by Marci Bolden
He was everything he hated about the movie industry and the superficial people who fought to survive there. Staying prominent had been more important than his ailing father, and it had been more important than Carrie.
The realization made his stomach turn and bile burn up his throat.
By two in the morning, Will had beaten himself up to the point of becoming numb to his own self-loathing. By four a.m., he was trying to sort out what the hell he could do to make things right. And by six a.m., he was at the airport climbing onto a plane headed not to Des Moines, but to Chicago. The closest airport to the little town where he’d grown up, the town where his family still resided.
Several hours later, Will parked his rental car in his brother’s driveway and looked at the small ranch where Brad and his wife had lived since their first year of marriage. That was over twenty-five years. For twenty-five years, Brad and Anne had stayed in one place, raised two kids, and had supported and loved each other through all the ups and downs life brought.
Will’s life had been parties, traveling, and awards shows. Fake friends, faker lovers, and business associates who disappeared once they got what they’d needed from him. Even his nieces, whom he loved dearly, tended to only reach out when they wanted VIP concert tickets or money their parents hadn’t been willing to lend them. Brad and Anne? Will hadn’t spoken to them since…Christmas of the year before. Almost a year. And that had been out of holiday obligation.
Part of Will wanted to back out of the driveway and leave before he had to deal with this confrontation. The other part of him knew if he didn’t face this now, he never would. He and his family would continue to grow apart.
Taking one big, deep breath for courage, Will climbed from the car and headed for his brother’s front door…and hopefully toward mending the first of many bridges he’d burned.
Chapter 26
The humming of the road beneath his tires hypnotized Will as he drove. Though his eyes were seeing the path before him, his mind was on the litany of mistakes he’d made.
He’d called Carrie on Christmas morning, hoping the spirit of the season would grant him a little clemency. She hadn’t answered. After moping his way through New Year’s Eve, he’d finally confessed to his mom and brother that he hadn’t only hurt them with his inability to put his career aside when needed. He’d hurt Carrie—someone who had come to mean the world to him.
They had listened, his mom had even been a bit sympathetic, but in the end, his brother told him what Will had known all along: he would never fix the damage he’d done to his relationship with a phone call. His mom had agreed. If Will wanted to make things right with Carrie, he had to face her. No matter how hard that might be.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so much fear gripping his heart. Facing his family again after so long had been difficult, but he’d known, at the end of the day, they were his family. They would find a way to forgive him. They’d accept him back into their fold and find a way to move forward.
He didn’t have that guarantee with Carrie. She had no reason to forgive him. They had no unbreakable ties. Will couldn’t remember a time in his life when he needed forgiveness as much as he did now. He also couldn’t remember a time when he deserved forgiveness less.
When the GPS told him to prepare to turn, Will’s heart dropped to the pit of his stomach. As he reached his destination, the guilt in his gut started to consume him. He felt like he was being swallowed by it until he couldn’t feel anything but the shame of his actions. After parking his car, he grabbed a piece of paper from the passenger seat and memorized the notes he’d jotted down. Swallowing hard, Will climbed out of the car with the dozen roses he’d bought on his way into town.
He slowly walked across the light dusting of snow that covered the ground until he stopped and looked at the stone at his feet.
Doreen Elaine Gable.
Tears burned Will’s eyes, and his guilt tightened into a lump in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. Looking around the cemetery, he gathered his thoughts before continuing, “I’m not sure if you can hear me or not, Mama, but if you can, please forgive me. And if you have any sway,” he said with a slight smile, “maybe you can convince Carrie to give me another chance.”
He put the flowers on her headstone and ran his fingers over the engraving that identified the woman buried there. “If she forgives me, I promise I’ll be better. I swear to you, I’ll take care of her. I won’t let her down again.”
Christmas and New Year’s Day passed with as little bother as Carrie could manage. Her spirits hadn’t lifted since Doreen had died. If anything, she guessed they’d sunk lower than ever. Settling the estate had happened more quickly than she’d expected. Then she’d had to get the house on the market. As soon as the time had come, a cloud had settled over her soul. Memories lived in every room. This home was all she had left of the family she’d loved so much, and she was finding it more and more difficult to think about leaving her home.
It was too late, though. She’d accepted an offer and signed the papers.
She’d considered keeping the property more than once. She and Natalie had discussed remodeling a portion of the house to have the tearoom that Carrie had dreamed of so many times before, but ultimately Carrie knew she could never manage to make the money she’d need to keep the house.
The only reason she’d been able to afford to stay this long was because of the unexpected guests she’d housed for three months. Hollywood’s elite.
Will.
She shook the thought of him from her mind before missing him could take hold of her heart. She still thought of him—it was impossible not to when his face was on the television and every gossip rag at the grocery store checkout. Rumor had it, he had backed out of a project and his friends were concerned for his future in Hollywood. At first, she’d been concerned too, but she refused to read more than headlines, which she convinced herself she wasn’t really reading—simply glancing at.
