Last Summer: A Novel

by Kerry Lonsdale

She nods. The memory is so clear. “I want us to always come back here and find each other.”

  “I still feel that way.”

  Ella moistens her lips, tasting whiskey and coffee. “Then why didn’t you stop me when I told you Luxe Avenue was putting me back on the Donovan exclusive?”

  “I did.” Damien sets aside his mug. “I mean, I tried. I asked you to come to London, remember?”

  “You asked me to ditch my interview. Why didn’t you just come out and tell me about him?”

  “You’re right. I should have. But I was distracted. The internal investigation has been a total nightmare and it’s taken so much of my time. I tried to stop you after our last phone call.”

  “What call?” Ella asks but at the same time the answer comes to her. The argument they had after Nathan had taken her snowmobiling. The call when she’d told Damien she was going to Alaska. Clarity appears out of nowhere and she draws back a step.

  “You called Nathan that night.” The phone call that came just as they’d finished dinner. Nathan had stepped out onto his deck to take the call, only to return agitated.

  “I couldn’t reach you.”

  “I was conducting an interview. I silenced my phone. And if you recall, I wasn’t too happy with you at the moment.”

  “I figured, so I called Donovan instead. I wanted to remind him of the restraining order I threatened him with when he showed up at the hospital. I thought he would pull the exclusive and you’d fly to London.”

  Damien called and threatened him. Nathan must have seen his chances of convincing Ella to be with him slipping away at that phone call.

  The whiskey sours in Ella’s stomach. She sets down her mug and tucks loose wisps of hair behind her ear. “Nathan hadn’t invited me to Alaska yet when you called. I don’t think he would have, but he did right after he hung up with you,” Ella softly confesses.

  Before Ella can blink, Damien hurls his mug into the sink. Pottery shatters. Coffee splatters against the backsplash and cabinets.

  He grasps the counter’s edge with both hands, his back to Ella, and it takes a moment for her to realize he’s crying. Silent sobs that draw out her own tears. She gently lays a hand on his back. He’s perspiring. She can feel the damp heat of him through his cotton shirt.

  “Damien, love. Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asks in a voice thick with self-loathing. “I am. I keep fucking us up.”

  “No, no, no. That’s not true. I made mistakes, too. Big ones. Whatever’s happening with us is on us both. And we’re going to fix this together.”

  “We can’t,” he says, pinching the tears from his eyes. He turns to her. “I don’t think we can.”

  “What do you mean? We can. We’ll talk this through and come up with a solution. We’ll learn from our mistakes. We’ll be honest from now on. I promise.”

  Damien slowly shakes his head. “You can’t deny love.”

  “I’m not. I love you. I love you so much,” she says, grasping his arms.

  “I’m not talking about me.” He cups her face.

  Ella shakes her head hard. “I don’t love him. I don’t. I swear.”

  He turns away and lets go of her. “The photo.”

  “Means nothing! Nathan means nothing. I don’t love him.” She’s crying now, desperate for Damien to believe her.

  “I think you do. You just blocked it out. What happens when your memories come back?”

  “I don’t want them to, I swear,” she says, shocked by her own admission. The truth about the months leading up to her accident is worse than she could ever imagine.

  “He can give you a child, Ella. I can’t.”

  He looks past her, toward the entryway.

  Ella follows his gaze and sees what he’s been up to while she slept in. A large roller case and a garment bag wait at the door.

  He’s leaving her.

  “No!” She grasps his fingers and holds his hand to her breasts. “I love you, Damien. You’re it for me. You’re the one that I want.”

  “But you also want a child. That’s what you told me on our trip.”

  “Which trip?”

