“Hey, your good intentions haven’t led you all the way down that road yet. He may come around still.” Alicia didn’t sound any more confident than I felt.
“I don’t think he will. He’s just so hard to understand. Straight-up party guys? Them, I can understand no problem. But Caleb? I have no clue what’s going on in his head or what makes him tick. Even the bits that I do know that make him tick, I have no idea why or where it came from.” It seemed like too little too late to be trying to figure him out now.
Alicia sipped her tea thoughtfully and then sighed and ran her hands through her long hair. She was growing it out, probably for the wedding. The golden strands stayed slightly upright with static at the ends, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“I might know why some things make him tick,” she admitted quietly, judging my reactions carefully. “Jared went to see him the other day, and when he got back, he told me everything. I think you deserve to know too.”
“It’s not Jared’s story to share, or yours,” I told her half-heartedly. Truth be told, I was dying to know what Alicia knew, but I also felt like I had to hear it from Caleb.
“I know. That’s how he felt too. That’s why he didn’t tell me before, but when he got back, he said it was time for him to step in. Also, both of us felt like you deserved the truth, and Jared’s convinced Caleb will never tell you. Apparently, he doesn’t talk about it. Ever.”
My curiosity was definitely piqued. And if both Jared and Alicia felt like I should be told the truth and Caleb wasn’t going to tell me, then why not? I’d come clean to him later and take whatever might come my way for hearing his story from someone else. But for right now, I just wanted the truth. I was desperate to make even a lick of sense of the infuriating man.
“Okay, I’m all ears. I should warn you. We both might be taking that road to hell together for talking about this behind his back.”
Alicia nodded, sadness in her eyes even as her jaw set in determination. “I know, but I hate seeing you like this, and I don’t think you’re going to be able to sort things out with him if you don’t know where’s he’s coming from, assuming you’d want a shot at something real with him. On the other hand, I don’t think you’re going to be able to move on without the ‘what if’s’, even if you don’t want to give things a shot with him. There will always just be too many unanswered questions.”
It really was remarkable how well my sister knew me. I was infinitely grateful suddenly that she was here for me, that she’d come armed with the answers I needed to clear up the chaos swirling around in my head.
“True. Okay, I’m listening. What secret is the great Caleb Larsen hiding?”
I’d assumed that he had some kind of horrific romantic past that was influencing and informing his actions now. I just never thought that it would’ve been quite as terrible as the tale Alicia came out with.
“Back in San Diego before the band made it big, Caleb had a girlfriend. They were together for a long time apparently. They got engaged when the band started getting a little more popular, and the whole wedding was planned when they got their offer to come out here.”
“He was engaged?” I breathed, unable to find my voice.
Alicia nodded. “He was. Engaged, and according to Jared, he actually loved the woman a lot. Her name is Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth. So she was the ghost who was still chasing him. “What happened?”
“As the band started gaining popularity and touring a little, things were still okay between them. Then they got signed by a big label, and like I said, the wedding was already planned, but Caleb had a choice. Elizabeth didn’t want to move to L.A., so she told him to choose between her and the band. She begged him not to leave.”
“But he did?” Of course, he had. That also made his words make a little more sense. They echoed in my mind as Alicia talked, him telling me that he’d had to make sacrifices for success, that he would’ve been happier if they hadn’t blown up. More specifically, his belief that nothing would last forever. It all made perfect sense now.
“He chose Destitute and L.A., yeah. But it gets worse. They had a huge fight after she’d begged him to stay. Caleb thought she just needed some time to calm down, so when she told him to leave, he did. He went to Jared’s to talk and drink and blow off some steam, but Elizabeth didn’t take the time alone to calm down.”
“Oh no,” I said softly, almost afraid to hear what she was going to say next. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how Caleb must’ve felt.
Alicia smiled grimly. “Oh no is right. As it turned out, she went out and slept with a friend of theirs just to spite him.”
My heart ached for what Caleb had gone through, how shattered he must’ve been when he found this out. Alicia had been right about one thing, this did make me understand things a hell of a lot better.
“How did we not know about any of this?” I asked her. Between the two of us, it was literally our jobs to know every last thing about these guys.
“I asked that too. Apparently back then, Elizabeth didn’t want to be in the public eye, even locally, so Caleb and the others never mentioned that he wasn’t single. People just assumed that he was, and he never corrected them. After everything happened, Elizabeth has kept an extremely low profile.”
“Wow, that all sounds horrendously painful,” I remarked, trying to put myself in Caleb’s shoes, to see the world as he saw it because of what he’d been through. Even just pretending to be looking at things from his shoes was too painful for me to bear.
There I’d been, sulking and crying for days because he’d walked out on me, but he’d been cheated on by his fiancée, a woman that he trusted and loved. A woman that he was planning a future with. How could I blame him for not believing in happily ever afters, personally or professionally?
I couldn’t. Not really. It was all so complicated and meshed together that it was easy to see how tangled the concepts were for Caleb. Destitute and long-term happiness weren’t two things he believed could be achieved simultaneously.
“Now you know his truth,” Alicia said, setting her now-cold cup of tea down. “I just wanted you to know so you could evaluate him in the context of everything. It wasn’t fair to either of you, you not knowing.”
“Thanks, sis,” I said, rising when she did and hugging her as she reached for her purse. “For everything.”
“Anything for you,” she replied, returning my hug with a tight one of her own. “I know the knowledge doesn’t give you a miracle map of what to do, but I hope it sheds some light. Good luck. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Will do,” I told her, walking her to the door. “Say thanks to Jared for me.”
“Will do,” she repeated in a sing-song voice, and then she was gone. The bomb she’d dropped followed me around for the rest of the day. My heart and soul ached for Caleb’s sake when I thought of it all, while I also tried to figure out where that left me in the picture that was Caleb’s life and belief system.
The truth that I was loathe to admit to myself was that I didn’t know if I could live in the shadow of a woman from the past. I didn’t know how he would react when I told him about Elizabeth, and I didn’t know if and how I’d be able to be with him if he was still hung up on her.