Great Big Beautiful Life(73)

“But that’s not me,” I go on. “I’m okay with my life. I’m happy with it. I don’t know why you need me to be angry with her, but—”

“Because you’re lying to yourself,” he says. “You’re pretending the whole world is rainbows and butterflies, like I can’t see what’s right in front of my face. You’re a journalist. You’re smarter than that.”

Now the anger surges through me. Not at my mother. At him, and at myself for bringing him here with me, for putting myself in this situation to be seen in a way I’ve never wanted to be, by someone who, by nature, doesn’t leave well enough alone.

“You’re right!” I cry. “I am smarter than this. I should’ve known better than to take a man I barely know to my home. But I guess it’s like you said: I was just lying to myself, pretending you were someone else.”

The car falls silent.

I’m shaking, my breath shallow, and hot from my forehead to my toes. I try to talk the anger back into its tunnel deep inside me. I keep myself from looking over at him, from imagining the hurt or frustration that might be on his face. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.

I just need to get back to Little Crescent.

To finish this audition.

To get this job, and write this book, and everything will be okay, like it always is.

I turn on the radio, and Diamond Rio’s “Meet in the Middle” plays, the irony nearly as thick as the tension.

We don’t say another word for the rest of the drive.

By the time we pull up to the Grande Lucia, night has begun to descend, and the ice between us is no closer to thawing. I half expect Hayden to invite me in for a minute, but one glance at his steely face tells me that’s not going to happen.

It’s probably for the best. For once, I don’t really have the energy to socialize.

I need to be alone, to refocus on the job, to figure out how to handle these last two weeks of interviews.

He averts his gaze as he unlocks the passenger door and gets out. He pulls his bag from the back seat, pausing for a beat. “Goodbye, Alice.”

He swings the door shut and heads for the stairs without a glance back.

It’s only once he’s out of sight that I realize: He said goodbye, not good night.



* * *



? ? ?

“You don’t seem quite like your usual overly chipper self today,” Margaret says.

We’re sitting across from each other at the table in her workshop on Tuesday morning, each of us polishing off our own latte from Little Croissant, while she arranges shards of sea glass into a rough pattern in front of her.

“I’ll be okay,” I say with a reassuring smile.

Her forehead lifts skeptically. “This process not going how you hoped?”

“It’s not that,” I say quickly. “It’s just family stuff.”

She sets down the two pieces of green glass she was arranging. “You can talk about it, if you’d like.”

I laugh a little. “No, that’s okay. We should get back to you.”

“He’s the same way, you know,” she says.

“What? Who?”

“Hayden,” she says. “Hates talking about himself.”

I stuff down a laugh. “You’re trying to make him talk about himself?” Despite his and my fight, I’m still charmed picturing it: this feisty woman trying to trick her staid interviewer into dishing about himself.

She gives a small shrug. “It only seems fair. I’m airing out all my dirty laundry—”

At the not-quite-believing look I give her, she changes course: “Fine, a lot of my dirty laundry. The least he could do is let down his guard a bit. But that boy is basically an animated suit of armor, as far as I can tell.”

“I think he’s just private,” I say, surprised by my defensiveness. “I think you can understand that.”

“Have you two spent much time together?” she asks.

My eyes dart to the recorder, aware that everything I say will be captured. It’s one thing to make myself vulnerable with her, but it’s another to drag Hayden into it. Even if he and I aren’t on the best terms right now. I settle on, “A little, yeah.”

“And what do you think?” she says bluntly.

“About?” I ask.

“Hayden,” she says. “Do you still think I can trust him? You think there’s a warm, beating heart under all that ice?”

The flicker of memories that licks across my mind is tawdry. I pray I’m not flushing. And even as the hurt and irritation of our last conversation push up through those other flashes, the truth is, I mean it when I say, “You can trust him.”

At the return of her suspicious eyebrow tilt, I add, “He’s got his reasons for being guarded, but he’s always honest. You can trust him.”

I trust him. There’s no talking myself out of it. I just do.

That’s why what he said bothered me so much. Because if he’s saying it, I can’t shake the idea that there might be some truth to it.

Margaret looks at me for a long moment and then, quite suddenly, drops her eyes and hands back to the glass shards. “So,” she says. “Where did we leave off last time?”