  “The Maldives. You said you wanted to start trying for kids. I wasn’t prepared to tell you about my . . . issue. I convinced you to table the discussion until we got home. But then—”

  Ella’s shoulders drop. “I went on assignment for Nathan’s article. You flew to London where I joined you afterward and—”

  “And several weeks later you found out you were pregnant. You were overjoyed. I knew it wasn’t mine, but I couldn’t take that happiness away from you. You know us—reuniting in London—you would have thought it was mine.” He lays a gentle kiss on her forehead. “I don’t know why you left Nathan last summer, but you chose to stay with me. And you chose me again at the hospital. You told me you could fix our mistakes. You said you knew how to suppress your memories of Nathan. You’d block your memory of the night of the accident, when we argued and I told you about my sterility. You didn’t want to feel anything for Nathan. You didn’t want to remember I was sterile, and you wanted to still believe that I didn’t want kids. You described it as ‘cleaning the slate.’ We could start over. Go back to the way we were. But it didn’t work, Ella. You ended up right back in his arms.”

  She squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I believe you love me. You might love him, too. But I won’t share you. I doubt Nathan will either.” He tucks an errant strand of hair, now moist from her tears, behind her ear. “I love you, Ella.” He kisses her lips and moves away.

  “No!” Ella follows him into the entryway. “You can’t leave me!”

  He steps into his loafers, pockets his wallet, and picks up his keys. He removes one of the two flash drives from his key chain, takes her hand, and closes her fingers around the drive. “This is yours. You’ll find all two thousand eighty-two files I removed from your laptop.”

  Ella opens her hand and stares at the little red drive. “You scrubbed my computer?”

  “And your phone and cloud accounts. You asked me to. It was part of the promise I made to you. You didn’t want access to anything that chanced you remembering Nathan.”

  “I guess we didn’t anticipate him reoffering the exclusive to his story,” she says, glum.

  Damien doesn’t comment. He takes a breath. “I also wiped Luxe Avenue’s servers of any correspondence between you and your editor about him in case you asked your boss for anything.”

  She flinches. “You hacked into Luxe?”

  “It’s what I do, El. I protect what’s mine.”

  “Then why are you leaving me?”

  He swings the garment bag over his shoulder. “I’m not leaving you. I’m letting you go.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Ella nurses a mug of cold, bitter coffee and stares out the kitchen window into the gray afternoon. The city and bay are there, but she can’t make out anything other than the faint outline of nearby buildings. Off in the distance, the foghorns at the middle and south span of the Golden Gate Bridge blare their warning, the sound forlorn, echoing off the city’s cold, sunless shores.

  It’s been over twenty-four hours since Damien walked out their front door. He didn’t leave her. He let her go, like a drab outfit discarded at the donation center. Somehow it makes their parting that much worse. It evaporates the sliver of hope for them he tried to instill in her.

  Do you remember the first time we saw this kitchen? Do you remember what I said to you?

  How are they supposed to come back here and find each other when he’s already gone?

  Dejected, Ella hasn’t slept, showered, or eaten anything other than dry toast last night. She’s stewing in guilt and that’s what she deserves.

  She hasn’t opened her laptop to finish the article that Rebecca’s expecting in her in-box tomorrow. She also hasn’t returned any phone calls. And there have been plenty. Rebecca’s left two messages. One, she’s sending a photograp
her to Anchorage to meet up with Nathan to shoot the cover. And two, she wants an update from Ella ASAP. If she misses tomorrow’s deadline, she’ll leave the entire team scrambling.

  Nathan’s called four times since she landed in Reno. The first three were hang-ups when she didn’t answer. The last call, he left a message, an apology. He shouldn’t have said those things about the way she conducts her assignments. They were gross exaggerations.

  What about her telling him that she loved him? Was that a gross exaggeration, too?

  Nathan and Damien don’t seem to think so.

  Davie has also called. She left a message reminding Ella about her client’s art exhibit tonight. And finally, Andrew. She let his call go to voice mail, and when she eventually listens to it, it makes her smile more than she has in the past day. He has a date tomorrow night. He’s been seeing someone for a couple of months and it’s getting serious. Can Ella meet him at Westfield Centre? Shopping for a new outfit makes him want to stab his eyeballs. But he also wants to make an impression. This girl, she’s different from the others.

  Just as Ella finishes listening to Andrew’s message, Damien calls. She answers his on the first ring.