Damn it. He’d consumed her thoughts again.
Moving to the window, she looked out over the property and focused on her life. Her real life. The life that she couldn’t simply walk away from.
For the first time since the foundation had been laid, this house had left the Gable family. Carrie knew Mama would hate it, but what choice did she have? The house and everything in it, as negotiated, now belonged to someone else. Someone else would be living here, cooking in this kitchen, laughing in the den, drinking wine around the fire pit.
She looked around the kitchen until her gaze fell on the island, where she’d spent so much time with Doreen. “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said sadly. “I can’t do this alone.”
“Maybe you don’t have to.”
Startled, Carrie looked to the door, and her sorrow instantly hardened into anger as she met Will’s timid gaze. “What are you doing here?”
He let his breath out slowly and shrugged. “I was hoping we could talk.”
Carrie roughly wiped her eyes, hating that he’d caught her crying. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“I screwed up, Carrie.”
She scoffed and turned away from him.
“I know,” he said, “I did what I promised I wouldn’t do. I let the distance take me away from you. I’m sorry.”
Turning back to him, she shook her head. “I don’t need your apology. I don’t. I need some peace and quiet in my life. I need to process everything that is happening. I don’t need you distracting me.”
“I’m not trying to distract you.”
“That’s what you do,” she said with a hard edge to her tone. “Don’t you see? That’s all you were. That’s all we were. A distraction. Something to take our minds off what was happening around us.”
“We were more than that.”
“If we had been more than that, you wouldn’t have left me. You wouldn’t have left me here, alone, needing you. You would have been here, Will. If I meant half as much to you as you s
wore that I did, you would have been here. I needed you.”
“I know. I know you did. I am so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“I’m sorry.” He laughed a little, and then he looked at his hands. “There is no excuse for how I’ve behaved. I let that life pull me in. I forgot how all-consuming it can be. How everything else fades into the background. I fell back into my old life without thinking about how I was hurting you. After you called, when you told me about Mama, I went home…to Indiana. I stayed with my family and made things right with them because I knew I couldn’t…I wouldn’t have the right to ask for your forgiveness until I’d earned theirs. I did that. It was hard and humbling, but I did it. I want you to know that I do care about you, more than you know, and I will regret, for the rest of my life, that I lost you.”
Carrie narrowed her eyes at him. “You didn’t lose me, Will. You threw me away.”
He flinched, like her words were a slap across his face. “I made decisions that I wish I could take back.”
“Decisions? I saw the pictures of you with that…anorexic witch. That woman who acted like Mama and I were something to be scraped off her designer shoes. You know how she treated us. Yet there you were, smiling pretty with her hanging off your arm.”
“My job—” he started.
“Screw you and your job, Will! I don’t even remember how many times I called you. To tell you Mama was gone. To ask you to come to me. To beg you to help me. I needed you here. I needed you with me, like you promised you would be, and you were out living it up while my life shattered around me.”
“I know.”
Resting her palms against the cool tiles of the island, she glared at him. “You always say that you know, but you don’t know. You don’t have a clue what I’ve been going through. She’s gone. Everything is gone. Mama. The house. My life as I knew it. It’s gone.”
“Mama’s gone. But the house… The house is still yours.”
She shook her head. “I signed the papers this morning.”
Will looked down for a moment before meeting her gaze again. “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, Carrie. I know that. I ruined what chance we had, but I did… I do care about you. More than you can possibly understand. I will probably never know what our life could have been like, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least try to take care of you. I promised so many times that I would. No matter what happens, I need to know that you are where you belong, in this house, with no threat of it ever being taken away from you.”
She creased her brow. “What are you talking about?”
He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a stack of folded papers. “This is the deed. This house will never leave your name again.”
She stared at him, disbelieving. “You bought the house?”
“I made sure that you didn’t do something that you would regret for the rest of your life. Trust me,” he said with a wry smile, “you don’t want to go down that road.”
She gawked at him as he slid the papers onto the island between them. “How dare you.”
He looked taken aback. “You didn’t want to sell it.”
“Don’t pretend to know what I want.”
Stepping closer, he held her gaze. “I know you didn’t want to sell your home, Carrie. You told me. You told me that you wanted to stay here, you wanted to open a restaurant. You wanted Doreen here to help you run it.”
His reminder stabbed at her heart, and hot tears stung her eyes. Rage ignited inside her. “Are you seriously trying to buy your way out of this?”
He stared for a few moments before shaking his head. “No. I promised I’d take care of you. I failed. You’re angry at me for not being here, but someday you’ll be happy I did this.”
She shook her head and scoffed at how absolutely obtuse this man was. “All you’ve done is prolonged the inevitable, Will. I cannot afford this house. If I could, I never would have sold it to begin with.”
