By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(51)

“You didn’t say anything,” my dad said. “Do you know how bad that made me look?”

They both stopped when they saw me, sitting there waiting for them. My mom smiled at me, but I could tell the smile was fake. I could feel the tension between them.

“Congratulations, Dad!” I said. I was thrilled for my dad; I knew how much he’d wanted to win.

He gave me a hug and grinned up at me.

“Thanks, Beau,” he said. “You were watching?”

I nodded. “Of course I was watching! I made everyone shush at the party when your category came up. We all cheered for you.”

He turned to look at my mom, who had kicked off her shoes and was taking the pins out of her hair. “Glad someone in this family is happy for me,” he said.

My mom looked up at that, a weary expression on her face. “Don’t” was all she said. She walked over to me, ran her hand over my hair, and kissed me on the forehead. I was just barely taller than her then. “Glad you were watching, Beau,” she said. She smiled at me and then turned, not quite looking at my dad. “I’m going upstairs to get this dress off and take a hot bath.” She kissed me again. “Good night.”

I waited until I was sure she was all the way upstairs.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” I asked my father.

He shrugged and dropped his bow tie on the table. “Your mother can be bitter. Jealous,” he said. “I forgot to thank her, up there onstage. But I had to thank all of the industry people, everyone having to do with the movie—she knows that! And then they started playing me off and I just ran out of time. She should understand that. I thanked her after, in the press conference, and you too, of course. It’s no big deal. She knows how important she is to me. But I don’t think it’s about that. I think it’s just hard for her to see my success, especially since she failed at her own career. It’s sad, really.”

He’d said things like this to me before, so I nodded. But I wasn’t sad for her, I was mad that she’d ruined this night for my dad for her own petty reasons.

He sat down on the couch next to me and sighed.

“That sucks, Dad. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really excited for you, though! Let me see the statue!”

It was still in his hand, and he looked at it for a moment, before he passed it over to me.

“I’ve wanted this for so long.” He traced his finger over his name, engraved on the bottom.

I was angry at my mom for weeks after that, for how deflated my dad was that night, for letting her own bitterness upstage his victory, for not being happy for him in the way I knew—or I thought I knew—she should be. To be honest, I was angry at her for years.

Now I’m just angry at myself.



When Izzy finished reading, she started again from the beginning, read it through once more, and thought for a while. Finally, she typed her notes into the document and pushed the laptop back to Beau.

Instead of looking at the screen, though, he looked at her.

“Why are you frowning like that? This time it is about what I wrote, I can tell. What’s wrong with it?”

She shook her head. “‘What’s wrong with it?’ is the wrong question. But you knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?” She smiled at Beau, but he didn’t smile back.

“Okay, pretend I asked the right question, whatever it is. I’m not in the mood to play guessing games right now. What’s the problem?”

Izzy tried to stay calm. That was her job, remember? She gestured to the laptop. “I gave you my notes right there; it might make more sense for you to read them.”

Beau pushed the laptop to the side. “I don’t want to read them. I want you to tell me. What’s wrong with it?”

Okay. She was finally going to have to do this.

“Fine. Like I said, it’s not that there’s something wrong with it, it’s that you’re skipping things. Why are you angry at yourself? What was behind the undercurrents that night? There’s a lot missing here. Maybe it’s a stylistic choice, maybe you’re just building up to it.” She didn’t think that’s what it was, though. “You sound like you’re talking around something key—both to you, and to the story—but the reader doesn’t know what it is, and it’s confusing. We can tell your hero worship of your dad wasn’t warranted. Why? Maybe you’re planning to get there, but you keep dropping these hints, without actually saying it. Why don’t you tell us what you’re really trying to say?”

His face shuttered. He closed the laptop, picked it up along with his notebook—the one he always gave her before he left the library—and stood up.

“Thanks for your ‘expertise.’”

He had that nasty tone in his voice again. Why had he pushed her to say all this if he was going to get mad? If he wasn’t even going to listen to her?

She swung around in her chair and kept talking as he walked to the door. “If you’re going to write a memoir, Beau, you need to either write the hard things, or ignore them completely—you can’t just dance around them like you’re doing. You could have written a very different book. I think you and I both know you intended to write a very different book.” He stopped walking. He didn’t turn around, but she kept going. “You could have taken the easy way out, but you didn’t want to. So if you, Beau Towers, are going to write this book, you have to write about the stuff that hurts to write about. Look, I get that it’s hard to write about all this, all of what you’ve shown me and all of what you haven’t even tried to write. Believe me, I get that. But—”