Becca looked at me. “Tell me what I can do.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I left Becca’s house feeling triumphant. We had a letter from her explaining what had really happened and stating that she would sue the Register if they went forward with Rob’s version of the story. We also had a copy of her restraining order that proved that Tim, by bringing Rob to Austin, had violated that same order and put Becca at risk from a potentially dangerous and obsessed stalker. I was eager to get back to the hotel and send my editor a copy of these statements and a copy of the article I had written, to replace what I hoped would be a shelved piece on Nathan Ryder. The rest of the world could write thousands of words on him, but my professional relationship was officially severed.
I couldn’t wait to tell him.
But when I got back to my hotel after Mandy had dropped me off, I found that I didn’t have to wait. He was sitting outside my hotel room. And he looked furious.
“Nathan—” I approached him cautiously, my heart sinking in my chest.
“You went to see Becca?” he demanded, his face stormy. “Don’t deny it, she called me and said a journalist and photographer had been there to see her. When she described you, I realized what an idiot I had been.”
“Nathan, let’s go inside.” I didn’t want to have this conversation in the hallway, but he ignored me, his expression twisted with anger.
“I thought we had gone beyond all that.” His voice began to grow louder. “I thought that I could trust you.”
“You can trust me,” I insisted, pulling at his sleeve. “Just come inside and let me explain.”
He yanked his arm away. “This whole time you’ve been lying to me.”
“No!”
“Last night.” He could barely speak. “Last night meant something to me. Was it just part of the job for you? Get the dirt on Ryder, a bonus if he’ll fuck you?”
I flinched as if I had been slapped.
“As if you haven’t been doing the same to me,” I snarled at him. “Doing everything in your power to keep me from doing my job.”
“Well, it looks like you’ve done it. Gotten the on-the-record interview you wanted,” he shouted. “So why don’t you take the crap you dug up and go back to Houston where everyone will applaud you for what you’ve done? Maybe they’ll even give you a promotion.”
“Fuck you.” Tears crowded my throat, but I would not let him see me cry.
For a moment his eyes filled with the same tenderness I had seen the night before, when we had been tangled together in bed, his kisses soft and sweet. When things had been perfect.
“Sophie, I—”
But I didn’t wait for the rest of it as I scrambled for my door. I slammed it behind me and waited until I could hear him walk away, counted to ten and then burst into tears.
***
As it turned out, sending the article about the shelter and the information about Tim’s piece wasn’t nearly as satisfying when your heart was totally broken. I managed to dig myself out of my fog long enough to drink a celebratory toast of mini-bar whiskey when I heard that Tim had been fired. And not just for trying to publish an article with no substantiated facts, but also for not caring about them, as he had admitted in his rant towards me, the same one I had recorded and transcribed, both included in my email to Mike.
But the victory felt hollow, especially when tomorrow came. It was finally time to leave Austin and head home. Mandy and Chris both came to give me a send-off. None of us said a word about Nathan, who I hadn’t heard from since our fight in the hall.
“I’ll send you the photos next week,” Mandy told me, giving me a hug. Mike had been thrilled with her initial photographs, but wanted to see the versions with the players before he signed off on the new article. “We’ll miss you,” she whispered.
Chris didn’t say much more, just gave me a hug as well.
I shoved my brand new suitcase—another unpleasant reminder of the mess I was leaving behind—into my beat-up car and got in. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to go back to my soon-to-be empty apartment and a job that I wasn’t even sure I was excited for anymore. But I didn’t have anything to stay for.
Mandy leaned in my car window and gave me another hug.
“It will be OK,” she told me. “And I’ll see you soon.”
I had cried too much in the past few days, I wasn’t going to cry now. So I pasted a big fake smile on my face and waved out the car window at Chris and Mandy until I could no longer see them in my rearview mirror. Then I aimed my car towards Houston and got the hell out of Austin.
Chapter Thirty-Two
There wasn’t much to pack. A few possessions that would fit in my mother’s tiny apartment and even less things that were worth taking with me. My clothes were piled in the backseat of my car, along with my bed linens, stacked next to the boxes of books that I hadn’t even bothered to unpack since moving into this place. The furniture I was going to leave on the curb with a note indicating it was free to anyone who wanted it, and everything else could be donated.
I had spent most of the last week canceling my power and water, giving the apartment the scrub-down necessary to get my deposit back, and crying into a pint of ice cream. I wanted more than anything to be moving on, to not be thinking about Nathan, but that seemed to be pretty much impossible. I had however, come up with the brilliant idea of making a human-sized ice cream container that could double as a sleeping compartment. I figured it would be a bestseller among women who had done the same dumb thing I had—namely, fall in love with a guy they couldn’t have. There wasn’t much that could soothe that, but lots and lots of ice cream sure helped.
“You ready, hon?” My mom had come to help haul the last of my furniture to the curb and take the few possessions that hadn’t fit in my car back to her place. Asking her if I could move back in with her after I returned from Austin had been far less painful than I had feared it would be. It probably helped that when I drove from the hotel to her house, promptly bursting into tears on her doorstep and crying for several hours about my broken heart, she was quick to suggest that maybe I needed a break from living on my own.
She had been absent for a good deal of my childhood, leaving me in arcades and outside of bars while she looked for her next boyfriend and bill-payer, but the years (and apparently menopause) had settled her a little. I had to admit I had been a little surprised when she opened the door. Gone were the low-cut shirts and barely-there shorts, now replaced with pretty dresses, that while still shorter and tighter than the outfits most women her age wore, were positively puritanical on her. She had tucked me into my old bed that night, making sure to keep my stuffed unicorn at arm’s reach. It had done a great deal to ease the pain of Nathan’s hurtful words.
But weeks later, I was still heartbroken, and still missing him. A part of me thought of going back to Austin, of going to him and begging him to forgive me, but to my surprise it was my mother that held me back.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, hon,” she told me. “In fact, you saved his bacon. He’s the one that should be asking you for forgiveness. Not the other way around.”
I knew she was right. The drama-filled story that Tim had attempted to pass off as news had been killed, keeping Nathan’s name out of the gossip pages. There had been murmurings around the office about the upcoming MLB draft, but I had done my best to ignore it, even turning down Mike’s offer to let me go back to Austin and cover it. The announcement was going to be made today, so no doubt Nathan and his family would be holding a press conference. But I didn’t want anything to do with that story in a professional capacity. In a personal capacity, well, I couldn’t deny that I wanted to see Nathan again, but I knew that it was better if I stayed away. Better for both of us.