“What was the focus of the conversation?” I pressed. This was all very uncomfortable.
“You.”
My heart leapt. I hadn’t known. Ian had never mentioned I’d made an impression on him back then. He’d never said a thing about it.
“What about me?” I asked.
She looked vaguely embarrassed by the admission that she’d talked to Ian about me. “He liked you. He just wanted to know about you.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked again.
“Exactly?” She asked with a raise of her eyebrow.
I nodded. “Exactly.”
Her eyes focused anywhere but on me. “I told him that you were not working as an EMT anymore. I told him that you had an interest in video work and had gotten a job at the news station. I didn’t tell him anything beyond that. I tried to discourage him from pursuing you because you were in the middle of so much.”
“And why didn’t you tell me about all this?” I naturally recoiled from the idea that Caroline had told anyone anything about me. I was a private person, even before the accident. I was even more of one now. At the time, I’m sure I would have been furious if I’d known. At this point I wasn’t furious, but I was… skeptical.
Her eyes skittered back to me, but only for a moment. They fled a second after connecting with mine. She was clearly worried I’d explode in anger. “Because you were a mess right then. Remember? Your dad was having all those issues financially, you were just starting a new job, and you were still getting over Sam’s—” She trailed off.
“Sam’s death?” I repeated.
It hurt a bit to say it, but I was able to say it now. I hadn’t really been able to say it then. Back then, even thinking about Sam had me melting into tears.
Caroline nodded at me. “You weren’t exactly in the market for a relationship.”
I couldn’t really argue with that assessment. I’d been a mess. Psychologically and physically. Hell, I’d been struggling to relearn how to write at the time (I’d since learned to write with my right hand; ugly but workable). Which was why I was dragged to that damn support group in the first place.
“What else did you tell him?” I asked her.
She shook her head at me. Her pale hair caught the afternoon light and made her look like a somewhat sheepish angel. “Nothing much. Nothing you would object to. But it was obvious that he was head over heels for you.” She flashed her teeth at me. “I think he was waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.”
I thought back to meeting Ian at South by Southwest. I’d thought it was just fate that the kid wandered my way and Ian had followed. Maybe it had been something more all along. Something engineered.
“The song is about you,” Caroline added.
I blinked at her. “What song?” Part of me already knew.
“This One’s For You.”
The song that had been stuck in my head all day. All month. It was a love song. The kind of love song that makes the hair on your arms stand up and shivers run down your spine. My heart fluttered again, like a hummingbird. That was happening a lot lately. It couldn’t be entirely healthy.
“Do you think so?” My voice sounded tiny in my ears. Because they were ringing. I’d wondered if it was about me. But I’d been too scared to ask Ian.
Caroline smiled at me, and it almost hurt. Hope hurts if you aren’t prepared for it. I wasn’t prepared.
“It’s got to be about you,” she replied. “It’s clear it’s about you. I know Ian wrote that song,” she told me. “It’s obvious to me because it sounds just like him. And just like you.”
I shook my head back and forth. All of this was too unbelievable.
It couldn’t be true.
Did Ian really love me? Was it real?
“You don’t know that,” I said to her. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what I was being told.
Caroline’s expression shifted again. She pushed her white-blond hair back behind her ears and smiled at me tiredly. It occurred to me that she must be jet lagged and exhausted from her flight all the way from Botswana. “I know Ian pretty well,” she told me. “I’ve known him for years, and I knew that he wouldn’t have called and asked about you for nothing. He’d never called me before, even when he was in the thick of his own very serious troubles. But he called me about you, Vanessa.”
I swallowed hard as reality came back and intruded on me. “I have to let him go. For his own good.”
“You love him, don’t you?” she asked me. I didn’t deny it. I just simply couldn’t. “You’ll regret it if you let him go.” Her voice was firm, and her expression matched. “He wants you, and it’s not just some passing thing. He loves you. I know that he does.”
I couldn’t quite process what I was hearing yet. It would take me some time alone to do so. And then, when I was done, I would need to speak to Ian. I’d need the truth to come from him.
“I don’t know,” I confessed.
“Remember when our positions were reversed?” she asked me. “When I was the one that doubted whether or not Christopher and I could make it work?”
I nodded. “I remember.”
“You encouraged me to take the risk and go to him,” she said. “Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”
That had been incredibly easy for me to do. Christopher and Caroline were obviously meant to be together. They were a clear match. Soulmates. Faith and her husband were no different. Sometimes people meet and it’s just plain that the universe wants them to be together.
But I’d already met my soulmate and then lost him. Or I thought that I had, anyway. Can a person have two soulmates? Can a person be that lucky? I’d finally gotten over Sam’s death enough to let me date again, but this was more than just casually seeing someone. I was in love with Ian. I wanted him to love me back. I wanted him to be the one.
And if I was that lucky, if everything that Caroline was telling me was true, what would that mean? There were still so many obstacles in the way.
“Are you mad at me?” Caroline asked.
I couldn’t process anything. My anger had already deserted me. I didn’t have enough room in my psyche at the moment to be truly angry. “I’m glad you’re here,” I told her. “Even if you did gossip about me to Ian.”
