The Beautiful and the Wicked
Page 32
Sam Bennett, ever the opportunist, sold the story of her steamy affair with Jack Warren on The Rising Tide to a national tabloid for three hundred grand. In 2021, she starred in Season 28 of the moribund reality TV show The Bachelorette, where twenty waxed and gelled bachelors competed for her affections. Her engagement, marriage, and quickie divorce failed to grab the attention of Hollywood as she’d hoped. So she hawked her engagement ring to pay for some small cosmetic procedures she needed before returning to TV to work on her self-diagnosed “love addiction” on yet another reality-TV show, this one set in a rehab facility on a farm in Idaho.
Josie Warren, aside from becoming obsessed with a scintillating email correspondence with the freshly jailed Asher Lydon, gained years and years of material to discuss with the three different therapists continually in her employ.
Lila watched all of this unfold from a distance. What happened to Jack, Elise, Josie, Ben, or anyone else from The Rising Tide didn’t really matter to her. What mattered was when Ava would finally come out of hiding.
After the news broke about Jack, Lila woke up each morning thinking that this would be the day that Ava came back home. After all, there was nothing left to fear. Every corner of the globe knew that she was innocent. But days passed. Then weeks. Nothing.
Ava was still gone. And as the weeks went by, Lila began to worry that her sister would never come back to her.
Luckily, Teddy was there. Always Teddy. For the first time in her life, Lila began to understand what it really felt like to count on someone, to know that he’d always be by her side. Since the afternoon when Jack almost gunned her down, she’d seen Teddy every day. She couldn’t think of anyone on the planet whom she liked better. The fact that they alone shared the secret about her involvement in the Jack Warren case—not counting Conrad and Jack Warren himself, of course—only continued to solidify the bond that existed between them. It felt like the beginning of a new life, a life that wasn’t as lonely as the one she’d been living for so long.
IT WAS A perfect day in Miami, and everyone in South Beach was outside enjoying the beautiful weather. Lila was home with her windows thrown wide open. The gentle breeze and the cheerful voices from the people walking along the strip gently floated in, along with the smell of the salty sea air. She was running late. Teddy was on his way to pick her up for their now-customary afternoon lunch. She threw on a sundress and pinned up the bleach blond pixie cut she’d been anxiously growing out for the last six weeks since she traveled from the past.
Then she heard a knock on the door. Without turning around, she shouted, “Come on in, Teddy. Door’s open.” Then she scrambled into her bedroom, searching for her shoes.
“Found them!” she exclaimed as she dragged a pair of red espadrilles from beneath the bed. But the moment she stood up, the shoes fell back down to the floor.
“Ava?”
Standing there in front of Lila, a duffel bag flung over her shoulder, was her long-lost sister. “Is it really you?” Lila cried as she ran toward the beautiful, fragile woman whom she’d missed every day for a decade. She wrapped her up in her arms and drank in her scent.
“It’s me,” Ava whispered, holding her sister tight.
“Thank God you’re back.” Lila buried her face into Ava’s neck. “Thank God.”
They stood holding each other, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, for what felt like hours.
When Ava pulled away, Lila felt her eyes on her, studying her closely. “Your hair?” Ava said. She paused, looking at her sister as she ran her hand through Lila’s still short, white-blond hair. “So, I wasn’t crazy,” Ava said. “It was you?” she said. “Everything was such a fog that night, that terrible night, but your face was the one thing I remembered clearly. You saved me, didn’t you?”
Lila didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t lie to her sister, but she also couldn’t tell her a secret she’d promised Teddy she’d never spill.
“Okay. You don’t have to answer. But . . . how is it possible?”
“I’ve seen so many impossible things since you’ve been gone. But you returning is the best one of them all,” Lila said with a smile.
“It feels so good to finally be home,” Ava said as she squeezed her sister until Lila thought she’d break. Lila saw that underneath the joy, there was so much sadness still in her sister’s eyes. Lila grabbed her hands in hers and kissed her sister’s tear-soaked cheeks.
“Lila, I need to say something to you.” Ava closed her eyes and let out an anguished sigh. She looked at the ground. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you and Mom. And when I found out she died . . .” The words caught in Ava’s throat, and she fell silent for a moment. “When I heard she died, all I wanted was to come home, to call you, to be there for you. But I was too scared. I didn’t want to go to jail for the rest of my life. But there hasn’t been one day that I haven’t thought about you, and missed you, and wished I was right here with you.”
“Look at me,” Lila said. But her sister’s eyes were still focused on the ground. “Ava, look at me.”
Ava slowly lifted her head. The two sisters’ eyes met. “That’s all in the past, okay?”
“Can you ever forgive me?”
Lila threw her arms around her sister, who began to sob. “Ava,” she whispered. “Of course. We’re back together now. That’s all that matters. Mom understood. We both always knew you were innocent. It was never a question in our minds.”
She felt Ava hold her closer as their grief and sorrow began the long, slow journey to forgiveness and love. Lila knew it would take time. But she had her sister back, and it was better than she had ever dreamed.
“Knock. Knock.” Lila looked up to see Teddy standing in the doorway with Conrad hovering close behind him. Her already radiant smile grew even brighter.
“Ava,” she said to her sister, taking her hand firmly in her own, “I’d like to introduce you to someone very special.”
“Conrad,” Teddy said as he reached out to shake Ava’s hand for the first time, “I’m delighted to say it’ll be three people for lunch today.”
“Splendid, sir,” Conrad said with a bow. “Just splendid.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LIV SPECTOR was raised on Cape Cod and currently lives in Canada. She has worked as an oyster shucker, dancer, farmhand, journalist, and teacher. A graduate of McGill University in Montreal, she received her MFA from Brooklyn College.
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CREDITS
Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Cover photograph © by Bernd Vogel/Corbis
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE WICKED. Copyright © 2014 by Alloy Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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EPub Edition DECEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780062258496
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