  In a dry, measured tone, Damien tells her his plans. He’s staying at the Embarcadero Hyatt Regency. The internal investigation at PDN is keeping him in town. He’ll let her know if he has to fly overseas. Otherwise, he’ll give her his address once he finds a more permanent place and figures out what he’s going to do.

  Not them, she notices. Not us or we.

  He. Him. Alone.

  Ella wants to cry into her coffee, but the tears won’t come. She’s married and in love with her husband. She wouldn’t have slept with Nathan unless she had good reason.

  The Maldives.

  Her mind keeps circling back to that.

  Damien mentioned an argument they’d had while on vacation, of which Ella has no recollection. But she can speculate. For whatever reason, on that trip, she told him she wanted to start a family, but he brushed her off. Ella then slept with Nathan because she’d been infuriated with Damien, disillusioned about their marriage. Crushed she couldn’t convince him to have kids.

  So she lashed out. She wanted to hurt Damien the way he’d hurt her. It’s what she does. After her parents’ deaths, she destroyed her mom’s Lladró collection, and she did something similar after Grace’s death. Grace’s dad had asked Ella for photos of his daughter to use at the funeral. Rather than saying no, Ella ripped every photo she had of Grace, including the pages in her yearbook. Seething, she put the torn pieces in a shoebox and left them on Grace’s mother’s porch, where her dad was sleeping on the couch while in town to bury his daughter. Spite and rage drove her to hurt Stan because she blamed him for Grace’s death. In the end, though, Ella only hurt herself. The only photos she has of her best friend are in her memory.

  Of course, she has to consider the other reason she slept with Nathan.

  She fell in love.

  Behind her on the marble counter sits the thumb drive. That drive has the answers, perhaps the key to everything. Yet every time she reaches for it, she hesitates. Damien’s words come back, haunting her: Are you sure you want to remember?

  No, she’s not.

  There’s a reason she made herself forget. Because . . .

  No memories, no emotions.

  A coward’s way out.

  Stop being one, Ella reprimands herself. She needs to deal with this now, or else she’ll never fix what’s broken between her and Damien.

  Ella pours her coffee in the sink, leaving a brown spiderweb stain on the porcelain, and grabs the thumb drive. In her office, she boots up her laptop and plugs in the drive. Two thousand eighty-two items display in the window that pops open. Folders, files, transcribed recordings, and photos. Forgotten moments, even days, from the seven months prior to her accident if she’s counting her and Damien’s time in the Maldives.

  She picks through the files, opening random documents. Notes from her first interview with Nathan reveal they covered the same topics, proving Nathan hadn’t lied to her. Surprisingly, there’s a fully drafted article, similar in style and direction to the one she started the other day in Alaska. That’s comforting, and a huge help considering her deadline. But the photo she opens next is not.

  Nathan stands shirtless, waist deep in water, his bare back to the camera. Her cheeks heat. She quickly closes the file and opens the next.

  Nathan sits cross-legged on the ground, the front of him cast in the glow of firelight. His expression is reflective. From the look of this photo alone, Nathan hasn’t changed much between interviews. He still broods. Self-disgust still simmers just below his surface. Guilt has him living a solitary existence.

  Ella risks clicking open several more photos, none of which are incriminating or make her too uneasy about her relationship with Nathan. Though she’s overcome with the same feelings she had while looking at the photos of her pregnant self after her accident. The pictures don’t feel like they belong to her.

  Ella clicks through the files on Amira Silvers, the celebrity she interviewed last August. She doesn’t remember the interview, but Amira was the one who referred Ella to Dr. Irwin Whitely. Again, another draft article that wasn’t forwarded to Rebecca, along with eight recordings. Notes suggest Rebecca killed the article. The magazine didn’t have the space that month. But before the cancellation, the interview had been conducted over the course of three hours in a single day. Eight recordings tell her there were plenty of stops and starts during their discussion. What did they talk about off the record?

  Ella closes out the Silvers folder and opens the Irwin Whitely folder, also on this thumb drive. It is extensive. She opens the first document and starts reading. Several hours into her search she comes across a brief mention of a code to unblock memories, a trace that the mind follows to retrieve a specific memory or idea, even a miniscule fact that’s been stored.

