Page 16 of Falling for My Sister's Heartkeeper
"The girl with your heart. I told myself I'd look once and leave." He almost laughed. "I moved her into your room's hallway instead. She sings in the shower. She's a terrible actress and a worse cook and she calls me Maximo and she has no idea, none, that the reason I can't breathe around her is buried in this ground."
He did not say the rest of it, not even to the stone. That the girl with Mary's heart was forbidden to him twice over, once for the heart and once for the years between them, and that he had been losing the argument about staying away from her since the day he found her.
The wind moved through the oak and didn't answer either.
"I'm not going to tell her." His voice went rough at the edges. "She gets to keep laughing. She gets to keep thinking she stumbled into some rich man's kindness. And I'll keep her safe from everything, including me, including the truth, for as long as she lets me. Even when she hates me for the walls. Even when she leaves." He pressed his palm to the cold granite, once. It was the closest thing to a vow he'd left in him. "I'll keep her alive for you. I promise. It's the only piece of you I've left, and I'll guard it with everything I have."
Then he stood, and squared his shoulders, and walked back up the path toward the gate without looking back.
Which is why he didn't see the girl standing in the shadow of the crooked oak, both hands pressed over her mouth.
I WASN'T GOING TO FOLLOWhim.
I really wasn't. I saw his face at breakfast, gray and shut and a hundred miles from me, and I heard him give the driver an address in a voice I'd never heard him use, and I told myself, firmly, that a promise not to pry is a promise not to pry.
I lasted exactly until the front door closed.
A smart girl would have let him go alone. I have never once been that smart about him.
So now I'm here, hanging back between the headstones like the world's worst spy, watching a man I'm not allowed to love kneel down and talk to a grave, and I can't hear the words, and I don't try to. Some things you don't get to have. I decided that in the dead middle of a night once, and I'm holding the line.
But after he's gone, after the gate clangs shut behind him, my feet carry me down the path anyway, left at the oak, to the fresh flowers lying too neat on the grass.
I don't read the name. I gave myself my word, and anyway my eyes are too blurry to be trusted.
I just crouch where he crouched. And because the day has cracked me clean open, I finally say what I've been carrying around unsaid for two whole years.
"I don't know who you were." My hand finds my chest, the heart that was never mine to start with, thudding away. "But somewhere out there, somebody died and gave me the rest of my life. And I never got to say it, so I'm saying it to you because you feel like a good place to say it." My voice breaks right down the middle. "Thank you. Thank you for all of it. I promise I won't waste a single beat."
The flowers say nothing.
The grass says nothing.
And the name on the stone, six inches from my blurry, careful, downturned eyes, goes right on sayingMary.
Chapter Eleven
I NEVER DID TELL HIMI followed him to the cemetery.
That's my secret now, folded up small and tucked in right next to all of his, and I've decided the very least I can do with it is make sure the man laughs out loud at least once a day, whether or not he has budgeted for it.
A smart girl would take the hint that a busy billionaire is not, in fact, sitting around waiting on bad deli coffee. But this smart girl (you know me by now) has decided his office is a place I keep happening to be.
I come after auditions, still wearing whoever I played at the reading, and I bring him the bad deli coffee he claims to hate and drinks anyway, and I sit on the edge of a desk fancier than everything I own put together and narrate my callbacks until something in his jaw lets go.
The staff catch on faster than he does.
"Morning," I tell the receptionist, who long ago stopped asking whether I have an appointment.
"He's in a mood," she warns me, waving me through with the tired fondness of a woman who has firmly picked a side. "Although it lifts about ten degrees the second you get off the elevator." She lowers her voice. "There's a pool going on when he finally cracks. My money's on you, honey."
Over by the good conference room, two people in serious suits are having a conversation they believe is private.
"—no,thegirl. The actress. His girlfriend."
"I heard fiancée."
"I heard she moved in ages ago—"