“The money from the sale will last a long time.”
“You think I’m going to take your money?” she asked quietly.
“You have to,” he said calmly. “We’ve signed the papers.”
“I’ll cancel the agreement.”
He shrugged. “You can’t. We’ve closed on the deal.”
Frustration filled her gut and made her stomach churn. “I won’t stay here. I won’t live in your house.”
“Your house.”
“The hell it is,” she said angrily. “I will not allow you to buy your way out of your guilt.”
“It’s not just guilt,” Will said just as hotly. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, but you can’t give up something that is this important to you because of your anger toward me, Carolyn.”
The name drove an arrow of pain through her heart. “Don’t call me that! Don’t you dare call me that!”
“I ruined things between us,” he continued, ignoring her outburst, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to help you when I can. You know as well as I do that you’ll regret selling the house.”
“That’s not your concern, Will. Not anymore.”
He sighed and shook his head. “The night we spoke, when you told me Mama died… I didn’t sleep. I kept replaying every mistake I’ve ever made over and over. I knew I had to fix my relationship with my brother. I’d known that a long time, but I was too scared to try. I deserved whatever he said to me because he was right. You were right. I always end up putting my career first. I don’t mean to. It just happens. I don’t even realize what I’m doing until it’s too late. I went home the next day. I went to my brother, and we had a long talk. Several, actually. It took some time, but I didn’t leave until I’d fixed things.”
“And now you’re here?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can make things right between us. I messed up, Carrie. I own that, but I think you need to recognize I wasn’t alone in screwing this up. You weren’t exactly tripping over yourself to call me before Mama died.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Before Mama died, how many times had you called me to check in, to say hello?”
“You were busy,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, I was. But the phone goes both ways.”
She crossed her arms and tilted her head. “You are a world-class son of a bitch.”
“I’ve been told that a time or two. But you can’t lay all the blame on me. I should have reached out to you when you called. I agree. I messed up. So did you, Carrie. Because before Mama died, I was the only one making an effort to stay connected. Other than a few messages on social media, I was the only one reaching out.”
She lowered her face, embarrassed by the truth he was stating. She hadn’t called him as often as she should have. She’d made a lot of excuses why she hadn’t, but the reality was, she didn’t have any more of an excuse than he had.
He threw his hands up as if he was giving up trying. “The house is yours. Do with it what you want. If you really can’t accept that I did this, sell it. But I think you’ll regret that. Almost as much as I regret…throwing you away.”
Carrie stood, watching him leave, furious that he’d have the nerve to walk away when she was still fighting with him. But then his words sank in and she eased the clench of her jaw.
He had damn near crushed her when he’d disappeared.
But the reality was, she was damn near crushed already. She’d been broken when he’d found her. He’d been broken too. Wasn’t that what had bonded them? Their mutual need for someone to listen, someone to be there. He’d done that for her in abundance. But how much had she given in return? Really? She’d tried to support him, but the reality was, so much of their relationship had been him comforting her, and she hadn’t even noticed until he’d stopped.
Closing her eyes, she exhaled some of her frustration. The anger and grief that had been consuming her turned into something else. Shame.
As m
uch as she wanted to blame him and be angry at him, she was as guilty of neglecting him as she’d insisted he was her. Sure, she’d called when she’d needed him, but she’d also spent a fair share of her time fuming that he hadn’t called her. She had been so convinced that he was going to leave her once he got back to California that she’d all but left him first. And then she’d pointed her finger at him, as if he were the only one to blame. They were both to blame. They were equally guilty of not trying hard enough. Whether it was fear or selfishness or just plain stupidity, they’d both had a hand in their own downfall.
He was right, they’d both made mistakes.
Rushing out of the kitchen, she caught up with him in the foyer. “Hey,” she called, her voice thick with the emotions raging in her chest. “You do not get to come in here and dump all of this on me and then walk out on me again.”
He looked down for what seemed an eternity before looking at her with sorrowful eyes.
“You broke my heart,” she whispered harshly. “You left me. You promised me you would help me and then you left me.”
“I know.”
“I needed you.”
He nodded. “I know. I’m so sorry.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” she asked.
After another long silence, he shrugged. “Do you think… Can you forgive me?”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know. I’m so hurt.”
“I love you,” he said softly.
His words took her breath away.
“I love you, but I realize that I ruined what we had. I put us second, and I failed you. I’m sorry for that,” he said. “I’m trying to be better. I think you and Mama made me better, you helped me see what was important, but I tripped up. I lost the ground I’d gained. I’m as confused and lost now as I was when I first came here. I know you must be feeling that way too. Maybe it is too late for us to try to fix each other again, but I won’t ever forget how you helped me realize that I needed to change. I’ll never forget what we meant to each other. I do need to know that you’re happy. You won’t be happy if you leave this house, Carrie.”
