My gaze snapped to her. “Why, so you can justify your choices like you did last night? You’re the one who has to live with them, not me.”
Tears sparkled, clinging to her lashes, but her face was bent with hurt and anger. “You know, you never figured me for a liar. But I never figured you for an asshole.”
“Guess we were both wrong.”
With the smallest, sharpest of breaths, she flinched, though our gaze never broke. But she didn’t shrink away—she grew, drawing herself up to her full height, squaring her shoulders, lifting her quivering chin.
“I guess we were.” One step back. Another. “Then I guess that’s that,” she said with resilience and force and bottomless sadness.
But I said nothing back. Only turned to my flowers with my heart clenched in my throat. And I listened to the sound of her heels on the concrete as she walked away.
This time, I feared it would be for good.
And good riddance, I told myself without faith.
She might have sold her soul, but I’d be goddamned if she took my family with her on the road to hell. She’d gotten in bed with lie-eating snakes, and there was nowhere to go but to become one of them. I wouldn’t watch her do it to herself. I couldn’t watch her demean herself any more than she already had.
And I wouldn’t become a part of that lie factory with her. Not when my family was at stake.
Not when I knew there was no way to save her.
Blindly, I worked in the flower bed for a dozen painful heartbeats. Until my father cleared his throat.
He stood on the other side of the flower bed, looking sheepish.
“How much of that did you hear?” I asked carefully.
“Well, once she started talking, I couldn’t exactly walk out. If my knees were young enough to crawl, I might have.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t let her take us to hell with her.”
“That’s not what I’m worried about, son.”
I drew a noisy breath and shifted my gaze to my hands in the dirt. “Don’t worry about me either. I’m fine.”
“You’re not, but why should you be?”
“It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have gotten involved with her in the first place.”
“And why not?”
“Because we’re different,” I said to the mums.
“Since when does that hurt?”
“Since I was stupid enough to think I could be with someone who puts herself above everyone else.”
“But that’s not all.”
“No,” I huffed. “It’s not. Girls like her aren’t interested in simple lives. They want some asshole with a PhD and a penthouse, not a man who plays with flowers in the dirt. We’re different, Dad. There’s no getting past that.”
“I dunno. Seems like you’re the one with the problem, not her.”
I paused, glaring up at him. “You can’t be serious. She cares so much what they think of her, she lied about me. She wants to sell our family out for a fucking television show. How am I the one with the problem?”
“Well, for starters, you didn’t even hear her out. You’re so convinced you’re right, you decided for the both of you.”
“I heard enough the other night to have good reason.”
“Son, listen to me.” He watched me until I met his gaze, silver brows drawn. “I know it feels safer to run—you got that gene from me—but think about what you’ll lose. And for what? Fear? Pride? Lila Parker does not strike me as the kind of woman to be anything short of a straight-shooter. And I suspect you care very deeply for her.”
“I do,” I said around the lump in my throat.
“When I met your mother, she was the heiress to a fortune, and I was the son of a plumber. She ran in society, and I ran snakes through drainpipes. Never in a million years did I think she’d want someone so beneath her. But what you don’t seem to understand is that love doesn’t care where you come from, only who you are. That, and snobbery works both ways. You thumbing your nose at the things she wants is no better than her thumbing her nose at yours.”
“So, what … I should hear her out? Give her a chance to make it right?” I shook my head at the question he never asked, the same one Luke had suggested. The one that just one hour ago, I was willing to take. “If it were just about the other night, that’d be one thing. But a reality show? That’s too big for me to look past.”
“She didn’t exactly say she accepted the offer. Only that she got one.”
I frowned. “No, she said—”
“That she got an offer. That was all. I won’t tell you what to do, but I will say this—I’d hate to see you let love go for the sake of vanity, Kash.”
Before I could argue, he turned and headed back to his post in the zinnias, leaving me with his words ringing in my ears.
Mostly because he wasn’t wrong.
I was running away, so convinced I wasn’t enough that I’d doomed us from the start, turned us into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d turned my nose up to the life she wanted, what she’d worked for, partly because I hated—desperately hated—seeing her be demeaned. But also because all the things her life represented were patently opposite of mine. And that comparison made me feel less than, even though this life made me happy. It was all I wanted, besides her.
But the show. The thought of her participating in a reality show made my stomach turn, and my heart sank into its waiting arms. She might not have come out and said it, but she’d taken that offer. Everything she’d ever wanted had been handed to her on a silver platter, tarnished with lies and deceit. The devil had made her an offer, and I couldn’t imagine a world in which she’d refuse. I also couldn’t imagine a world in which she wouldn’t have told me right then and there that I was wrong if she’d turned it down.
She had called me an asshole, which wasn’t off base.
As I watered the beds, my thoughts swirled in brackish eddies like the water running through the dirt at my feet. Time. I needed time to sort through it all, to take stock and reconvene when I would be objective—a trait which I generally embraced. But not when it came to my heart. Not when it came to Lila.
With her, all bets were off.
29
All Hail the Dumbassador
KASH
Dusk had fallen, painting the greenhouse in golden pinks and blues as the winter sun inched toward the horizon. It was still, quiet, the shop far away from my solitude. Dad had gone up hours ago, leaving me to withdraw in peace. As peaceful as my mind was at least, which was not very.
My hands stayed busy. Stupidly, I’d thought going to my greenhouse on the roof would cheer me, but instead I found traces of her. I found them everywhere I looked—in the potted plants she’d admired, the lilies that were on the verge of opening up to show me if I’d successfully bred them. Even in the main greenhouse, even old Brutus. The black-eyed Susans where she’d fallen what felt like a lifetime ago. The table where I’d shown her how to plant ivy.
She was everywhere, in the air, under my skin, living in my heart. But every thought was tainted with a fear, the see-saw once again in motion. And this time, I didn’t have a truth to hold on to beyond that I loved her, I feared her, and I desperately needed to talk to her.