I don’t want to get my hopes up. “Doubtful.”
“What are you going to do if you run into him?” she asks. “It’s going to happen. LG is small.”
I glance over my screen, shrugging. “Say hi? Smile? I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it.”
I’m lying.
I’ve thought about it a hundred million times, day after day, night after night. Each scenario always ends differently. Sometimes he’s receptive. Other times he greets me with a stare so cold his hatred becomes palpable. Those are the nights I wake up crying, wishing I had a chance to tell him how sorry I am for hurting him. Still wishing, after all these years, that he would just let me explain.
“People are saying he bought the Conrad mansion,” Bryony says, lifting a steaming paper cup to her punch-pink lips. “That’s the rumor anyway. Connie at the coffee shop said there was a sold sign on it when she drove by this morning.”
The Conrad mansion has been on the market for the better part of a decade, since the old wind turbine factory moved and the president cashed out his stock and took a job working for Ford Motors.
These days, there isn’t a soul in Lambs Grove who can afford a multi-million-dollar estate.
Nevada and I used to drive past that mansion back in high school, and he’d always muse that someday he was going to buy it for me so we could “fill the eight bedrooms with lots of blue-eyed babies.” He said he’d build me an elaborate garden with a maze, and he’d refinish the pool and patio so we could throw the best parties in town.
Epic, he called them. They’d be epic.
If what Bryony is saying is true, then this feels like some sort of sick joke.
Or maybe his way of retaliating against me for hurting him.
“You should probably roll the phones over,” I say. “It’s after eight.”
My sister lingers, her cool blue gaze washing me in the kind of pity I have no use for. “I’m here if you want to talk …”
She probably thinks this news is going to stir up old emotions, that it’s going to send me over some kind of edge or sink me into some kind of depression. Only you can’t stir up old emotions if they never settled in the first place.
Mine have always been right there, at the surface.
I’ve just gotten better at hiding them as the years have passed.
At twenty-eight, the fact that I’m still not over my first love isn’t exactly something I try to broadcast, and I’m certainly not proud of this. It isn’t some badge of honor I wear for all the world to see—it’s mainly just something I’ve accepted after years of fighting it and losing every time.
It’s a part of me now.
A benign tumor on my heart.
It isn’t going to kill me, and it isn’t going anywhere.
And for the time being, there’s no reason to operate.
I wave Bryony away. “You should probably let me work if you want your paycheck on time this week.”
With that, she’s gone, heading up to man the aptly named Sew Shop we run along with our mother, Rosamund. Mom does the cutting and sewing, Bryony handles the customers, and I handle the business side of things, hidden away in a back office.
We make enough to get by.
Once upon a time we Devereauxs were local royalty, living a castle-on-a-hill fairytale existence.
Dad brought our San Diego-based textile factory here, lured by the cheaper cost of living and abundance of out-of-work locals who were willing to work for a fraction of what he paid his Southern California team.
We were going to be richer than we’d ever imagined, he’d told us on the drive out here when my sister and I were lamenting about how much we were going to miss our friends back home.
“We’ll fly them out to visit you on our own private jet!” he’d said, this wild-eyed look on his face that fit somewhere between joking and crazy. We laughed at the time, trying to quell our nauseous, uneasy bellies and desperately wanting to believe him.
He even promised my sister a pony.
And me a brand-new car.
None of us knew it at the time, but his company was in dire financial straits long before we moved. This was his final attempt to salvage Devereaux Wool and Cotton.
We lasted three years before he had to file for bankruptcy and the town was hit with another economic devastation. We lost Dad six months later. Massive heart attack in his sleep.
He died penniless, which means so did we.
All we had left to our names were broken hearts.
Minimizing the payroll spreadsheet to the corner of my computer screen, I double click on a browser and run a Google search on Nevada, as I’ve done so many times before, only this time coming across a dozen articles all confirming his sudden retirement.
This career-ending move is apparently causing shockwaves throughout the multi-billion-dollar professional basketball industry and as of an hour ago, it became the number one trending topic on Twitter.
When I find a video of the press conference, I close my door and turn the volume on low before watching it three times.
It’s true.
Nevada Kane is coming home.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Oh, God
Yardley
I drive past the Conrad mansion on my way home from work.
Sure enough, the Coldwell Banker Real Estate sign that’s been sitting in the front yard for years has a giant “Sold” sign slapped across the middle.
When I bought my little townhome a couple of years ago, it took thirty days to close. It could be thirty days or more until he’s here. And I imagine it’s going to take a while to get his Raleigh house packed up and freighted halfway across the country. I looked it up once, and it was over twelve thousand square feet with an eight-car garage. His guest house alone was thousands of square feet bigger than the average American home.
I’ve got plenty of time.
Unless he’s staying with his mom in that enormous brick colonial on the south side of town …
The thought of Nevada being in Lambs Grove right now, this very moment, knots my stomach and fills it with equal parts anxiety and excitement.
This is either going to go very well.
