by Bella Andre
She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t bear to see his reaction as she picked up her phone and ignored the half-dozen messages blinking on it. She dialed the travel agent with whom she’d booked all of her siblings’ wedding trips and honeymoons.
“I need to buy the very next ticket from San Francisco to Las Vegas, please.”
Cole took the phone from her before she could grip it tighter. “Make that two tickets. First class out of SFO. Yes, noon works.”
Anna walked past him as he was reciting his credit card number from memory. She locked the bathroom door behind her, and as she stood beneath the spray of the shower she tried not to face the real reason her face was drenched.
She’d asked Cole for a divorce once before and it hadn’t happened.
Looked like the second time was the charm.
* * *
“Hi, Mom.”
Anna was sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the airport, Cole tailgating them in his car. She hadn’t said a word to him since getting out of the shower and though he’d barely taken his eyes off her until the taxi came, he hadn’t pushed her.
She’d pulled up the article on her phone the minute she’d climbed into the taxi. Each word Cynthia had written—about how she and Cole had seemed like a fairytale come to life, only to realize that, unfortunately, their relationship really was too good to be true—had ripped another chunk out of Anna's heart. Now, as her mother poured sympathy over the wireless line, another wave of sorrow gripped her.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly to her mother. “I should never have lied to you. Especially when you knew right from the start that everything wasn’t okay.” She’d purposefully avoided seeing or speaking with her parents and sisters during the week because she hadn’t wanted to face the truth. She hadn’t wanted to see that she was acting crazy.
Not good crazy, whatever she’d thought that was.
Bad crazy.
But now that she was forcing herself to be honest, completely, painfully honest, wasn’t it also true that the way she felt as she sat in the back of the taxi wasn’t entirely Cole’s fault? He hadn’t forced her to do anything, hadn’t held a gun to her head and made her say the things she’d said to her family and friends and the journalist.
Just like she’d told him, everything she’d done, every lie she’d told, had ultimately been her choice. They were entirely on her own head. Weighing in her gut.
Creating the holes in her heart.
“No,” she said to her mother, “don’t blame Cole. He was doing what he thought was right for his sick grandmother. Marrying me was what he thought he had to do to make her happy.”
The taxi driver turned his head slightly as if he was trying to hear her mother’s reply. Frankly, Anna didn’t care anymore. The whole world already knew what a fool she’d been.
The whole world already knew that she’d fallen in love with a man who didn’t love her back.
“I’m not making excuses for him,” she said. “What I’m finally doing is telling the truth.”
It would be so easy to fall into her mother’s comforting arms, to let her sisters rally around her, to let them all crucify the man she’d married. So easy.
And so false.
“I screwed up, Mom. And I’ll survive.”
Somehow, some way, she’d figure out how to pick up the pieces and move on with her life. One day people would stop feeling sorry for her. One day she’d find another man to date, to marry, to love. And one day she’d go to bed and realize she hadn’t thought about Cole for minutes. Hours even.
But just then, just when she thought she was finally telling herself the truth, she made the mistake of looking in the rear-view mirror.
“Promise me that you’ll remember, sweetheart. No matter what happens. Promise you won’t forget that I love you.”
Oh God, she hadn’t forgotten. How could she, when his declarations of love were still ringing in her ears, when she could still feel the sweetness of his touch all over the surface of her body?
But accepting Cole’s love wasn’t about memories.
It was about trust.
And trust was something she was all out of.
* * *
Cole wanted to knock the teeth out of every single person who stared at them as he and Anna walked through the airport. After she’d insisted on taking a cab, rather than driving with him to the airport, he’d thought she was going to try to outrun him once they got inside. But when he caught up to her at the security checkpoint, she silently waited for him to put his shoes back on and they walked to the gate together.
She didn’t look mad.
She didn’t look like she was going to cry.
She just plain didn’t look like she cared about anything either way.
That was the worst of all, Cole realized as he walked through the airport beside her: Her glow was gone.
And it was his fault.
He wanted to get down on his knees and beg her forgiveness. He wanted to hold her still in front of him until she agreed to listen to him. He wanted to kiss her until she believed that he loved her.
But they were onstage, so he couldn’t do any of those things. All he could do was make it perfectly clear to each and every person watching that if they dared say even one word to either of them, or took a picture with a cell phone, they’d deeply regret it.
Shit. He couldn’t stand this silence. Couldn’t stand knowing how much Anna hated him.
Couldn’t stand knowing how much he deserved it.
He got out his phone, typed in a text message.
He heard hers buzz in her purse and he thought for a minute that she was going to ignore it. But then she reached into her bag.
I LOVE YOU. PLEASE FORGIVE ME.
She ran her finger across the touch screen and deleted his message, then dropped the phone back into her bag, her expression not changing once.
What hurt the most was being so damn close to Anna, having a hundred things he wanted to say to her, and knowing that she wasn’t going to hear any of them.
