Los Angeles
“It’s been three goddamn months!” I shouted at our lawyers. “What do you mean you don’t have anything?”
The three suits glanced at one another while Pax slid to my side, taking my hand in his. The length of this boardroom table wasn’t sufficient to keep me from launching at them if they called us in here one more time to tell us they had nothing.
“Miss Carstairs.” The oldest one looked down his glasses at me. “We’ve exhausted every resource. The Cubans won’t let us speak to him, as is their right, and by law, he’s a citizen of their country.”
“But he’s a citizen of ours, too,” I snapped. “How many times can we meet here with you feeding me the same exact line?”
“This will be the last time,” he said, his tone dropping.
Pax squeezed my hand.
“You’re giving up.”
“There’s simply nowhere for us to go. We have no legal standing here.”
“You have millions of dollars—my dollars—at your disposal, and you’re telling me you can’t get an American citizen out of a foreign country?”
He leaned forward, looking every bit of his sixty years. “I’m telling you I can’t get a Cuban citizen out of Cuba. We have nothing that supersedes their jurisdiction in this matter.”
I leaned back, sagging in my chair.
Pax rose and thanked the lawyers, and Brandon walked them out, leaving us alone on the seventy-fifth floor of the Wilder Enterprises high-rise.
I found my feet and walked over to the window where the city of L.A. spread out beneath us.
“Penna?” Pax asked, coming to stand next to me.
“I have all this money,” I said, matter-of-fact. “Millions of dollars. Magazines, commercials, hell, my agent just got a movie offer yesterday.”
“That’s—”
“I have everything I could possibly want, but not the one person I need. I don’t know how to give up on him, or how to reconcile the fact that everything I have is worthless.”
He slipped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to his side, resting his head on top of mine. “We will never give up. We just have to find a rule to bend.”
But we both knew the truth: we were out of possibilities.
I drove to Grandma’s house in silence, turning off the radio. Three months since we’d had a Marine escort to the Athena. Three months since Paxton declared that he owned the ship, and he’d invite anyone he wanted aboard. Three months since I walked Elisa onto U.S. soil, presented her passport, and realized Cruz’s dream.
Two months since graduation.
A month until the premiere of our documentary.
The earth kept turning around me, while my heart lingered outside the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, kissing Cruz for the last time.
How different the world looked to me now that I’d tasted love and lost it. How much dimmer, how bland, how…depressing. It was as though my heartache had altered my vision as much as it had stripped me of every emotion except sorrow.
Well, anger was there, too.
I pulled my Range Rover into Grandma’s driveway and got out, Cruz’s voice in my head as I walked over the cobblestone path and up to the familiar porch.
“Penna!” Elisa called out, opening the door and hugging me.
“Hey,” I answered, hugging the petite girl back. She was quiet, careful, but her mind was just as sharp as mine, and when she spoke, her words were all the more powerful for the care she took with them.
“Penelope!” Grandma hugged me even tighter, nearly squishing the air from my lungs.
“Grandma,” I said, choking back a lump.
She drew away, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes deep wells of understanding and a lingering sadness. “Your meeting did not go well.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head as the first tears prickled. “There’s nothing they can do. They’ve given up.”
“Have you?” she asked.
I wiped away an errant tear and shook my head. “It took Cruz ten years to get Elisa out of Cuba. I think three months might be a little too soon to give up on him.”
She smiled, holding my face in her hands. “Me, too.”
…
Two days later, I pulled up in front of Oak Moss Grove, parking next to my mother’s Mercedes.
My hands flexed on the steering wheel while I pulled myself together. Then I sucked in a steadying breath, raised my chin, and got out of my car. I made my way up the steps that led to the rehabilitation center and opened the door, welcoming the icy blast of air conditioning.
Then I walked up to the reception desk with the biggest smile I could manage. “I’m so sorry, but I’m late!”
“Oh, that’s okay, Miss…” The receptionist looked at me with wide blue eyes.
“Carstairs. I’m sure my parents already headed in to see Brooke, and I got caught in traffic. You know L.A. on a Friday.”
