Last Summer(71)

She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m so sorry.”

“I believe you love me. You might love him, too. But I won’t share you. I doubt Nathan will either.” He tucks an errant strand of hair, now moist from her tears, behind her ear. “I love you, Ella.” He kisses her lips and moves away.

“No!” Ella follows him into the entryway. “You can’t leave me!”

He steps into his loafers, pockets his wallet, and picks up his keys. He removes one of the two flash drives from his key chain, takes her hand, and closes her fingers around the drive. “This is yours. You’ll find all two thousand eighty-two files I removed from your laptop.”

Ella opens her hand and stares at the little red drive. “You scrubbed my computer?”

“And your phone and cloud accounts. You asked me to. It was part of the promise I made to you. You didn’t want access to anything that chanced you remembering Nathan.”

“I guess we didn’t anticipate him reoffering the exclusive to his story,” she says, glum.

Damien doesn’t comment. He takes a breath. “I also wiped Luxe Avenue’s servers of any correspondence between you and your editor about him in case you asked your boss for anything.”

She flinches. “You hacked into Luxe?”

“It’s what I do, El. I protect what’s mine.”

“Then why are you leaving me?”

He swings the garment bag over his shoulder. “I’m not leaving you. I’m letting you go.”





CHAPTER 30

Ella nurses a mug of cold, bitter coffee and stares out the kitchen window into the gray afternoon. The city and bay are there, but she can’t make out anything other than the faint outline of nearby buildings. Off in the distance, the foghorns at the middle and south span of the Golden Gate Bridge blare their warning, the sound forlorn, echoing off the city’s cold, sunless shores.

It’s been over twenty-four hours since Damien walked out their front door. He didn’t leave her. He let her go, like a drab outfit discarded at the donation center. Somehow it makes their parting that much worse. It evaporates the sliver of hope for them he tried to instill in her.

Do you remember the first time we saw this kitchen? Do you remember what I said to you?

How are they supposed to come back here and find each other when he’s already gone?

Dejected, Ella hasn’t slept, showered, or eaten anything other than dry toast last night. She’s stewing in guilt and that’s what she deserves.

She hasn’t opened her laptop to finish the article that Rebecca’s expecting in her in-box tomorrow. She also hasn’t returned any phone calls. And there have been plenty. Rebecca’s left two messages. One, she’s sending a photographer to Anchorage to meet up with Nathan to shoot the cover. And two, she wants an update from Ella ASAP. If she misses tomorrow’s deadline, she’ll leave the entire team scrambling.

Nathan’s called four times since she landed in Reno. The first three were hang-ups when she didn’t answer. The last call, he left a message, an apology. He shouldn’t have said those things about the way she conducts her assignments. They were gross exaggerations.

What about her telling him that she loved him? Was that a gross exaggeration, too?

Nathan and Damien don’t seem to think so.

Davie has also called. She left a message reminding Ella about her client’s art exhibit tonight. And finally, Andrew. She let his call go to voice mail, and when she eventually listens to it, it makes her smile more than she has in the past day. He has a date tomorrow night. He’s been seeing someone for a couple of months and it’s getting serious. Can Ella meet him at Westfield Centre? Shopping for a new outfit makes him want to stab his eyeballs. But he also wants to make an impression. This girl, she’s different from the others.

Just as Ella finishes listening to Andrew’s message, Damien calls. She answers his on the first ring.

In a dry, measured tone, Damien tells her his plans. He’s staying at the Embarcadero Hyatt Regency. The internal investigation at PDN is keeping him in town. He’ll let her know if he has to fly overseas. Otherwise, he’ll give her his address once he finds a more permanent place and figures out what he’s going to do.

Not them, she notices. Not us or we.

He. Him. Alone.

Ella wants to cry into her coffee, but the tears won’t come. She’s married and in love with her husband. She wouldn’t have slept with Nathan unless she had good reason.

The Maldives.

Her mind keeps circling back to that.

Damien mentioned an argument they’d had while on vacation, of which Ella has no recollection. But she can speculate. For whatever reason, on that trip, she told him she wanted to start a family, but he brushed her off. Ella then slept with Nathan because she’d been infuriated with Damien, disillusioned about their marriage. Crushed she couldn’t convince him to have kids.

So she lashed out. She wanted to hurt Damien the way he’d hurt her. It’s what she does. After her parents’ deaths, she destroyed her mom’s Lladró collection, and she did something similar after Grace’s death. Grace’s dad had asked Ella for photos of his daughter to use at the funeral. Rather than saying no, Ella ripped every photo she had of Grace, including the pages in her yearbook. Seething, she put the torn pieces in a shoebox and left them on Grace’s mother’s porch, where her dad was sleeping on the couch while in town to bury his daughter. Spite and rage drove her to hurt Stan because she blamed him for Grace’s death. In the end, though, Ella only hurt herself. The only photos she has of her best friend are in her memory.