She was going to walk away from him before they got a chance to see what could have been.
And she would never believe that he loved her.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Mrs. Taylor, I stole your wish for your grandson and turned it into a horrible lie. I’m so, so sorry for what I’ve done.”
Anna stood beside Eugenia’s bed and waited for anger or tears or disappointment or all of the above from the woman she’d betrayed with a lie. Cole had wanted to come into the room with her, but she’d told him that this apology was something she needed to make alone.
Surprisingly, he’d respected that decision.
The other surprising thing was that his grandmother didn’t look particularly upset about her confession. Anna couldn’t understand it. According to the messages her sisters had been leaving her via voice and text and email, thousands of strangers were losing their minds on the Internet and TV over her fake marriage to Cole.
Shouldn’t his grandmother be more upset than anyone?
“The truth is, honey,” Eugenia said as she reached for Anna’s hands and gently patted them, “love was never straightforward for me, either.” She paused, held Anna’s gaze. “And you do love Cole, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Anna admitted, unable to do anything but speak the truth now. “I love your grandson. But it doesn’t matter. Not when I can’t trust him.”
“I know.”
She couldn’t believe his grandmother wasn’t defending him. “What do you mean, you know?”
Eugenia sighed, shaking her head. “Just because I love my grandson doesn’t mean I don’t see his faults. He’s bullheaded. Sometimes it’s a good thing, like when he was chasing his dream to make a career out of football. But other times, he gets an idea in his head and follows it straight into a dead end.” To Anna’s surprise, the woman smiled. “Did he ever tell you about the first time I went to bail him out of juvie? He started talking back to
me before we even got in the car, so I turned around and took him back inside. He didn’t think I’d leave him there, but I did.”
Anna shook her head. “He went to Juvenile Hall?”
“Oh yes. He spent a night in prison once, too.”
Anna felt her eyes grow wide. “He was in jail?” She tried to tell herself she didn’t care, that it didn’t matter now that they weren’t going to be husband and wife anymore, but she’d told herself enough lies already. “For what?”
“Nothing much. Drinking from open containers. Talking back to police officers. His father was just like that when he was young. Too much energy and nowhere to put it. That’s when his father started flying, real fast planes that could take all he could give.”
Anna could feel herself softening toward Cole. No! Just because his grandmother couldn’t help but see the good in him, didn’t mean Anna had to keep seeing it, too. She’d come here to apologize to Eugenia for her lies, not let the woman convince her to make the marriage real.
She needed to get their focus back on the apology. “I really am sorry about letting you believe my relationship with Cole was something it isn’t. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me one day.”
“Oh, honey.” Eugenia patted her hands again. “I appreciate you coming all this way for me, but I don’t think you really want me to forgive you for falling in love with my grandson. I think you should forgive yourself first.”
“How can I?” Anna whispered. “I’ve lied to everyone. Not just you, but my family, my friends, my colleagues.”
“Cole made his mistakes. And now you’ve made yours.”
Anna shook her head, not willing, not able to believe it could all be that easy.
“I know you’re hurting, honey, and I know my grandson is the reason for that. But I’ve never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. Like he’s finally seen the sun, like he finally believes it can shine down on him.”
Anna’s heart almost stopped beating. “He needed to act like that so you would believe that he loved me.”
“Oh no. My boy has never been able to get a lie past me. He loves you, honey. Funny thing about us Taylors—we’re ornery about relationships. We do our best to act like we don’t need anyone. But when we fall in love, that’s it for us. Only once. But with every last piece of our hearts.”
Anna didn’t know what to say, not when the last thing she’d expected was for Cole’s grandmother to sit here and talk to her about love. Blaming, yelling, hating—they were all easier than loving.
“If you could, would you take it all back? If I could clap my hands and send you back to Friday night and make sure that you never met my grandson, is that the path you would take?”
Anna opened her mouth to say yes, of course she would take back everything she’d done. But the words just wouldn’t come.
“Or,” his grandmother said with such kindness, such understanding, “would you have loved him anyway?”
* * *
“I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to you, Grandma.” A flash of pain shot through him. “And to Anna.” Cole’s grandmother held his hand, so gently, as if he were the one in the hospital bed. “I took her innocence and broke it in two.”
“I’m angry with you, Cole. Anna’s angry with you.” His grandmother gestured to the stack of papers on her side table. “The entire world is angry with you. You’ve certainly got a lot of explaining and groveling to do. But anger fades.”
“I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks.” And it was true, he never had. It was what had made him impenetrable. “I only care about you.” His throat was almost too tight to say, “And Anna.”
“I still love you, honey. And the last time I saw someone as full of love as Anna, I was looking into your grandfather’s eyes. Your father loved your mother like that, too. All the way. Holding nothing back. No matter what.”
“I made her lie for me.”
