By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(50)

Priya beamed at her. “I would love some chocolate cake, actually! It’s probably going to spoil our dinner, but I don’t care. Where are we going, Izzy?”

Beau’s eyes snapped to her. “Oh, you’re going out to dinner tonight?”

Izzy nodded. He had that weird, blank look on his face again.

“Yeah, to a Mexican place downtown. Didn’t I tell you?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh my God.” Everyone in the room looked at Priya. “This cake. This cake is incredible. You told me about the pool, and the bathtub, but not the cake. Is there just cake like this here, all the time? You have to go back to New York in what, a week? How are you going to survive?”

Beau turned away and sat back down. Okay, maybe he’d had enough of Priya. Though, to be fair, he’d been a lot nicer to her than Izzy would have guessed. And a lot nicer than he’d been to Izzy when she’d gotten here.

“Speaking of the pool,” she said. “Let’s go outside. You can finish your cake as I show you the gardens and the pool. And the orchard.” She smiled in Beau’s direction, but he didn’t look at her. She took Priya’s arm and steered her firmly toward the kitchen door. “See you later, Beau, Michaela. Thanks for the cake.”

Priya was subdued—for her—during the tour of the gardens and the pool. It wasn’t until they got back to the car and were on their way down the hill that she exploded.

“OH MY GOD.”

Izzy grinned. “Great house, isn’t it?”

Priya let out a high-pitched noise. “House? The house? You think I’m talking about the house? Yes, yes, the house is lovely, that is not what that OH MY GOD was for. Isabelle Marlowe, WHEN are you going to jump that man? Or have you done it already? Tell me you’ve already done it, and you just haven’t told me.”

Well, at least Priya had waited to say this until they were out of Beau’s hearing.

Though…her voice carried pretty far.

“No, I have not, and I will not,” she said. “Beau and I are barely even friends!”

Priya threw her hands up. “If that man said, ‘It’s been my pleasure,’ about me the way he said it about you, and then smiled at me like THAT? We would be a LOT more than friends by later that night.”

“PRIYA.”

“Well! I’m just saying! Did you see his shoulders?”

Izzy sighed. She should have known this would happen. This, she realized, was why she hadn’t wanted Priya to meet Beau, because she had known this would happen.

“You can just say all you want, but nothing like that is happening. First of all, I’m here for work. Second of all, he dates models and actresses and people like that. Not people like me.”

“Okay, well, FIRST of all, you’re not working FOR him, you’re working with him. People who work together date all the time. And SECOND, you’re as incredible as ANY model,” Priya said. “If Beau doesn’t know that, he’s not worth you!”

Izzy squeezed Priya’s hand. See, this was why she’d missed her.

“You’re the best,” she said.

“BUT,” Priya said. “I’m pretty sure he does know it.”





Izzy got home from dinner late that night and poked her head into the TV room to see if Beau was there, but it was empty. She usually ran into him in the kitchen during the day, either in the morning or at lunchtime, but on Friday she didn’t see him at all until she met him in the library.

“Hi.” She handed him his notebook when she sat down.

“Hi,” he said, without quite looking at her. There was no real preamble that day; he just took the notebook, flipped it open, and started writing. A while later, he switched to his laptop—she’d stopped setting the timer; he didn’t need it anymore—and she scribbled in her notebook. She was just…jotting down some more of that idea, that’s all.

When he finished, he pushed the laptop across the table to Izzy.

When I was sixteen, my dad finally won an Oscar. I say “finally” because that had been his goal for years. He’d been an acclaimed screenwriter since I was a kid. He’d written a ton of movies, and some of his movies had gone on to win Best Picture. Sometimes he was also nominated for the screenplay, but he would get so resentful when he wasn’t.

“Apparently, the movie just wrote itself,” he would grumble, every time.

My mom always looked at him when he said that, I remember that now. But she never responded.

The night he won, my parents left together for the ceremony, my dad a little frumpy, as usual, my mom glamorous, also as usual. She often tried to hide—or at least minimize—how much taller she was than my dad, but that night, she wore these super high heels. I overheard her on the phone with one of her friends that day, when she was getting dressed. “You’re right,” she said. “Flats just don’t work with this dress. Fine, I’m going to do it.”

When they got home that night, I expected them to be gleeful, celebratory, triumphant. But instead, they were quiet, angry, as they walked in the door.

“Stop putting words in my mouth,” I heard my mom say in a low tone. I’ve always had much better hearing than my parents thought. “I didn’t say that.”