“Boy, do I,” she said, smiling at me. “Let me walk you back.”
My heart thundered in my chest, at odds with my stomach that wanted to run the opposite direction, but I kept my pace steady as we made our way down the same hall Cruz and I had visited almost six months ago.
“Here we go,” she said, opening the door.
“Thank you so much!” I said with a quick grin, getting in the door and shutting it behind me. I threw the lock and leaned back against it as I met the incredulous stares of my mother, father, and Brooke.
Brooke, who I loved more than myself.
Brooke…who met my eyes for one sharp, horrified second and then looked away.
“Penna!” Mom exclaimed, jumping up.
“Careful, Mom. I wouldn’t want you to wrinkle your dress.”
“I don’t want her here,” Brooke said in an all-too-small voice.
“Well, I don’t give a flying fuck,” I snapped.
“Penelope!” Dad hissed, but walked over to me slowly, kissing my cheek. “I’m glad to see you, but do you really think this is the best way to do this?”
“It’s the only way to do this,” I countered, “when your only sister, the other half of your heart, drops a fucking stadium light on you, watches you shatter your leg, and then refuses to speak to you.”
“Penna, let’s be nice,” Mom cajoled, slipping over to the loveseat Brooke sat on in her designer tracksuit and wrapping her arm around her.
“I tried nice, Mom. I tried letters, and phone calls, and emails, and even a visit once. Nice got me nowhere, and I’m sick of being nice. Personally, I’m not sure how you’re not sick of being nice. I’m the one she nearly killed, and yet she’s the one you’re comforting.”
“She’s delicate.”
“She plotted against our friends and nearly killed several of us, Mom. I’d hardly call that delicate, right, Brooke?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Brooke wrung her hands.
“You don’t get a say anymore.”
Dad leaned against the door next to me, towering over me in height but never in attitude. He’d been the calm as I grew up, the blue sky to Mom’s tornado.
“Richard…” Mom cajoled.
“I’m on Penna’s side here. Brookie, I love you, but if you ever want to move forward, you’re going to have to stop hiding and confront what you did and whom you’ve hurt.”
It may quite possibly have been the most uncomfortable silence of my life as I watched Brooke struggle, then shake her head.
“I talked to Nick.”
Her eyes flew to mine.
“He was with us for the last couple of months on the cruise. He actually pulled off some pretty amazing ramp work in that chair in Cuba.”
Her brows furrowed.
“He also told me what you did to him. About Patrick.”
She sucked in her breath.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “That’s the only thing I’ll absolve you of. You cheating on Nick—that’s on you. Everything he did after that, what put him in that chair? That’s on him. He knows it. We all do. That was not your fault.”
Her gaze dropped, and her mouth pressed into a thin line.
“The rest is on you,” I said softly. “Everything you did to Pax, to Leah, to me. That’s on you.”
“You wouldn’t stop,” she whispered.
“I don’t have to stop. You don’t control me. What happened to Nick was a horrible accident that could have been prevented in so many ways. What you did was cause more, but you didn’t rip us apart, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
I waited for a response—hoped for one, but I’d stopped waiting for Brooke a while ago.
“I don’t forgive you yet,” I said, which got Mom’s attention.
“Penna!”
“Be quiet, Claire,” Dad snapped.
“I don’t have to forgive you, and you sure as hell haven’t so much as apologized or asked for forgiveness. Maybe one day I will, and that’s my choice. I know now that waiting for some kind of closure or explanation from you only prolongs my hurt, when I have every right to heal from what you did to me.”
“You didn’t stop!” Brooke shouted, coming to her feet. “After everything, you went right back out there, flipping that goddamned motorcycle as if nothing mattered! As if I don’t matter, only they do!”
“Of course you matter, and you were one of us!” I yelled. I sucked in a shaky breath; my eyes locked onto my sister for what I prayed would not be the last time.
“I was never one of you. Never reckless enough. Never willing to break myself over some stupid trick.”
“But you were willing to break me.”
