He nodded, but he still didn’t look convinced.
“Okay,” she said. “I can give you more detailed notes on it. I’ll be happy to do that. But really, I thought it wouldn’t be…” She bit her lip. “I wasn’t sure what to expect from your writing. But, Beau, I’m telling you. It’s good.”
He took a step closer to her. “Wait. When you said, ‘I thought it wouldn’t be…’ you thought it was going to be bad. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? You’re surprised that you like it. Aren’t you?”
She sighed. “I was actually trying really hard not to tell you that, as a matter of fact. And it’s not like I thought it was going to be bad! But the thing I am telling you, because it’s true, is that it is good. You can do this. You are doing this. I’m excited to see what else you have in that notebook.” She shrugged. “I don’t have a lot of experience, obviously, and I don’t know what Marta will think, so I don’t want you to think that I—”
He brushed that aside. “I don’t care what Marta thinks. I care what you think.”
They grinned at each other.
He looked down, then back up at her. “I’d love it if you gave me those notes, actually. Tomorrow, maybe?”
Izzy nodded. “Tomorrow sounds great.” She turned back to the house. “Come on, now it’s your turn to celebrate a victory. There’s a lot more ice cream in there and a whole lot of hot fudge.”
Beau caught up to her. “Ice cream before dinner sounds like my kind of celebration.”
On Wednesday morning, Priya texted.
Can’t wait to see you this weekend!!!
That’s right; this weekend was Priya’s cousin’s wedding in Santa Barbara. Izzy had totally forgotten. The past few weeks had gone so quickly.
Ahhhh when do you get here? Where are you staying?
She couldn’t wait to see Priya. So much had happened in the past three weeks. And she couldn’t believe she only had a little over a week left in California.
I get in tomorrow! Dinner tomorrow night? Do I get to see that house? And BEAU???
Izzy laughed at Priya’s many punctuation marks and then bit her lip. She and Beau were in a good place now, with work and everything, but it still felt tricky to ask him if someone—anyone—could come to the house. She knew how special this house was to him. And she also knew how he felt about his privacy.
And Priya would want to go everywhere in the house and ask all sorts of questions.
Dinner, yes! I can pick you up from the airport! But mmmm, not sure about coming to the house, or meeting Beau. I’ll have to check
Priya’s text came back in seconds.
SO CHECK THEN!!! I have to see this place you’ve been living! And meet this GUY
Izzy rolled her eyes.
He’s not a GUY. But fine, I’ll ask if I can bring you up here before we have dinner
Should she really ask him, though? She didn’t want Beau to think that she was violating his privacy in any way. And she really didn’t want to mess up the still somewhat fragile working relationship between the two of them, just to satisfy Priya’s curiosity. She’d have to think about this.
Izzy still hadn’t decided what to do when she got to the library that afternoon. After he finished writing, Beau pushed his laptop across the table to her. She read what he’d worked on, made a bunch of notes in the margins, and pushed the laptop back to him.
The first time they did this, he’d frowned at the screen when he read her notes. He had looked at her, but when he’d opened his mouth, she’d cut in before he could say anything.
“No—not yet. Don’t answer my questions now. Answer them in your writing. But don’t do that now either—wait until tomorrow, at least. Maybe even the next day, or sometime next week.”
That angry frown she remembered from her first week had returned to his face.
“But you said—”
She’d shaken her head. “I know what I said, but you have to give yourself some time to think about it. Sure, maybe you think my idea for a change doesn’t work—okay, that’s fine, you’re the one writing this, not me. But give yourself time to think about it, come up with a better idea. This is a marathon, not a sprint, Beau.”
He’d looked at her for a minute, and suddenly his face relaxed. “But how am I going to argue with you about all this if I have to wait? The heat of the moment might be all gone!”
He was smiling. Good. She’d been worried for a minute there.
“I know,” she’d said. “That’s the worst part. You might even agree with me.”
He’d laughed and given her the notebook.
After he read her notes on Wednesday, he looked up at her, his eyes narrowed.
“Okay, but what else?” he asked.
She stopped, midway through sliding her notebook into her tote bag. “What do you mean, what else?”
He set the laptop to the side. “You had this worried look on your face, the whole time you were reading. I thought there must be something really wrong with it, but nothing you said is that bad. Are you holding out on me? Giving me the easy notes at the beginning, so I can get used to it, and then bam, you’ll come in and tell me to rewrite the whole thing?”
Izzy laughed. “No, and no. And I promise, I won’t tell you to rewrite the whole thing.”
He pushed his notebook across the table to her. “Then what is it? What’s wrong? Something put that look on your face.” He shook his head. “Wow, incredibly self-centered of me to assume it was my book, you do have other things in your life. Never mind.”
Izzy rubbed her hand back and forth on top of his notebook. “Oh. Um. It kind of was about you, actually.” Why was she so bad at hiding her emotions around Beau? She used to be so good at it. “It’s just that…Okay, feel free to say no to this?”
She still wasn’t sure if she should ask, but now she had no choice.
“I’m good at saying no.” He looked amused. “As you’re well aware. What is it?”
She swallowed. “Um, my friend Priya—I work with her, I’ve mentioned her, I think? She’s going to be in Santa Barbara this weekend for a wedding, she has a million cousins. And she kind of wanted to know if she could come up here, and see the house, and everything?” She couldn’t read Beau’s face at all. He wasn’t smiling anymore, but he didn’t look mad, exactly. Just…blank. “It’s okay, it’s not a big deal, I’ll just tell her—”
“Of course your friend can come here.” He said it almost harshly, but then he smiled at her. “You’re living here, aren’t you?”
Did he mean it? Izzy couldn’t tell.
“Are you sure? It’s okay if—”
Beau stood up. “It’s fine. Really.” He still seemed…off, but she wasn’t going to push it.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll bring her by Thursday.”
So on Thursday afternoon, right after she left the library, she drove down to the airport to pick up Priya. She’d left plenty of time to get through airport traffic and figure out where and how to meet her. When she pulled up to the tiny, adorable airport that didn’t even have a single traffic light, she laughed out loud. She really hadn’t needed all that time.
After a few minutes, her phone buzzed.
Just landed!!!
Izzy got out of the car to wait for Priya.
Yay! I’m here! See you soon!
She couldn’t believe she was going to see Priya. Suddenly, the thought of seeing someone from New York, from her real life, almost overwhelmed her. She’d been in this tiny, almost dreamlike bubble in California, with Beau, for the past three weeks. It felt strange that someone else, even someone as great as Priya, would intrude on that.
She only had just over a week left in the month Marta had given her. Beau was on track, she thought, to finish his memoir, at least eventually. It wasn’t as scary to him anymore, she didn’t think. But…she hadn’t quite told him the whole truth the day before. She had been holding out on him. Everything he’d written so far was good, but it was all missing something. If he’d written about whatever had made him leave LA and come to this house in Santa Barbara and disappear from the rest of the world, he hadn’t shared it with her. In fact, she was pretty sure he hadn’t put it down on paper yet. It was clear he was leading up to something big, but it was vague, only hinted at. Izzy had found herself getting impatient as the days went on, waiting for him to get there. She hadn’t pushed him on it, not yet, but she knew she had to in the next week before she left. She wasn’t looking forward to that.
“Izzy!!!!!”
She looked up, and Priya was running toward her, rolling suitcase in one hand and her long black hair flying behind her.
“Priya!”
Priya almost smothered Izzy with her hug, but Izzy didn’t care.
“Ahhh, it’s so good to see you,” Priya said, when they finally let go of each other.
“It’s so good to see you, too,” Izzy said. “I feel like it’s been forever.”