Or it’s going to get uglier than I’ve ever imagined.
After the decade I’ve had, my money’s on the latter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Paper Covers Rock
Nevada
The ink is hardly dry when my silver-haired, cheap suit wearing, tawny-skinned real estate agent extends his ring-covered hand. “Congratulations, Mr. Kane. Welcome home.”
I muster a closed smile and meet him with a firm grip before getting the hell out of there. Moving back to Lambs Grove wasn’t anything I imagined myself doing in this lifetime.
Then again, I didn’t imagine my wife giving birth to our second beautiful daughter and hemorrhaging to death in her sleep while I slept peacefully on the pull-out sofa in her deluxe recovery suite.
Estella had only held our new baby for a couple of hours before requesting some time to rest. It’d been a long labor, harder on her than the first, and she was exhausted.
We all were.
My onyx-haired, emerald-eyed wife smiled and blew a kiss as a nurse placed our six-pound, twelve-ounce daughter in her clear bassinette and rolled her to the newborn nursery, and then she told me to get some rest as well. Her parents were bringing Lennon to meet her new sister in a few hours and we both needed to catch up on sleep.
She was there.
And then she was gone.
The rest of my life had been planned out, practically chiseled in stone. And then suddenly I’m mailing a copy of her death certificate to the life insurance company.
Paper covers rock.
It wouldn’t be the first time my future had been yanked out from under me. Twice in ten years makes a guy wonder if the universe has it out for him.
Contracts and endorsement deals and sponsorships don’t mean shit if you don’t have that person to th
row their arms around you, smother you with lipstick kisses, and tell you how proud they are of you—and genuinely mean it.
That was Estella Perez.
The glimmering star to my solitary moon.
The clear sky to my raging thunderstorm.
She was only ever supposed to be a rebound after my ex obliterated my heart with a fucking nuclear warhead. Estella was pert and bubbly and so damn happy all the time, and to be honest, it annoyed the hell out of me at first. But she had the biggest fucking laugh and the sexiest fucking smile. Took up half her face, dimples and all.
She was so different from … the girl who came before her. So different, in fact, that when I was with her, I found myself forgetting about the pain and the past. She anesthetized that wounded part of me.
She was my opium.
She gave me my fix and I became addicted.
Maybe it was selfish of me, but I married that girl. I gave her the biggest fucking diamond I could find and started a family with her because she made me forget and I was convinced this was going to be the only way I’d ever be able to live some semblance of a life.
I mean, I loved Estella. Don’t get me wrong.
But it was a different kind of love.
I wanted to take care of her and make her happy. I wanted to give her all the things she could ever possibly want because that’s how good she was to me.
In return, I gave her most of me. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to, I could never give her my heart in all its entirety … and it fucking killed me.
They say you never get the same love twice, and I know from experience that’s the God’s honest truth.
I wanted to love Estella the way I loved the other girl, and I tried. I tried like hell. But at the end of the day, you can’t project those feelings onto someone any more than you can force the old ones away.
Until the day I die, I’ll regret that she was only ever my #2.
Anyway, six months ago, I buried my wife.
And six months ago, I hired a team of nannies and lost myself in work, traveling for appearances and meetings and sponsorship deals when I wasn’t practicing with the team. It wasn’t until I came home and baby Essie cried when I tried to hold her that I realized not only had I turned my back on my life, I’d turned my back on the only two things that meant anything to me.
My girls.
They’d already lost their mother. They didn’t deserve to lose their father too.
People think retiring from one of the most lucrative careers in NBA history was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, but they’re wrong.
It was the easiest.
But coming here? To Lambs Grove? That was the hardest.
I didn’t want to.
But I didn’t have a choice.
This is where my family is. I can’t raise these girls alone, and I refuse to go the nanny route again. So now we’re here. I bought my princesses a castle-like estate in my hometown—which is conveniently enclosed by an eight-foot fence—and I’m going to do everything in my power to keep them healthy, happy, loved, and surrounded by family.
When I leave the Coldwell Banker office, I slide into my rented Denali and drive to the south side of town where my mom has my girls. It hits me that this is their first time in Lambs Grove, their first time at their grandma’s house.
Estella always begged me to take her to my hometown, but I always had my reasons. I exaggerated the poverty and crime rate, I told them it was a toxic wasteland with dirty water and a lingering, hog-confinement stench in the air.
Yeah, I lied. But at the time, Estella was my untarnished future. I didn’t want to soil her with anything remotely having to do with the past.
I show myself in through the garage door when I arrive, calling for Lennon. The scent of fresh baked chocolate chip cookies fills the kitchen. Mom never had time to bake when we were growing up. Between working two jobs and overnight shifts, she never had the energy. Being able to gift her with a chef’s kitchen and an early retirement has been one of the many luxuries I’ve been afforded these past ten years.
“Shh.” Mom ambles up to me, her pointer finger pressed against her lips. “I just put Essie down.”
