I release my breath along with the death-grip I have on Baylor’s hand. I replay his words in my head. Full recovery.
The nurses tinker around a while longer and then they leave the room, turning off all the lights except one in the corner that is just bright enough to illuminate Baylor’s tears.
“You’re going to be fine, Bay” I tell her, carefully crawling into the bed next to her.
“It’s not me,” she says. Her eyes close, squeezing out more tears. “Callie . . . Callie’s gone, isn’t she?”
My heart sinks. I nod. “Did the nurses tell you that before I woke up?”
She shakes her head gingerly. “No. I already knew. I’m not really sure how,” she says through her muffled sobs on my chest. “I remember hearing something about visiting her grave. I must have picked up bits of conversations you had. I feel like I’ve known for a while. I knew your mom was here, too. I heard her voice, I think.” She looks around the room. “How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks,” I tell her. “You had a pretty severe head injury and there was some swelling. You didn’t wake up after they brought you here in the ambulance and then they gave you drugs to keep you in a coma-like state so that your brain could heal. You also have some bruised ribs, a gash on your leg, scrapes along your left arm and side, and some cuts on your face that have already started to heal.”
“Cuts on my face?” She feels the tiny new scar right under her chin where they had already removed a few stitches. “That must be why I saw red in the car, right? Because I was cut and I was hanging upside down. The blood must have run into my eyes.”
I let my gorgeous girl fall apart in my arms as she relives the accident and comes to terms with the death of her friend. She cries herself to sleep and I simply hold her until the nurses pry me off her in the light of the morning.
I call everyone as the nurses tend to her. Skylar shrieks into the phone. Baylor’s mom sobs uncontrollably and tells me she’ll phone Piper so that she doesn’t get on a plane after all. Chris thanks me for calling with a husky voice that tells me tears aren’t far behind.
When I’m once again allowed back in her room, after they’ve removed her catheter and cleaned her up, she says, “I have something to tell you.”
I sit on the edge of her bed and rub her uninjured leg through the blanket. “I have something to tell you, too,” I say.
“Me first, okay?” she asks.
I nod at her.
“I was on my way to tell you that I can’t stay here in L.A.” She looks guiltily at the floor. “I love you, Gavin, but Maddox and I don’t belong here.”
I put my finger to her lips to stop any more words from escaping. “I know, darlin’.”
Her eyes go wide and then fill with tears. “Did Callie tell you before she died?”
“No,” I say, sadly. “I didn’t get to see her after they brought her in.”
“Then how?”
“Baylor, when are you going to get it through your thick and damaged skull that I know you? Sometimes I think I know you better than you know yourself.”
She quietly stares at me with glistening eyes.
“You don’t think I’ve been watching you over the past month? Watching Maddox? At first you were both so happy,” I say. “You were writing a lot and Maddox was excited about being in a new place. After those first few days, though, you changed. Maddox changed. I thought maybe you both needed time to adjust. But as the weeks went by, you stopped telling me how many words you’d written each day, and Maddox didn’t talk about school because he couldn’t find a single good thing to say about it. I know you’ve both made an effort to fit in, but it’s been written all over your faces. You hate it here.”
I see a mixture of guilt and relief wash over her. “Yes,” she admits. ‘I hate L.A., but I love you.” She takes a hold of my hand and grips it hard. “We can make it work, Gavin. You don’t have to do all the traveling this time. Maddox and I will visit. A lot. We’ll come so much you’ll get sick of us. And we can talk and text every day. And there’ll be summers and vacations and holidays—”
“Can you shut up for two seconds, Bay?”
She cocks her beautiful head to the side and a disobedient wave of tangled hair falls into her eyes as she silently questions me.
I reach out and tuck her hair behind her ear. “While you’ve been out of it for two weeks, I’ve done a bit of . . . reorganizing,” I tell her.
“Reorganizing?” she asks.
“My life is with you and Maddox,” I say. “I won’t be away from you like that again. I want to come home to your bed every night. I want to have breakfast with Maddox every morning.”
“What are you saying, Gavin?”
“I’m saying, fuck L.A., we’re moving to Connecticut. We’re moving you back home, darlin’.”
I’m not quite sure she heard me. She does have a head injury, after all. She blankly stares at me with an adorable wrinkle in her brow. “Uh . . . what?” she asks, incredulously.
I lean down close to her lips, making each word a staccato between my gentle kisses. “We. Are. Moving. Back. Home.”
“I can hear, you stupid cowboy,” she says, playfully slapping my arm. “But how can you run your business from back east without traveling so much?”
“I won’t be running my current business from back east,” I say, leaning over to pick up a folder off the table next to the bed. “I’ll be running a new one.”
“What?”
“Scott will run Bay Watch Productions from here. I’m going to run our new sister company from New York City.”
She gasps. “You started a new company. While I was sleeping?”
I place the folder on her lap for her to peruse. “It will take a while to get it up and running, but yes. It’s an idea I tossed around before you decided to move here. I just didn’t run with it until now. Until I realized something.”