  Ella pushes back from her desk with a whoop of relief. There it is. Now all she has to do is find the file with her code.

  Several hours later, when Ella is deep into her notes, her phone vibrates on her desk. Ella jerks, startled. Davie’s face glows on the screen. She snatches up her phone.

  “The opening is in an hour. Are you coming or not?” Davie asks after Ella apologizes for not getting back to her earlier.

  Ella looks at the time. Six o’clock p.m. She hasn’t showered, and her stomach has decided it’s no longer feeling sorry for itself. It growls. She glances back at the laptop. There are plenty more files to pick through, at least two months’ worth, and she still has an article to finish tonight. But she also needs some air.

  “I’ll be a little late, but yes, I’ll be there.”

  “Fantastic. See you then.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Located directly on the Embarcadero Promenade and under the Bay Bridge, the Pier 24 Photography gallery has beautiful views of the bay. But viewing photographs is not Ella’s idea of a great evening out, especially in her current frame of mind. She finds the showing, a retrospective of California architecture, from the adobe shacks built by the missionaries to the Spanish Colonial Revival bungalows and Eichler tract homes of suburbia, seriously boring. And two champagnes and a handful of passed hors d’oeuvres later, Ella is ready to leave. She sets down her glass and looks for the ladies’ room. After a quick pee and fresh lipstick application, she’s going to call an Uber. But she spots Davie waving at her, the gorgeous photographer, her client, at her side.

  Davie weaves through the crowd, making her way over to Ella. Davie looks stunning, as always, in a shimmering navy-blue tunic and gold lamé Roman sandals. Ella feels like a fraud in her jade-green wrap and nude heels. But she’s smart enough to blame that feeling on her current mood. She’s depressed and rejected. Guilty on all counts.

  She should have stayed home. Nathan’s article is due to Rebecca tomorrow. She’d promised her it would be first thing, but as long as she sends it by midnight,
she’s still within her deadline. Though it’s probably a good thing she isn’t working on it right now. Exhausted and snippy, who knows what she’d write?

  Stifling a yawn behind a hand, Ella quickly pastes on a smile and takes the hand the photographer, Flynn Hershberger, offers. His jet-black, glossy curls meet at the top of his black mock turtleneck and Ella can’t help smirking. He looks like a young Steve Jobs. Flynn envelops Ella’s hand with both of his. “Our exquisite friend Davie tells me you write for Luxe Avenue.” His eyes flash. “I can’t wait to read what you think of my work.”

  Ella raises her brows. She glances at Davie, who shrugs.

  Ella slips her hand from Flynn’s. “I’m sure Davie will let you know when that happens. Great show, Flynn. I wish you luck. If you’ll excuse me.” She smiles graciously and parts company.

  Davie catches up with her on the way to the restroom. “Sorry about that. This is Flynn’s biggest exhibition to date and it’s attracting a lot of media attention. He just assumed—”

  Ella flicks her wrist, waving aside the apology, and pushes open the restroom door. “No worries. I get it.” She tucks into a stall.

  “Do you want to go across the street and grab a cocktail?” Davie asks when they meet back up at the sink.

  Alcohol is the last thing Ella needs. “I can’t. I have to finish Nathan’s article.”

  Davie pouts. “Lucky you. Spending time with two delicious men. That god of a husband of yours and that fine specimen you get to write about.”

  Normally, Ella would laugh. This time, her stomach turns.

  “Tell Damien I said hello. How is he, by the way? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “I don’t know. He left.” Ella dries her hands.

  “For London?”

  “No. Me.” Ella drags her Bobbi Brown stick across her bottom lip. Her eyes meet Davie’s stunned expression in the mirror.

  Ella drops the lipstick into her clutch. “Simon wasn’t his.”

  Davie’s mouth hangs open. “What the hell, Ella? When did this happen? How did this happen? Oh, my god, don’t tell me.” But her mind clicks and sets an answer. She mouths, “Nathan?”