Lennon darts around the corner before jumping into my arms. I catch her and kiss her sticky face.
“Where’d you go, Daddy?” she asks. I brush her dark hair out of her bright green eyes—the ones that match her mother’s fleck for fleck.
“I bought us a home,” I say. There’s a noticeable void in my chest when I say it out loud. It doesn’t feel as good as it should, making this announcement. Buying this house in this town is just another reminder that Estella is gone forever, that my girls will never grow up firsthand to know how much she loved them.
All I can do is show them pictures and videos and hope they’re able to comprehend a fraction of how wonderful their mother was.
“Everything go all right with the papers?” Mom rubs my arm. She’s been doing that since we got here a couple of days ago, treating me with kid gloves.
I may be broken in some parts, but I’m not fragile, and there’s a difference.
“Daddy, Grandma let me eat cookies and it’s not even dinner yet,” Lennon says, her twinkling eyes darting between my mother and me as she fights an ornery smile. The girl can’t keep a secret, even when she tries. She wears it all over her face, just like her mother did.
“Uh, oh. Should I put Grandma in time out?” I tickle and tease my daughter. Her smiles are life, but they don’t quite numb the gaping hole in my heart. Maybe someday, but we’re not all the way there yet. “Five minutes, Lennon? You think that’s enough? Or should we go by her age. That’d be … fifty-six minutes.”
“No!” Lennon giggles, covering her mouth. “That’s a lot of minutes!”
My mom laughs with us before heading across the kitchen toward a beeping timer on the wall oven.
“Okay, you two,” she says. “Have a seat at the table. Eden and the kids should be here soon. They’re having dinner with us. Hunter’s coming too.”
In a few minutes, my family will fill this house. Lennon will chase her cousins around the yard. My sister will fuss over baby Essie. And my brother will pretend like he doesn’t like kids and then spend hours playing Legos and rolling around with them on the floor.
I need this noise.
I need this proof that life goes on, that I haven’t lost everyone.
I need to be reminded that moving here was the right thing to do—even if every part of me already believes it was a mistake.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Too Late
Yardley
“Really, Bry? A date on a Tuesday night?” I lie on my sister’s bed in the spare room I’ve so generously rented out to her for the last six months. Dex, my seven-year-old golden retriever, curls up against me, occasionally licking my hand. He must smell the leftover remnants of my chunky peanut butter and apple jelly sandwich. “Is this the same guy from Saturday?”
“Nope.” She smacks her lips, emphasizing the ‘p,’ and then she uncaps a tube of her signature shocking pink lipstick while leaning toward to her dresser mirror. Bryony is the biggest attention whore I know, and I say this with nothing but love.
“Same guy as Friday?” I ask.
“Uh, no. Not him either.” Her painted mouth twists into a smirk.
“Where are you finding all these eligible bachelors?” I squint at her. “Last I checked, the good ones got the hell out of Lambs Grove, and the only ones left peaked in high school and have since married and divorced their high school sweethearts.”
“You act like it’s so hard to put yourself out there. There are apps for these things, you know. That’s what modern people do in this modern age. They use their phones and they find people and they have fun and they don’t just sit at home watching Netflix and curling up with their dog.”
“I refuse to use a dating app.” And Dex is a million times better company than any of the other douches in t
his town.
“Then you’re going to die an old spinster.” Bry grabs a deluxe sample bottle of Tocca perfume and dabs it on her pulse points. All her perfumes are samples, since her cut of The Sew Shop’s earnings doesn’t cover little luxuries like fine boutique perfumes. Every week she smells like someone else. And she never wears the same fragrance around different guys. She says it’s bad luck. I say she’s a weirdo.
“Nothing wrong with being single,” I say. “Let me remind you I’m neither waiting around or settling. That’s more than a lot of people can say.”
I tried dating over the years, but I couldn’t find anyone who gave me that same flutter in my chest and somersault in my middle. I’d go on a date and go to bed, falling asleep without so much as a single thought about my new potential suitor.
I always took that as a sign that they weren’t worth my time.
Life’s too short to waste it on people who don’t make us feel like a million bucks.
The last person to make me feel that way was Nevada.
“You haven’t really been with anyone since Griff,” she reminds me, as if I’ve simply forgotten Griffin Gaines and the hurricane that unfolded when he asked me for a favor I couldn’t turn down. “And you haven’t moved on from Nev. Are you just going to wallow in depressing sadness the rest of your life? Because I’m pretty sure he’s out there, waiting to find you, and that’s never going to happen if you’re hiding away from the world for ninety-two percent of your life.”
“Ninety-two? Why ninety-two?”
She rolls her ocean-blue gaze. “The other eight percent accounts for the time you spend walking Dex, driving to and from work, hanging out with your bestie, Greta, and the occasional coffee or office supply run where you’re forced to interact with the general public.”
“You make it sound like I have no life.” I sit up. “And I have more friends besides Greta.”
“That you only hang out with when you feel like it.”
The Rebound Page 8