Page 46

Jo scoffed, flagging down the bartender. “I’m an excellent multitasker. What do you say we order another round and by the time we’re done I promise we’ll have a plan for your books and your love life.”

It was hard to say no to her. She supposed that was how Jo had gone from being Derek’s one-night stand to his nanny to his wife. It was certainly how Kat wound up telling her the whole sorry story of her and Beckett over bottomless mimosas and Belgian waffles covered in whipped cream and glazed strawberries.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Jo said, licking a dollop of whipped cream off her lips, “you mean to tell me you and Beckett were together for a year and a half and it never got leaked to the press?” She shook her head, cutting another triangle of waffle. “Damn. That man is better at keeping secrets than a Hollywood makeup artist.”

Kat frowned. “That’s actually the problem. He’s a little too good at keeping secrets.”

“Oh, shit,” Jo said, gesturing with her knife. “Don’t tell me he cheated on you. I know it was a long time ago, but I will still castrate that man if he—”

“Nothing like that. Beckett would never cheat.”

“Then what?”

Kat pushed her plate away, drawing circles in the condensation on her glass with the tip of her finger. “He had been pulling away for months. He started taking phone calls in the other room, like he didn’t want me to hear his conversations.”

“You’re sure there was no one else?”

“I’m sure. I’d find him awake in the middle of the night just staring into space. Something was obviously bothering him but he wouldn’t tell me what. He just kept saying he couldn’t talk to me about it. And, okay, I get it. There are some things you want to keep to yourself. Fine. But... I don’t know. It started to feel like…”

“Like what?”

“Like he was shutting me out of his life. He’d get frustrated when I asked him where he’d been. He wouldn’t show up when he said he would, or he’d show up really late with no explanation. Not all the time, but enough, especially because he used to be so reliable. I hated feeling so paranoid and insecure. That’s not who I am.”

“I know. You’re a total badass.”

She sighed, ignoring Jo’s sympathetic expression as she continued. “I’d always felt so lucky to be Beckett Hayes’ girlfriend, even if no one knew it but us and the band. He was older and gorgeous and everyone wanted him, but he wanted me. I thought we were going to be together forever. The things we believe when we’re twenty-two,” she said with a mirthless huff of laughter.

“So what happened?”

Kat shrugged. “I had enough. I’d just finished my first book and a small bookstore on Long Island had agreed to host a book launch event for me. I couldn’t believe it. It’s not very often that bookstores hold launch events for indie authors, especially debuts. They even got a sheet cake that said ‘happy book birthday’ on it. It was the first time I thought that someday I could make a whole career of it. I kept thinking about how we wanted kids, but I didn’t want us to both be on the road all the time.”

“You were talking about kids,” Jo breathed, sympathy pulling her brows together.

“We always talked about the future. This nebulous ‘someday’ when he’d stop touring so much, and I’d write my books. I’d be making my own money, be home to get the kids off the school bus. They’d go to a normal school, have a normal life. It seemed like people making a big deal about my first book put us that much closer to making the dream a reality.” She dashed away a tear from the corner of her eye before it could fall. “I was out here trying to build our future, and he couldn’t even be bothered to show up on the most important day of my career.”

“No,” Jo gasped. “He didn’t show up?”

Kat shook her head. “I kept looking for him, like an idiot, but he never came. He never called. He never texted. And when he came to my hotel room later that night with a wilted bouquet and refused to tell me why he hadn’t made it... What was so important that he couldn’t come? And why couldn’t he just talk to me?”

She drained the dregs of her mimosa, letting the bubbles tickle her nose and pull her back to the present, out of that lonely hotel room all those years ago.

“I couldn’t do it anymore. He didn’t trust me enough to let me in, and I couldn’t spend another night waiting for him to. The next day I asked Derek for a transfer to a different band’s team. We didn’t see each other or talk again until the reunion show at the Hotel Bellwether last summer.”

Jo’s eyes widened. “Like, at all? After all that, you didn’t talk for years?”

“There were a few times I got phone calls from an unknown number and the line would be silent and I thought it could be him, but... no. He didn’t even try to fight for me. In the end, our relationship didn’t mean as much to him as it meant to me.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Jo shoved their dishes to the side of the table, silverware clattering against porcelain. “That doesn’t make any sense. That man is in love with you.”

Kat huffed a laugh. “I promise you, he’s not.”

“I promise you, he is. The way he looks at you? He can’t keep his eyes off you. Something must have happened. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t matter what happened. The problem was never that he had other things going on or that he was too busy to come to a bookstore. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t tell me anything. He wouldn’t let me in.”

“Maybe he couldn’t.”

“What could possibly have been going on that he couldn’t talk to me about it?”