And by the time I let the last note fade away, I felt as if I’d been exorcized.
We were both silent for a minute. My eyes closed as I held the sustain pedal down to let the last notes linger in the air. A mourning quality to the piece that had never been there before I royally fucked up.
The note finally ended, and I opened my eyes to find Campbell thoughtfully staring at me. My cheeks reddened, and I removed my hands from the piano. “What do you think?”
“You’re a little pitchy,” Campbell said with a smirk.
I snorted. “More than a little.”
Campbell held his hands up. “I wasn’t going to say it.”
I stared down at the keys and released the tension in my shoulders. “I wrote it about your sister.”
“Ah,” he said softly.
“Ah?” I asked, jerking my head back up to look at him. “That’s it? You’re not going to punch me?”
Campbell shrugged. “I could if you’d like me to?”
“Uh, no. No, thanks. I just…I don’t understand.”
“Well, I’m not stupid.”
I blinked at him. “You knew that Nora and I were together?”
“I had my suspicions. You’re not exactly sneaky. Did you think you were being sneaky?”
“Uh…yeah,” I said slowly. “I thought you were going to kill me. You said to my face that you’d kill anyone who touched her.”
“Oh, I know,” he said, dropping into a chair across from me. “I had every intention of doing just that. I was even halfway to your house one night when Blaire helped to talk me down.”
“Blaire knows, too?” I ran a hand back through my hair. “Jesus, does everyone know?”
“Hollin doesn’t know or else you would have a black eye.”
I grimaced. “Yeah. So, uh, you’re taking this better than I thought. What the hell did Blaire say to you to get you not to beat the shit out of me?”
“She reminded me that I liked and trusted you. That we were friends for a reason. And if I respected you as much as I did—” He shot me a look. “Which I do. I wouldn’t have asked you to join the band if I didn’t think you were worth the shot.” He rubbed his hands together. “Then I should respect you enough to take care of my sister as well.”
“And you listened to her?” I asked in shock.
He chuckled. “Uh, no. She was right, of course. But I wouldn’t hear a fucking thing about it. I wanted to make you pay.” He met my gaze and shrugged. “It was Nora actually.”
“Wait, Nora told you?” I asked, coming to my feet. “There’s no way. She would have mentioned—”
He held his hand up. “She didn’t tell me. It wasn’t like that.”
I sat back down. “Oh.”
“But it was still Nora who convinced me. You remember after she and August broke up?”
I nodded. I hated thinking of her that way, but, yeah, I couldn’t ever forget how she’d been a broken, empty vessel. Sand poured out of an hourglass.
“Well, that wasn’t the first time I’d seen her like that. She was like that after Mom died. And she dragged herself out of it after a lot of time, but I wasn’t there to help her like I should have been. I didn’t want that to happen again. I promised I’d be there. So, I was pissed, thinking you were taking advantage of her depressive state.”
“I would never…”
“I know. Because that night I went to your house, I saw Nora happy. You were sitting in the living room, playing a video game. She would laugh her head off and then pounce on you. You’d lift her off you like she weighed nothing and drop her down on the couch. She’d wiggle away and snatch the controller back to play again. Blaire took one look at me and was like…would you be helping or hurting if you barged in right now?
“And she was right. Nora was happy. She was the happiest I’d ever seen her. I didn’t know what was going on between y’all. It wasn’t my place to interfere anyway. As long as she was happy, that was what mattered. If you make her happy, that’s what I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for her.”
I nearly choked. I remembered that night. So many nights when we’d dicked around at home. Deliriously happy, away from the rest of the world. In our own little bubble.
And I’d ruined that.
“I just figured you weren’t that serious after all,” Campbell said.
I hung my head. “We were. I fucked up.”
“Should I punch you now?”
“Uh, no,” I said quickly. “Not helpful. Mostly, I keep seeing everything as black and white. Her job is in Lubbock. Mine is here. We’d agreed that when I went back to LA, it would be over. I hadn’t realized how far we’d come in the time we had.”
“Do you love her?” Campbell asked. “Because if you love her, then all that other shit doesn’t matter. You’ll figure it out.”
And somehow, it was all so clear. We’d just figure it out. It had seemed so cut and dry in Lubbock. I still had no clue how it was going to work out. Things were fucking hard as hell, but still, I had to try.
I met his gaze. “Yeah, I do.”
Campbell nodded. “Good. That’s the right answer.”
He held his hand out to me. I clapped mine into his, and he helped me to my feet, pulling me into a hug.
“I have to fix this.”
“Yeah, you do because if you leave my sister broken, then I’ll actually have to throw that punch.”
I laughed. “That seems fair.”
“All right, what’s the plan?”
And that was when it all materialized before me. I knew exactly what to do. Exactly how to win her heart one more time.
30
Nora
“What the hell is this?” Hollin asked.
I passed him the paperwork. He stared down at it and back up at me. Piper was seated next to him. She craned her neck to look at the paper, and her eyebrows shot up.
“Nora!” Piper said in surprise.
“My two-week notice.”
“You’re quitting?” Hollin asked in dismay. “What? What for?”
I handed him a second piece of paper. “This is why.”
Hollin snatched it out of my hand and stared down at it. His eyes got huge. “Holy shit, Nora!”
“Oh my God, this was what Eve was so excited about the other night!” Piper cried. “She wouldn’t tell us until you said so.”
“Yeah. Eve was there when I got the call. It’s a contract to work for the Kensingtons as a wedding planner for English and Court’s wedding.”
“A celebrity wedding,” Hollin said softly. “That’s what you wanted.”
I’d accepted the offer from English and signed the contract the next day. This one wedding was two-thirds of my entire salary for the year, working twenty-six weddings or more a year. And instead, I could just work with this one. But I’d need to be in New York, and I couldn’t do that and keep my job here full-time.
I nodded. “Seemed unlikely to happen when I hadn’t been in the industry for longer, but I got lucky when we were in New York. I would be an idiot to turn this down.”