers to drive, but put her red stilettos in the backseat.
And then she drove. She thought she would have second thoughts on the long drive, lose her courage or her nerve, but neither happened. If anything, her confidence grew. She had a sense that this was something she should have done a long, long time ago.
She drove through the familiar campus. It was summer session, but there was still lots of life. She noticed the girls, in particular, looking so carefree, so filled with hope for their futures.
She had been that girl once. She had allowed Paul Weston to steal that from her. But here was the part that filled her with shame: had her silence allowed him to steal it from other young women, as well?
The new her parked in the spot reserved for visiting VIPs, and she changed shoes. The new Bree walked right by the president of the university’s stammering secretary, knocked briefly on his door and went in.
He looked up, surprised, and she let the door swing shut behind her.
Twenty minutes later, with assurances of a complete investigation, she strode across the campus in her heels. She felt like a warrior: she could feel the absolute confidence shimmering around her, like a crackle of electricity in the air before a coming storm.
Men stopped and stared at her as if she was the most ravishing woman they had ever seen. Some of them ventured a smile. Women seemed to know she was on a mission for all of them, because they smiled at her as though they recognized her, or recognized something in her that they liked.
She didn’t even hesitate at the familiar steps of the culinary arts building. The heels did not even slow her down.
She went in and stopped by the lecture hall.
And there he was. She could see him through the small rectangular
glass frame that looked in to the hall.
He was dressed as he always had been: a tweedy jacket and rumpled pants. Today he was sporting an ascot. She could clearly see he was wearing the costume of a distracted, artsy college professor.
She took a deep breath and opened the door. All eyes were on her as she went down the sloping aisle, past the rows of theater-style seats, up the three stairs to the raised dais he stood on.
“Paul, do you remember me?” she asked, her voice loud and clear.
His eyes wide, the man who had haunted her nightmares looked at her. His mouth opened, then closed, opened again.
“Bree,” he said, “I’m in the middle of—”
She saw what she had never seen as his eyes shifted away from hers. The weakness and the cowardice, a man who had used his position and power to feed his own sick needs.
“I don’t care what you’re in the middle of,” she said, and she turned to face his students. She took a deep breath, and began.
“I want to tell you about a young girl, who sat right where you are sitting now,” she said. There was no hesitation and no fear. “Her father had just died.”
“Bree.” His voice was plaintive.
“Paul, sit down and shut up.”
He stared at her. He scuttled over to a chair and sat down.
She finished her story. For a moment, there was shocked silence. For a moment, she wondered if she had done the right thing. And then one lone, brave young woman stood. Bree could see tears running down her face. She began to clap. And then another rose, and another. The young women were the first, but the young men followed. She turned to look at Paul. His chair was empty.
And then she was surrounded in a sea of caring.
Strangers who felt as if they were not strangers at all were hugging her, some of the girls were telling her about the creepy moves Paul had put on them.
Bree realized she felt as if she was leaving her body, as if she had floated way up above herself and was looking down at the woman in the stiletto heels and the red cape, and seeing her for what she was.
Brave enough, finally, to be worthy of the gift called love.