“Realized what?”
“That you are definitely not a California girl.”
Her jaw hangs open as she picks up the thick file folder. She pages through piles of contracts and legal papers. “What’s the name of the new company, Bay Watch Two?” she teases.
“No. I thought I’d go with something different this time.” I point to the name on the articles of incorporation.
“You called it ‘Mad Max Productions’?”
I nod. “And our first acquisition will be getting the film rights to your books.”
She smiles shyly. “I may have the perfect one for you,” she says.
“Which one is that?” I ask.
“The one I’m writing now. It’s about us. It’s our story,” she says. “Well, I changed the names, but as it turns out, our tumultuous lives make for a pretty interesting romance novel.”
I lean down to kiss her. “It better have a damn good happy ending, that’s all I can say.”
She smiles. But then she sighs, closing the folder. “What if I had died? You started this weeks ago. It would have all been for nothing.”
“Not for nothing, Bay. Maddox doesn’t belong here, either. I would have moved back there anyway. Maple Creek is where he needs to grow up.”
“But what if the same thing happens to you that happened to me? What if you hate it there?” she asks.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “Not only do I have you and Maddox, but your dad and I have become pretty good friends. And Chris, he’s not the asswipe I always took him to be. In fact, he’s actually pretty great. So, you see, I already have friends there. I have a business there. I have you there. What more could I need?”
“Asswipe?” she says, raising her eyebrows.
I shrug my shoulders. “It was my nickname for him in college.”
She laughs but then winces in pain.
“Careful, darlin’,” I remind her. I help arrange her so that she’s more comfortable.
She frowns. “Callie was going to move back there with me. Can you believe that?”
“Yes, I can,”
I tell her. “You completely underestimate the pull you have on people. Most of us would follow you anywhere.”
She pales and her whole body stiffens. “Oh, my God, I totally forgot,” she says. “We were being followed, Gavin. At the restaurant there was a black-haired lady. And then she was behind us in a blue car. Oh, God, did she hit us with her car?”
“No,” I say, “But she did cause the accident.”
“How?”
“She punctured one of your tires when you were at lunch.”
“Oh, my God, really?” she asks in horror.
I nod. “Her plan was for you to get a flat tire and then she would stop to help you. But when you were on the freeway, your tire blew out, causing the car to flip.”
A tear rolls down her cheek as I imagine she’s reliving it once again. “So they caught her?” she asks.
“No. She turned up dead at a motel the next day,” I tell her. “She had pulled over to help after seeing the accident. You had stopped breathing for a short time and apparently she witnessed that, thinking you died, because she explained in her suicide note that she was sorry, that she never intended to kill you.”
Before we can talk about it further, the door flies open and an excited Maddox runs across the room followed by the rest of Baylor’s family.
“Watch her head and her ribs, partner,” I say quickly before he jumps up on her bed.
“Mommy!” he cries, embracing her in an emotional hug that can only be shared by mother and child as the rest of us silently watch with elated smiles.
Baylor spent the rest of yesterday sleeping and recovering while the rest of us attempted to return to our normal lives. Her parents decided they would head back east today as they’d left the restaurant unattended for far too long. Skylar is going to stay here while Baylor recovers. She will fly back with us as soon as Baylor feels up to it. Maddox even went back to school this morning, after our visit to the cemetery of course. He was ecstatic when we told him that we were all moving back to Maple Creek. However, he said that he would really miss his ‘kid cave.’ Little does he know I’ve already got people at the house working on it.
Baylor’s morning scans today continue to show improvement, and they tell us she will be released tomorrow, barring any unforeseen setbacks. I’m sitting on the couch in her room, catching up on e-mails, when she emerges from the bathroom. I stand up and quickly go over to help her.
“I’m not helpless, you know,” she says. “I can walk from the bathroom to my bed. I even managed a quick shower.”
I take in the fruity smell of her damp, freshly-shampooed hair as I escort her back to her bed. “I know you’re not helpless, Bay, but cut me some slack. I had to sit here for two weeks wondering if I’d ever be able to do anything for you again.”
She smiles at me as I get her into bed and pull the sheet up over her, tucking it gently around her. “I know. I’m sorry,” she says. “It must have been hell for you. Your mom told me you barely even left the hospital.”
I settle on the bed next to her and take her hand. “Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”
She sighs. “I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“I think Karen had something to do with your stalker showing up,” I say. “I can’t exactly prove it yet, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to, but I do have a private investigator looking into it. So far all he’s been able to find out is that a woman called the police station a week before your accident, trying to get information about your stalker. But nobody can figure out how Karen even knew you had a stalker.”
Baylor pales. “Oh, my God. This is all my fault.”
“How can this possibly be your fault?” I ask.
She shakes her head as tears well up in her eyes. “I’m the one that told Karen I had a stalker,” she says. “The day she came to the condo, I yelled something at her about how I would rather see my stalker than her.”
