By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(54)

But instead she just sat there and thought. About Beau’s apology, about what she’d decided on the beach, about how the past three weeks had made her like Beau and trust him. She wanted to know, really know, if he’d been worthy of her trust.

Finally, she walked back downstairs and into the kitchen. Somehow, she knew she’d find Beau there. He was sitting at the table, his notebook in front of him, staring out the window. He turned when she walked in.

Was she doing the right thing here? She was about to find out.

“Isabelle. I thought you—”

“You said you wish you’d explained everything to me,” she said. “Okay, then.” She sat down across from him. “Explain.”

He looked at her. “You don’t have to let me explain.”

She nodded. “I know I don’t.”

She was doing this for herself, not for Beau. She wanted to know if she’d been wrong to trust him, to care about him. She wanted to know if she’d been wrong to trust herself. And, selfishly, she wanted to leave Santa Barbara, and this house, with good memories—to remember this as the place where she’d started to write again, to believe in herself again.

He let out a breath. “Okay.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Okay. About a year after that Oscar night, my parents split up. They’d had a lot of fights like that before that night, but then a lot more afterward. With my dad loud and pointed, my mom silent. I never thought they’d actually get a divorce, though—they’d been fighting like that for years, it just felt like that’s how their relationship was. And then my dad took me out to dinner one night and told me they were splitting up. I should have expected it, but I didn’t—it felt like it came out of nowhere. He said it was because my mom was bitter, angry at him for all his success. He told me she’d turned to another man, that he’d had to file for divorce because of that.” He looked down at his folded hands. “And I believed all of it. She didn’t…This sounds like I’m blaming her, I’m not, but she didn’t say anything to me about it for a while. I’m pretty sure, now, that she didn’t even know he’d told me. And then when she did talk to me about it, he’d already been telling me all those lies about her for a while. When she moved out, she just said that she loved me very much, and that she would always be there for me, no matter what.”

He stared down at the table for a while before he started talking again.

“The divorce was really nasty,” he said quietly. “They fought over money a lot, my dad ranted about my mom to me all the time, and I took his side. My mom and I had always been close, but somehow…” He sighed. “That’s…When you said, in there, that I was originally going to write a very different kind of book, that’s what I’d planned to write. What I’d started writing. A vindication of my dad, who, yes, I had hero worship for, parroting back all the stories he’d told me about my mom, defending him against all the people who criticized him and his work, all that. When he died, some of the stuff I read about him—some of the stuff I heard people say—made me furious. I wanted to tell the world what a great writer he was, what a great person he was.”

He stood up. Izzy thought for a second he wasn’t going to finish.

“Do you want some water?” he asked.

Izzy nodded. She wasn’t particularly thirsty, but it seemed like he needed something to do.

He grabbed two glasses and poured them water from the tap. He started talking again almost as soon as he sat back down.

“Like I said—like I’m sure you know—he died two years ago. I kind of…lost it for a while when he died. You probably know that, too.”

She nodded.

He looked down at his hands. “The worst thing I did—the thing I’ll feel terrible about forever—is what I did, and said, to my mom, when she came to his funeral. She told me she came for me, and it infuriated me. I was just so…mad at the world then. And I was really mad at her. I blamed her, for him dying. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I didn’t make a lot of sense then. And so when she told me that, I said…” He stopped, and looked down for a few seconds. “I said such awful things to her. Like…like I did to you, in the library, except so much worse. I told her this was all her fault, that she was brainless, talentless, a leech on him. I repeated some of those things my dad said about her over the years.” He was silent for a moment. “She…I’ll never forget the look on her face when I said all of that. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I see it.”

Izzy tried not to react to anything he said, to just listen.

“Not too long after that, an agent approached me about writing a book. I jumped at the idea. I haven’t really had an acting career in years, and I wanted to write. I’d always sort of thought I’d turn to screenwriting eventually, like him, you know.”

He laughed quietly, but there was a note in his laughter she didn’t like. It was that same mean laugh from the first week.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her.

“Don’t laugh like that. That’s not…I don’t like it when you do that.”

That sounded so silly, so pointless to say, but he nodded like he understood what she meant.

“I don’t like it either. I don’t like me, when I do that.”