If the Red Slipper Fits...

by Shirley Jump

  A smile wavered on her lips. “Because you’re not the story, Caleb. You’re…so much more.”

  He wanted to believe her, wanted to trust that she was the Sarah he had come to know, not the one whose byline he had seen this morning. But that would have to wait.

  Right now, he had something else to do. Something he should have done a long time ago. He clasped her fingers. “Thank you, but I think this is something I should do on my own.”

  “Okay.” She pressed a kiss to his cheek, lingering for a moment there, then drew back and got out of the car. Sarah Griffin ran toward her car, the heavy rain swallowing her up and taking her out of Caleb’s line of sight.

  As he’d expected, the reporters attacked him with questions as soon as he reached the door of the hospital. Once again, he said nothing, just brushed past them and inside. The receptionist glared at him for bringing this mayhem onto the staff. He gave her an apology, and her glare softened slightly.

  The door to his mother’s room was ajar. The lights were dimmed inside the private suite, and only a small Tiffany nightlight burned on the corner table. It was enough to illuminate the bright bedcovers, the dozens of flowers, the portraits of family members lining the window ledge. Nearly everything in the room had been brought here from his mother’s Central Park apartment, as Caleb tried to recreate her home bedroom in this foreign place.

  As if having all these things from home would be enough to make her want to wake up or restore her to her former self. Like Sarah, he would have done anything to make that happen. And nothing he had done, nothing he had said, no doctors he had paid, had changed the facts. Maybe Sarah was right, and he just needed to face reality. Things like this happened…

  Just because.

  He dropped into the wingback chair beside his mother’s bed, and watched her for a long time. Her eyes were closed, her jaw slack, as if she was sleeping. So peaceful, so quiet. But as the machines beeped a steady rhythm, and his mother’s chest went up and down with the help of the respirator, Caleb knew the truth. It was all an illusion, just like the bedcovers and flowers. This wasn’t his mother, not anymore, just as this wasn’t her cozy bedroom in Manhattan.

  Lenora Lewis had left a long time ago. The doctors had been telling him this for a year, but he’d refused to accept it. Refused to accept that a woman who had been such a force in life could be gone.

  He laid his head on the bed, and reached out to cover her cool, limp hand with his own. Every time he came here, it seemed she got thinner, paler, frailer. Like there was less and less of her every day.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered to her. “I’m so sorry.”

  The machines beeped. The respirator raised and lowered, a soft whoosh with each breath it pumped into Lenora Lewis’s lungs. Out in the hall, the sounds of life carried on—people talking, walking the halls, sharing laughs.

  He clutched his mother’s hand, and now, finally, the tears raced to his eyes and a sob chased up his throat. The tears that Caleb Lewis had never shed began to fall, dropping into small round puddles on the white crisp sheets.

  “I love you, Mom,” he whispered, and now the tears blurred his vision until he couldn’t see anything but her delicate pale fingers. “Goodbye.”

  The word tore his heart in two. But still, he stayed. Until there wasn’t a reason to stay anymore.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PEDRO leaned over the cubicle wall between his desk and Sarah’s, and plucked a chocolate out of the basket on Sarah’s desk. “Hey, where’d all the candy go?”

  “I’ve been eating it.” Almost nonstop since yesterday. The chocolate didn’t solve her problems, but it sure made everything seem more bearable. Like wondering how Caleb was doing. If he still hated her for that article, or if yesterday had made things better. Hell, she wasn’t sure she could make that article better, but she was willing to try.

  “You ate almost all of it?” Pedro asked. “There was, like, three pounds there.”

  “And your point is?” She arched a brow in his direction.

  Pedro put up his hands, laughing, then he rested his head on his hands on the cubicle wall and studied her. “Something bothering you, peach?”

  “No.” She looked at the pile of wrappers beside her. “Yes.” She toyed with the Frederick K stilettos sitting on her desk, supposed to be serving as inspiration for the article she was going to write on being transformed by the shoes. So far, she’d barely written a word. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to…” She searched for the right words. “…find the ending to the story.”

  “Maybe that’s because there’s another twist yet to come.” Pedro grinned, then gestured at the silver-and-blue paper that had arrived on her desk that morning. “Do I see an invitation to the ball, Cinderella?”

  “I don’t know if I’m going.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, Caleb will be there—”

  “Exactly. And it’ll be the perfect opportunity to show him what a hot mama you can be.” Pedro picked up the invitation and flipped it over to read the return address on the envelope. “It came from him.”

  “I know.” She didn’t know why Caleb had sent her an invitation to the pre-Fashion Week party hosted by several of the top couture designers in New York. Did he mean for her to be his date? Was it some cruel way to get back at her because he still thought she’d written that article? Or was she just on some mass-mailing list from LL Designs and she was reading too much into a piece of paper?

  What if she went, and in the end, Caleb still didn’t believe her? Seeing him again would only compound the inevitable hurt if they couldn’t move past that headline.

  She sat down at her desk and reopened the article she’d been working on earlier. As her hands hit the keyboard, she wondered for the hundredth time why she kept working for Karl. The man had no ethics—that article in Behind the Scenes about Lenora had proved that. If he did it once, what was stopping him from doing it again?