“I never meant to hurt you, Penna. But you needed to stop. You all have to grow up and stop.”
I stepped forward but left my fingers on the door handle. “Did you know that I pulled off the first double backflip ever performed by a woman?”
Her eyes widened. “No.”
“Or that I fell in love with an incredible man who traded his life for mine? For his sister’s? That there’s an overwhelming chance that I will never see him again?”
Her shoulders sagged. “No.”
“I know you’re hurt. But your hurt does not trump mine. Somewhere along the way you forgot to write your own story. This one’s mine, and you don’t get a say in what’s between these pages. I’ll decide what my story is. I’m done feeling guilty over you. When you’re ready, come find me. Until then…focus on what makes you happy, because I’ll always want that for you, no matter what you did to me.”
I turned around, kissed Dad on the cheek, and walked out of the room, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other as I made my way down the hall.
The receptionist said something to me, but she sounded distant and easy to ignore. I pushed my way out the door and held my face up to the sun, feeling my heart break one last time over Brooke. Then I walked down the stairs, feeling like no matter how much it hurt now, I’d eventually stitch myself together. The hurt would come to an end.
“Penna!” Mom called, and I turned just before I reached my car.
“Go back inside, Mom. I’m sure Brooke needs you.”
She tucked her bobbed blond hair behind her ears and cleared her throat. “You know that I love you, right? Just as much as I love your sister?”
“Sure.”
“I do. But you… Penna, you’re a force of nature. You haven’t needed me since you were three years old and you discovered how to apply your own Band-Aids. You shunned cotillion, every society event, and when you did show up, it was always with Paxton Wilder or Landon Rhodes. Nothing existed for you outside your troop of Lost Boys. I have always loved you, but Brooke has always needed to be protected in a way you never will.”
“Maybe I needed you to side with me. She almost killed me, Mom, and you stand by her side like I’m going to hurt her. Like I’m the dangerous one in this situation.”
She put her hand on my face, her perfectly formed smile slipping for the barest of seconds. “I knew you would be okay—you’re so very loved by those boys of yours. But if I sided with you there was a very real chance I would lose Brooke to her demons, and I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I lost either of you.”
“Well, the good news is that we’re both alive. The bad news is you lost me anyway.”
Mom straightened, dropping her hand. “Well, my conscience can live with that.”
“I’m glad. Please tell Dad I’ll see him for lunch like usual on Thursday. Good-bye, Mom.”
I climbed into my Rover and shut the door. I made it to Grandma’s house before I burst into tears and cried on the shoulder of a woman who had become more like family to me in the past few months than the mother I was born to.
…
Music blared through my speakers as I attacked my apartment with cleaning supplies. Yes, I had someone who cleaned for me, but after yesterday’s fight with my mother and Brooke, I wanted to scrub everything dirty out of my life.
I threw open the door to my walk-in closet and started on the pile of crap I’d let accumulate in the corner. Sorting dirty laundry, bags, and gear into piles, I paused when Cruz’s backpack appeared.
I gathered it to me, hugging it against my chest like it was Cruz himself. God, it even smelled like him, or my nose tricked me. Either way, for that millisecond, he felt real instead of this nearly perfect man I’d made up.
I sat on the floor between the piles and pulled out the accordion file. Everything was exactly where I’d left it when I’d last looked at it in Miami. My fingers grazed his military paperwork, and I pulled out the paper-clipped stack.
None of it made any more sense than the first time I’d looked at it. I saw his discharge papers and read through the details of his service. Maybe it was a violation of his privacy, but I would have done anything to feel closer to him at that moment.
My forehead puckered when I found the next sheet, and my hands started to shake. Could this…?
Scared to get my hopes up, I read carefully. Cruz had gotten out of the military, but was there a chance this could be what I needed?
I whipped out my cell phone and called the only person I could think of—Brandon.
“What’s up, Penna?”
“I think I know how to get Cruz back, but I’m going to need some help.”
“What do you need? You know I’ll help,” he said after a moment of silence.
“I think I need to talk to the president.”
“Of course you do.”