“Well, that’s explains it, then. And that only strengthens my suspicion that she’s behind it,” I say. “Think about it, Bay. No way was it a coincidence that your stalker showed up the same week Karen’s accusations about me being her baby’s father were disproved. She was trying to break us up again. Maybe scare you away or something. She’s a woman with means and we’ve both seen all too well how far she can go.”
“Can that woman rip apart our lives any more? How can she get away with all this, Gavin?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” I explain. “We could take her to court. I doubt we could press criminal charges, but we might be able to build a civil case against her.”
“Take her to court?” she asks.
“If you want to, darlin’, yes. I will spend every last cent I have making her pay, if that’s what you want. But it might mean staying here, or at the very least, coming back for long periods of time. And even then, we may not be able to build a strong enough case, not unless my guys can come up with something.” I put down her hand and tip her chin up so her eyes meet mine. “It’s up to you, Baylor. I will do whatever you want. It’s your best friend who was killed. It’s your body that was damaged. Take some time to think about it.”
She nods silently as she cries herself to sleep in my arms once again.
chapter forty-six
After burning the midnight oil, I sit in my office early this morning, going over the new corporation papers, when I see Skylar walking down the hallway through the glass walls of my office. I narrow my eyes at her and study her appearance. Her hair is matted down, and I could swear she’s wearing the same bright-green top that she wore at the hospital last night. I quickly go to my door and stare her down while leaning against the frame.
She has the decency to blush like her older sister when she spots me. “What?” she says innocently.
I raise my eyebrows. “Doing the walk of shame, are we?” I ask. “Did you just sleep with my partner . . . in his office . . . that has glass walls?”
She shrugs as she walks by me, ignoring my comments as she says, “See you at the hospital, big brother.”
I shake my head and go down the hall to Scott’s office to see him emerge from his bathroom. His office is in disarray. Couch pillows are on the floor. Papers have been scattered. “Did you really fuck my sister-in-law in your office?” I say, barging through the door.
“Future,” he says. “Future sister-in-law. She’s still fair game, my friend. And yes, but only after I fucked her in the hospital and then again in a bar bathroom.”
“Dammit, Scott, are you ever going to grow up?” I ask. “At the hospital, man, really?”
“Well, there were all those empty rooms with perfectly good beds, and when I ran into Skylar after I brought you those contracts yesterday . . .”
I look at my watch to see that it’s about time for Maddox to wake up. “I don’t have time for this shit,” I say. “I have to go eat breakfast with Maddox. Just leave Skylar alone. She doesn’t need another player in her life.”
“She came onto me, Gavin,” he says. “She’s twenty-four. I think she knows what she’s doing.”
I shake my head, thinking how I’m glad Baylor’s even younger look-alike sister, Piper, isn’t here for Scott to besiege. “Just zip it up around her. Please,” I say. “Baylor shouldn’t have to worry about her little sister sleeping around Los Angeles. She has enough to worry about these days.”
He bows his head to the ground. “Sorry, man,” he says. “It was a one-time thing anyway.” He smirks. “Well, it was five times, but, yeah, it won’t happen again.”
I turn around to leave his office when I see something that has me rolling my eyes. “And wipe the goddamn ass prints off the glass wall.”
“She’s a big girl, Gavin,” Baylor tells me, after I spilled the beans about Skylar’s indiscretions. “Not everyone finds their soul mate at eighteen, you know. She’s already slept with half of New York City, it only makes sense that she’d do the same here.”
“You’re not mad?” I
ask.
She shakes her head. “I stopped being mad about her slutiness ages ago,” she says. “Skylar is a great sister and I’d do anything for her, but she’s a terrible girlfriend. She leads guys on and then dumps them as soon as they show any signs of attachment. It’s who she is. Nobody can change that.”
“Maybe we should give her the keychain,” I say. “That thing is fucking magical.”
She giggles and I realize it’s the first time I’ve heard that sound in almost a month.
I lean down to kiss her. “If you’re not pissed about it, I guess I won’t be either.”
“I have too many other things to be pissed about to worry about my sister’s mating habits.”
I nod my head, silently agreeing with her.
“They’re letting me out today,” she says, smiling.
“I know. I talked to your doctor earlier. He said you’re good to travel but that you should follow up with your doctor after we move back east. That is, if that’s where we’re going. Have you made any decisions?”
“I have,” she says, trying to sit up a little straighter. “I don’t want to be in the same city as that horrible woman a minute longer than I have to. I talked to Callie’s parents about it last night. They both agree that we probably don’t have much of a case, because even if Karen told the stalker where I was, she can’t be held responsible for her actions. They don’t want to drag this out, either. None of it will bring Callie back.”
I place a kiss on her temple. “Okay then, I’ll get the ball rolling for the move. Would a week be too soon for you?”
“Yesterday wouldn’t be too soon for me, Gavin,” she says. “But there are two things I want to do before I go back to Maple Creek.”
“Anything. You name it,” I say.
“I want to visit Callie’s grave. And I want to see Karen.”
“You don’t have any firearms, knives, or hand grenades that I don’t know about, do you?” I ask Baylor as we walk up to the ostentatious door of my former house.
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