  “I think you should go,” Pedro said. “Wear something sexy, something shocking.”

  She looked at the invitation one more time. If she went, the editors of all the other magazines in the industry would be there. If nothing else, it would be a great networking opportunity.

  Yeah, that was exactly why she’d go. To network. Not to see Caleb and find out if there was a chance they could move forward again.

  Pedro slid down, then popped back up again. “One more thing, Cinderella. Be sure to wear a killer dress because everyone knows when you make a great entrance, the Prince won’t be able to keep his eyes, or his hands, off you.”

  But what if she got there and Caleb was with another model? Could she stand seeing him, knowing this Cinderella had no chance with the prince her heart desired? “Griffin!”

  Sarah looked up and saw Karl at the end of the aisle. He strode down the block of cubicles and stopped in front of hers. “You need me, Karl?”

  “Great job on that story on LL Designs. We’re slotting it in the issue.”

  Satisfaction roared to life inside her. She’d done it. Written something that had made it into the main magazine. Her gossip days were finally over. “Thanks. Now about that job on the staff of—”

  “Later, later. Right now, I’ve got another story for you. And this time, you can write it up and not have all that ridiculous guilt about whether your byline was really yours or not.” He rolled his eyes as if that kind of moral commitment was ridiculous. “Karl, I—”

  He slapped a piece of paper on her desk. A phone number and a name had been scribbled on it. “Call this nurse at the rehab center right away.”

  “Why?”

  “The playboy finally did it. Finally pulled the plug on his own mother and that means the death of Lenora Lewis is going to be big news. Huge. I want you on it, and I want you to get a quote from him. I know you’ve been seeing him, for the article or…” He winked. “…whatever. That should give you an in with the bad boy of fashion. Allow you to get some really juicy quotes.”
<
br />   Revulsion roiled in her stomach. She wasn’t this kind of reporter. She never had been. And she wasn’t going to be now. She regretted every one of the gossip articles she’d written. If she could yank them out of print, she would. It might be too late for that, but it wasn’t too late to do the right thing. “No.”

  “It’s a simple call. Take you all of five minutes. And then, yeah, you can do those other pieces you wanted to do.” Karl grinned. “If you still want to be Lois Lane after you break one of the biggest news stories in our industry.”

  “Find someone else to do your dirty work.” Sarah picked up the paper and pressed it into Karl’s hand. “I quit.”

  Shock dropped Karl’s jaw. “You? Quit?”

  A sense of satisfaction filled Sarah. For the first time since she’d been assigned to the gossip pages at Behind the Scenes, she felt as if she was making the right decision. She had no plan, no back-up job, not so much as a résumé in the mail, but she didn’t feel worried. Her conscience filled with the knowledge she’d finally made a choice she could live with. She’d wake up in the morning proud of the path she’d chosen, instead of cringing at the headlines she’d helped craft. “Yep. I’m done here.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Maybe.” She turned and grabbed her purse and the invitation from her desk. Her hand hovered over the pair of Frederick K stilettos, sitting there as inspiration for the article. Let them be someone else’s inspiration. She’d gotten everything she needed from those shoes.

  Then she turned and walked out of the office, leaving behind a stunned boss, an applauding coworker and a career that had never fully suited her.

  Caleb stood in his office, watching the city go by a dozen stories below. The early-evening lights twinkled back at him, a sparkle of life that showed the city really didn’t sleep. He let out a long sigh, one that seemed to take with it a dozen pounds of stress.

  What was Sarah doing right now? Was she thinking of him?

  He sure as hell hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. Ever since he’d met her, she’d lingered in his mind. He should let her go—should forget her. After all, hadn’t she proved that she was only after the headline?

  Except a part of him wondered if she was telling the truth. If that article had been fabricated by someone else. If that was so, then why use her name?

  Was Sarah Griffin the woman who had sat in his car in the rain and comforted him? Or was she the one who had taken his most painful secret and blasted it across the front page?

  He’d invited her to the party to find out. If she showed up with her reporter pad, then he would know she was the woman who wanted only the headline. If she left that behind, and came as just Sarah…

  “You did the right thing.”

  He turned at the sound of Martha’s voice. “Did I?”

  “Of course you did. It was a hard decision to make, but the only one you could.” The assistant came into his office. “For a year, the doctors have been telling you to let her go.”

  “But what if…” Those thoughts still plagued him, but not as much as before. It was as if his brain was finally accepting that he had made the right choice. The only one. He glanced over at the portrait of his mother, and he could swear she smiled right at him, as if in agreement with Martha.

  You did the right thing.

  “There weren’t any what-ifs left, Caleb, and you knew that.”

  He sighed again. “I guess I finally accepted it.” Thanks to Sarah’s advice and wisdom, and her clearer head. If she hadn’t come along yesterday, would he have had the fortitude to make that long walk down the hospital corridor? If he hadn’t known she had gone through the same thing, and come out okay?

  “Then do one more thing for me,” Martha said. “For your mother.”

  “What’s that?”

  She pressed a card into his hand. “Live your life. Actually live it. Don’t watch it from the sidelines. Not anymore.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “YOU are obsessing.”

