Page 63 of The Write Track
“It’s not a bad thing,” I assured her. “I like how mouthy you are, how easy you are with a laugh and a smile. You just weren’t this way when we first met.”
She turned serious, and it tugged on my heartstrings. I wished I hadn’t said anything. Then she spoke. “This is the real me. I was this way until I met him. Heck, I was this way for a time after I met him. Slowly but surely, he chased this me away, though. I hadn’t even realized I’d lost her until she was long gone.”
She was so melancholy it hurt everything inside of me. “Don’t let him steal who you are, Bella,” I said in a much softer voice than I’d anticipated. “You are amazing. He saw that, and it’s why he wanted you. He just wanted to choke that amazing out of you so nobody else could see it and it would always be his.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“I do. He wants you back but not just for the reason you believe. Yes, his ego took a hit when you left. He was grooming you to put up with whatever crap he threw at you. He wanted you as his wife, but he didn’t want to give anything up to keep you.
“Guys like him think they’re above everybody, that they deserve everything given to them on a silver platter,” I continued. “He saw something beautiful in you and wanted it for himself. He just wasn’t willing to give you something beautiful back.”
“I want everything beautiful,” she admitted. “That’s what I realized when I saw him with Tiffany. I wasn’t sad because I was losing something. I was happy because I was finally free.
“I never told anybody this—he’d kind of alienated me at that point, so I didn’t really have anybody who was on my side to listen anyway—but I had been trying to figure out an escape before it happened,” she continued. “I didn’t realize it up here.” She motioned toward her head. “It was still down here.” She lowered her hand to her heart.
“You realized it once you were safe and away,” I guessed. “You recognized you weren’t safe with him and were trying to figure out how you could escape without him hurting you.”
She opened her mouth, but I silenced her with a shake of my head.
“I know he didn’t physically hurt you, but what he did do to you wasn’t okay, and you need to stop pretending it was.” I was matter of fact. “He stifled your growth. He made you afraid to express joy. That makes him the worst man in the world.”
“Who are we talking about?” Hayley asked as she eased close to us.
“Preston,” I replied, pointing.
Hayley looked back and laughed. “Nice. He’s a real jerk, huh?” She was smooth in her kayak, but I wasn’t all that surprised.
“He is a jerk,” Bella agreed. “I wish…”
“Go ahead,” I prodded. “We want to hear it.”
I didn’t have to tell Hayley it was important to encourage Bella to express herself. She already knew that. “Definitely,” she said.
“I was about to say I wished I could go back to my senior year of college and never meet him. Maybe date Jake instead or something.”
I barely managed to throttle back a growl. Not Jake. I didn’t want to hear about Jake.
“That’s not the right thing to wish for, though,” she continued, not noticing my momentary distraction. “I learned from everything that happened, and I know I’ll never let it happen again. I want to experience joy. That’s something that I’ll never lose, not a second time.
“I do wish I’d figured it out sooner, and I really wish I hadn’t hurt my mother’s feelings the way I did,” she continued. “She forgives me. She never holds a grudge. I’m mad at myself, though.”
“We’re going to fix this situation with Preston,” I assured her. “I guarantee, after this retreat, he’s never going to want to stick his nose into author affairs again.”
“Oh, definitely not,” Hayley agreed. “We do need to come up with something big, though. We should all put our heads together and come up with something horrific. Maybe something from one of your horror movies since he hates those so much.”
“That would be poetic,” I agreed, grinning as Bree and Brody grew closer.
They looked to be laboring hard, Bree in the front and Brody in the back.
“How are things?” I asked.
“I’m totally going to kill you,” Bree replied, anger flashing in her eyes. “We wanted to write at a table and play footsies, and now we’re sweaty and not for a good reason.”
“This is a special kind of torture,” Brody agreed.
“You’ll survive,” I replied. “In fact…” Before I could finish, Bree reached forward with her paddle. I recognized what she was trying to do—tip us over—but they weren’t balanced enough to try to mess with Bella and me. We balanced a kayak together as if we’d been doing it our entire lives.
Bella realized what Bree was trying to do too. “Wait,” she called out.