“Cole.” His name was a warning on his grandmother’s lips. “Don’t keep on with the lying. Don’t keep getting yourself in trouble. Yes, you benefited from the lies. But so did she, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone through with it.”
But the fact that Anna had made her own choices didn’t change the fact that he was ruining her life, that he’d gone and done it all in the span of one short week.
“I need to let her go she can have a normal life, marry a guy who’s good enough for her.” A guy he would dream of killing with his bare hands each and every night.
“I know you think you’ve broken her heart. But little cracks, that’s all there are in it right now. You want to really see it break, you go ahead and let a better man have her. I thought you were smarter than this, Cole.” His grandmother hadn’t talked to him like this since bailing him out of jail his freshman year at college. “Do you really not see that your entire future is Anna? Are you really going to just up and throw it all away? You’ve fought before, honey. Fight again. Fight like hell to fix what you’ve done wrong. And when you get back on the straight and narrow, don’t ever look back. Only forward.”
Word for word, it was what she’d said to him when he was nineteen. How could he have forgotten?
Playing football had been important, had given him a purpose, a reason to feel good about himself in the morning. Football had been more than just his livelihood, it had been his everything.
But he could play a thousand more games, could keep getting up in the morning, keep depositing those big checks into his bank account, and it wouldn’t matter.
Not without Anna.
Because she was his everything.
And he was going to get her back. Somehow, some way, he was going to convince her she needed to be with him.
When someone knocked, Cole looked up expecting to see Anna, and was surprised to see the doctor with her.
Please, God, no. Not this, too.
When his grandmother had been railing at him, trying to knock some sense into his thick head, he’d almost forgotten she was sick. She looked and sounded just like the woman of fifteen years ago who’d twisted his ear and told him, “Don’t fuck up again.”
“Mr. Taylor, I thought I’d bring your wife back inside so that I could give the whole family the news at the same time.” Cole could barely process the hint of a smile in the doctor’s eyes. “Eugenia, you are a remarkable woman.”
His grandmother shot him a triumphant glance. “I’ve always told my grandson that.”
“And I’ve always known it.” Cole's insides were so fucked up by now that his words sounded like gravel scraping on the bottom of shoe.
“I’m sorry, this isn’t fair of me to draw it out like this. It’s just that it’s so much fun, one of the highlights of my job, actually, to deliver such good news.”
Cole almost shot up out of his seat to grab the doctor and shake the rest of it out of her, but a small sound from Anna distracted him, had him looking at her instead. She held one hand over her heart, the other wrapped tightly around his grandmother’s hand.
“We’ll have to do more blood work, but based on the tests we did last night, I think we’re heading out of the woods. Hopefully for good.”
Cole could have sworn the clouds parted outside the window, that sunlight streamed into the room just as his grandmother whooped like she used to in the casinos when they got a big winner at the slot machines, as happy for a stranger as she would have been if she’d taken home the jackpot.
The ray of light illuminated Anna and he was struck for the hundredth time by her beauty. Her innocence. The pure goodness the radiated from her core.
And as he met her eyes and smiled to celebrate his grandmother’s victory, that was when his wife finally let herself cry.
Not because he’d just broken her heart.
But because a woman she’d only met a week ago might not die after all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cole had a game to play Sunday, but he wasn’t the only one who hated the thought of leaving
his grandmother again so soon, especially when there was such good news to celebrate. Anna barely knew his grandmother, but she was as happy about the news of her recovery as any one of Eugenia’s close friends would have been.
For the first time, Cole was damn glad for the small hospital room. Because it meant Anna was close to him. It meant he could drink in her beauty. It meant he could listen to her sweet conversation with his grandmother. It meant he could soak in her laughter for a little while longer.
Still, the entire time the three of them were together there, Anna never once spoke to him. Or looked directly at him. She was wholly focused on Eugenia. He only left the hospital room once to make a quick side trip. The taxi waited outside the hotel with the package—a gift for Anna, one he hoped she’d love.
After booking them on the very last flight out of town, they got into the taxi. He could tell she wasn’t going to say anything more to him on the trip home than she had on the way to Las Vegas.
“I, uh, picked up something for you.”
Her expression became even colder. “I told you already, I don’t want your bribes.”
“I heard you, Anna. I swear I heard every word you said.” He picked up the carrier bag that had been waiting on the floor of the taxi by his feet. “It’s not jewelry.”
She looked at the moving package on her lap in surprise. She shook her head. “Whatever it is, I can’t take it. Not from you.”
But he was already unzipping the bag, just enough that a wet nose and tongue licked across her hand. And then, just as he’d known she would, she was pulling the mutt out of his temporary home and hugging the fur ball to her. She didn’t let go of the dog for the rest of the taxi ride, held the carrier bag close all through the airport, and constantly checked on the mutt under the seat in front of her during the ride home.