“It wasn’t gossip.”
I frowned at her. “It was gossip. Not malicious gossip, but still gossip.”
She relented on the point. I could see it. But her conviction didn’t waver an inch on the larger issue. “He loves you,” she told me. “Don’t let anything get in the way of that.”
55
Vanessa
Caroline went off to visit Ian, and not five minutes later, my dad arrived at my door. His expression was panicked and he threw open the thin hospital door so forcefully that it bounced and banged against the wall.
“Vanessa!” He crossed the room and hovered awkwardly over me. “I’m sorry it took so long to get here. I’m so sorry, baby girl.”
My dad is physically a very big guy—tall, wide, and imposing. I’d only ever seen him this worked up a couple of times before. His skin was as beet red as our hair. He needed to get his blood pressure down before he had a heart attack.
“I’m okay, dad,” I promised him. “I’m fine. Sit down, please. Calm down.”
My mom had been by earlier. She’d had a similarly horrified reaction, but on a smaller scale. My dad was larger than life, physically and emotionally. When he got upset, it was better to stand back.
“My baby, my only child, is lying in a hospital bed,” he scoffed. His eyes were wide. “That’s the opposite of fine. That’s a father’s worst nightmare. Especially after—” he trailed off. We both knew.
My parents hated one another, but my accident a year ago had struck them both with such horror and worry that I’d awoken to find them holding hands at my bedside. I’d thought I was dead for sure.
I reached out and grabbed his hand in mine. “I know, dad. But I promise, I’m okay. We’
re both okay and the only real damage was to the car.”
“We?” His expressions shifted and he sat down on the bed. My dad was six foot four and almost three hundred pounds of angry Scotsman. The bed made an angry noise in protest, but we both ignored it. “That’s right,” he continued. “Faith’s message said you were with a man?” His skepticism and disapproval were obvious.
I nodded. “Yes. I was with a man, dad. Sometimes I do that.”
“Was it his fault? This man?” He said man, but he meant monster.
“Was it Ian’s fault? No,” I told my dad. He was not above marching over to Ian’s room and smothering him with a pillow. I needed to put a stop to whatever was going on in my dad’s head. I could see concern and anger swirling around in his expression. “Ian was in no way responsible for the accident. Some idiot kid ran a stop light.”
“Americans are horrible drivers. The whole bloody country is full of idiots.”
“I’m an American, dad,” I reminded him. “Technically, you’re an American too.”
He was a naturalized citizen going on forty years now. My dad left Scotland as a young man and except for his visits to see his siblings, complained that Scotland was a backward land with terrible food and nothing to offer the world. Except when he was irritated by America. In which case Scotland became the only civilized place on earth.
“So, who is this Ian Conroe fellow? Is he Scottish?”
I blinked. Ian Scottish? I briefly visualized Ian in a kilt. Hmm. Not a terrible mental image.
“Oh, um, he’s from the Dallas area.” This was not a conversation I was prepared to have.
“It’s a good Scottish name, at least.” Coming from my dad, that was actually high praise. I didn’t trust it.
“I suppose so. But he’s American.”
“I guess that can’t be helped.” My dad looked at me with a probing expression. “What does he do?”
“He’s a musician,” I explained.
That earned a massive frown. “A musician?” He said it like it was a punishable offense. Which, for him, it might be. My dad didn’t really like music much. He liked listening to conservative talk radio, and rarely, big band music or perhaps classical music. He didn’t really go in for modern rock and roll at all. He thought it was noisy and obnoxious, which was funny because I thought his talk radio was utterly intolerable.
I nodded warily. I might as well tell him everything since we’d gotten this far. “Yes. He plays in a rock band called Axial Tilt. You know the band that I was filming?”
My dad nodded unhappily. “Ian is the drummer.”
“And you’re seeing him? Romantically?” my dad asked. “A drummer?”
My dad stared at me like I’d just told him that I’d been seeing a serial killer. Or maybe a circus clown.
I nodded. “He’s very successful and famous if it makes a difference.”
“Not really, no.” My dad dragged a hand through his formerly ginger and now mostly white beard. “It really doesn’t make any difference to me if he’s famous or penniless.” He paused. “In fact, it might make it worse that he’s famous because he might think he can get away with more.”
“Ian’s a good guy,” I promised my dad. “He’d never allow me to get hurt if he could help it. This was just an accident.
My dad looked like he wanted to argue with me, but simply didn’t have the heart at the moment. I was grateful for the respite. He held my hand and brushed my hair back from my face. “I don’t care what kind of guy he is,” he said eventually. “I don’t care how successful he is, or anything else. If he’d let my baby get hurt, I’d be in there murdering him right now and you know it.”
That I believed with one hundred percent certainty. My dad was not the sort of person who would put up with me being hurt. There was someone sitting in a jail right now that had my dad to thank for his speedy prosecution after the accident that took Sam. Only the fact that my dad considered prison to be worse than death accounted for him still being alive at all. My dad was no longer a multimillionaire, but I wouldn’t put it past him to figure out a way to kill someone and get away with it if he thought he should. My dad made up his own rules. And under my dad’s rules, family always comes first.