  Diana sat on the edge of Sarah’s bed, watching as Sarah tried on and rejected one outfit after another. Sarah had walked out of the office the other day, and realized there were only a handful of people she wanted to talk to after such a momentous decision. Caleb Lewis was high on the list—but she hadn’t called him.

  She wanted him to believe her about that other article, all on his own. Without the knowledge that she had quit the gossip business. Thus far, he hadn’t called or come to see her again.

  She glanced at the invitation to the party again. Tonight she would see him. But would he be alone? Or would the Caleb Lewis she had written so many articles about be at the bar as he always was, surrounded by women?

  God, she was a true glutton for punishment for going to this thing.

  “Thanks for coming over, sis,” she said to Diana.

  Diana waved a hand, as if it was no big deal. “Anytime. And it was high time we started packing up Dad, even if I think moving him is a mistake.”

  When Diana had arrived at the apartment that Saturday morning, Sarah had reminded her father that today they were packing his things and then moving him over to his other daughter’s home tomorrow. Martin Griffin hadn’t said much, except that he was going to the store for his favorite coffee and he’d be back.

  “What mistake?” Sarah asked, drawing herself back to her sister’s statement while she held yet another sweater against her chest and frowned at the reflection in the mirror.

  “Moving Dad. He’s happy here.”

  Sarah sighed. “Diana, it’s your turn. Quit trying to talk me out of it.”

  “I’m serious. Did you see him this morning? He looked like he was losing his best friend.”

  Maybe Diana was right and her father didn’t want change any more than Diana did, because as soon as he’d left, she’d checked her cabinet and realized she already had two pounds of her father’s favorite blend. Clearly, he hadn’t wanted to be here, or to help with the move.

  “He’ll settle in after a few days and he’ll be fine,” Sarah said.

  Diana let out a long breath, then crossed to the half-packed box in the hallway and picked over a few of the items in it. “Listen, Sarah, I’m not like you. I don’t remember to pick up Dad’s favorite coffee when I go to the supermarket. I don’t have the patience to explain how the remote works. And I sure as hell don’t like sitting around at the end of the day rehashing the headlines I already read on the subway that morning.”

  Sarah bit back her frustration and wondered again if she had done something wrong along the way of helping to raise her sister. “It’s called being part of a family, Diana.”

  “I know. And if Dad wants to go to a baseball game or take a walk or do something…well, interactive, then I’m your girl. But I am not Domestic Diana, not by any stretch of the imagination.”

  “What better opportunity—”

  “If you use that word one more time, I swear, I will hit you with this.” She glanced down at the item in her hands. “What is this thing?”

  Sarah laughed. “It’s the shaving-cream warmer we bought him for Christmas last year. He wanted it because the barber had one and he swears it makes shaving easier.”

  “See? I don’t even remember that conversation. And I wouldn’t even know where to buy one of these…” She looked down at the slim cylindrical steel-and-plastic contraption again. “…warming-up things anyway.”

  “You’ll learn. It’s not that hard.”

  “For you. For me, this is rocket science.” Diana sighed. “I just don’t think the same way as you do.”

  Sarah tossed the sweater on her bed, went into her closet, returned with a red blouse and tried again. Ugh. No better. “And what way is that?”

  “Like Mom did.”

  Those words made Sarah pause. “Diana—”

  “No, let me say this.” Her sister got to her feet and crossed to Sarah. “I love you, Sarah, but you’re still acting like Mom, even though you don’t have
to anymore. And even though you think you stopped a long time ago. You still try to take care of all of us, and I’m sure you will even after Dad lives at my place, telling me how to make his dinner or starch his shirts or whatever.”

  “I won’t. I’m looking forward to the freedom.”

  Diana snorted. “You’ve always had that freedom, Sarah. You just didn’t realize it. We’re grown-ups, Dad and me. We don’t need you to do any of these things anymore.”

  The words stung, like a slap of rejection. Was this how they all looked at her? As some kind of hovering mother hen? “I’m not trying to do that.”

  “Yes, you are. You just step right in and offer your opinion or bring over a casserole or put a missing button back on a shirt.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  Diana laughed. “You call me every single day. And you know what you ask me?”

  “How you’re doing?”

  “If I ate lunch. Or dinner, depending on the time. And then you ask where I’m going that night. Half the time, you tell me not to stay out too late because I have a class or have to work.”

  “I just worry about you.”

  Diana put out a hand, as if that sentence alone proved her point. “Don’t. I’m fine, Sarah. All grown up and everything. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “Because lately you’ve been happier than I’ve ever seen you before, and I worry that you’re going to let all that go away.”

  “I’m not letting anything go.”

  Diana put a fist on her hip. “What about Caleb Lewis?”

  Sarah turned away. “Caleb let me go.”

  “Over a misunderstanding.” Diana reached for her sister, and waited until Sarah’s gaze met hers. “All your life, you’ve put everyone else first. It’s time you stopped doing that. If you want Caleb, if you, well, if you love him, then you should go for it. Take a chance. Live the life you’ve always wanted.”

  “I’m just going to this party to network and—”