“Please don’t murder Ian,” I told my dad. “I like him.”
He nodded grudgingly. “He’s lucky you aren’t hurt.”
“He’s hurt more than me.”
“That would only make him easier to murder, so don’t tempt me.”
“Dad.” My tone was disapproving.
“I’m sorry,” he told me. “I am. I just can’t stand seeing you back in a hospital bed. We already did this once and it almost killed me.”
“Yeah, me too,” I quipped.
His expression turned pained. “That’s not funny, Vanessa.”
“It’s kind of funny,” I replied.
“Not to me. Never to me.” He hugged me very carefully like he was afraid that I might break. “You’re tough and you got that from me, but I’m not tough when it comes to you, Vanessa. All I want is for you to be happy, and healthy, and safe.”
“I know dad.” My father had a lot of flaws, but not loving me wasn’t one of them. I’d learned a lot about how his mind worked after seeing him lose his company. He was the sort of person that let his ego get ahead of his brain sometimes. But that didn’t make him a bad person, or a bad father. It just made him complicated and troubled, and sometimes difficult to manage. But he loved me. I knew that was true, and I also knew that was what really mattered much more than money.
He shook his head at me. Although his flight had been shorter than Caroline’s, he looked much more jet lagged. “You can’t know. Not until you have a child yourself, Vanessa.” He picked up my hand and held it in his own massive one. “I just want to wrap you in bubble wrap and keep you from ever getting in another accident for the rest of your life. I think that phone call from Caroline took ten years off my life.”
“Don’t say that, dad.” I worried about his health. He had hypertension, and him being such a massive person had to put a lot of pressure on his heart in general.
He sighed. “I’m sorry. I just mean to say that I’m glad you’re alright. When are they going to let you go home?”
“Soon. They did all kinds of tests on me today. I bumped my head pretty badly in the crash.”
“Are they going to keep you overnight?”
“Yeah. Just for observation,”
“Do you need me to get you anything? Food? Something to read?” He patted his pockets like he might find a sandwich in one.
I shook my head. “No. I’m fine. Caroline and Faith got me everything I need. I’m really okay.”
He still looked doubtful. “Alright, Vanessa. If you say so.” He paused. “Can I go see this Ian character that was in the crash with you?”
“Absolutely not,” I told him. “He’s got a badly broken leg and needs to rest.”
“I just want to introduce myself,” my dad said, faking innocence. It didn’t fool me for a second. “I won’t throw him out a window or anything.”
“No, dad. Please. We’re not that serious and I don’t want you to make things weird.”
He frowned. “Weird?”
“You’ll scare him.”
He grinned evilly. “Only if he deserves it.”
“Dad, no.” I shook my head at him. “You always think the men I see deserve scaring.”
“Well, yes,” he agreed. “But it’s my job to put the fear of God in them. I wouldn’t be doing my duty as your father if I didn’t let them know what the stakes were.”
“I’m a grownup, dad. I don’t need you threatening my boyfriends for me.”
“Oh, so he’s your boyfriend? I thought you weren’t that serious?”
This was spinning out of control. My dad was clearly much too curious about Ian. My dad knew me, too. He knew when I was minimizing my feelings, because I’d learned that particular strategy from him. So, naturally, he saw straigh
t through my attempt to downplay my relationship with Ian.
“Dad, I want you to promise me you won’t go see Ian or bother him at all.”
“And what if he comes to me?” my dad asked in a low whisper. “Then can I meet him?”
I blinked. “No. Because he won’t.”
The sound of someone clearing their throat at the doorway prompted me to turn. Ian was staring at me expectantly from a wheelchair. His newly gap-toothed smile was nervous.
“Hi, Vanessa. Is this a bad time?”
56
Ian
Vanessa’s dad was basically a mean-looking, ginger Shrek. The man was a fucking ogre. Vanessa wasn’t that tall. She wasn’t short either, but apparently, she’d been only a few paternal genes away from being a WNBA player. Her father was so large that he seemed to dwarf Vanessa and the hospital room we were in.
No wonder Vanessa had cautioned me against meeting him. He could probably squash me like a bug, and I was way taller and stronger than most people. The giant stared at me like he was considering whether to eat me or let me talk to his daughter. He looked genuinely torn between the two options. I hoped he wasn’t hungry.
At his side, Vanessa’s porcelain skin turned an even fairer shade of white.
“Ian,” she gasped.
The wheelchair pretty much made retreat impossible since I’d only mastered forward motion. So, even if I wanted to chicken out, which I didn’t as it would be unseemly, I couldn’t. So, I wheeled myself forward with as much confidence as I could muster.
“I commandeered a wheelchair and snuck out of my room,” I told her. “I wanted to see how you were.”
She didn’t seem to know what to say. Her worried gaze kept pinging back and forth between me and her father. It was time to acknowledge the elephant in the room who was staring at me warily from under his bushy red eyebrows.
“You must be Vanessa’s father,” I said, addressing the ogre. “It’s nice to meet you.” I was happy that I sounded relatively normal and confident. But it didn’t last long.
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