She swung around in her chair and kept talking as he walked to the door. “If you’re going to write a memoir, Beau, you need to either write the hard things, or ignore them completely—you can’t just dance around them like you’re doing. You could have written a very different book. I think you and I both know you intended to write a very different book.” He stopped walking. He didn’t turn around, but she kept going. “You could have taken the easy way out, but you didn’t want to. So if you, Beau Towers, are going to write this book, you have to write about the stuff that hurts to write about. Look, I get that it’s hard to write about all this, all of what you’ve shown me and all of what you haven’t even tried to write. Believe me, I get that. But—”
He spun around to face her. “Do you? How, exactly, do you get that? How would you possibly get that? Because from where I’m sitting, you’re just merrily tearing my work to shreds; ordering me to tell you all my hardest, worst, most difficult secrets; making cheerful little notes about how I need to tell more and be more honest; and then you smile and go back to your own boring little life where nothing bad or hard has ever happened to you. You’re not even a writer! You don’t know how this feels, and you certainly don’t know how to do it yourself! So tell me, Izzy, how do you ‘get’ how hard this is, as you sit across a table from me, while I do some of the hardest work I’ve ever done, and you fuck around on your phone?”
Izzy stared at Beau as he spat those words out at her. Every word, every sentence was worse than the one before. After a few seconds of silence, while they stared at each other, she stood up.
“Have you ever stopped to think that you don’t know a single thing about me?” she asked. “Of course you wouldn’t. I was right about you. You are a spoiled, selfish asshole who doesn’t think or care about anyone else.”
And then she pushed past him and out the door. She ran up the stairs to her bedroom and then shook her head. She couldn’t be here. She couldn’t be in this house for one more second. She spun around in a circle to find her tote bag, grabbed it from the chair by the window, and dug inside it to make sure the keys were there. She ran back down the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door. Right before she shut the door, she heard Beau call out her name. It just made her run faster, to get away from him, from his house, from what he’d said, from her stupidity in trusting him, thinking they were friends.
She got in the car and drove away fast, before he could come outside and stop her. She turned down the hill and drove, without any destination in mind. All she wanted was to get away.
Eventually, she ended up at the beach. It was the only place she could think of to go. Luckily, on a gray, drizzly, depressing day like today, not a lot of people were there.
She walked along the water for a while and finally sat down, in a sheltered nook in the sand. She stared out at the horizon, where the gray sky met the gray water. Then she dropped her face into her hands.
She couldn’t believe he’d said all that. She couldn’t believe he would hit her exactly where it hurt, in just that way. She couldn’t believe she’d let him in, let him get close enough to her to hurt her. If he’d done that three weeks ago, if he’d talked to her like that the first time in the kitchen, she wouldn’t have cared. She would have smacked it away in her mind; it wouldn’t have touched her at all. He didn’t know her then. She didn’t know him then. Then, she didn’t care about him.
Why had she let him in? Why had she thought they were friends? Why had she let herself relax around him, care about him? Why had she given him the power to hurt her? And why, why had she let Priya’s stupid little fantasies about Beau get in her head?
Over the past few weeks, she’d started to remember why she’d wanted to do all this in the first place. Publishing. Editing. Writing. She’d fallen in love with books again, stayed up late reading books she’d taken from the library, been inspired by her work with Beau. She’d almost decided to stay at TAOAT after she got back to New York, keep fighting for that promotion. Start writing again, for real. Writing, the dream she’d almost given up, had felt possible again.
And in just a handful of seconds, Beau had made all that hope, all those dreams, feel like ashes in her hands.
She obviously couldn’t work with him anymore, not after today. She was sure he didn’t want that either. Whatever, it didn’t matter. She was supposed to go back to New York in a week anyway, she’d just move that up. She could go to Priya’s hotel, crash with her for the rest of the weekend, and then fly back to New York with her after the wedding. Marta wouldn’t care if she got back a few days early, as long as Beau eventually turned something in.
But would he? She had no idea. If he didn’t, she was sure Marta would blame her for it—and Gavin would gloat—but there was nothing she could do about that. This was who Beau really was; she should have known that. She had known that.
Then why was she so sad about this? She’d thought…well, she’d thought lots of things, hadn’t she? None of them had ended up being true.
She sat there for a while as the tears dropped from her eyes onto the sand. She’d told herself at the beginning that if she left California without something to show for her trip, that would be it for her publishing career and her dream of writing. This had been a test—if she failed it, she’d give up, go do something else with her life. This wasn’t meant to be.
Okay. She’d failed. That was her sign: It was time to quit her job, figure out something else to do with her life, find a new dream.
She tried to accept that, to think about what was next. She’d thought she’d feel relieved when she finally made that decision. But instead, her whole body—her whole self—recoiled against it.
She wasn’t ready to give up.
For the past few weeks, as she’d worked with Beau, as she’d worked on her own writing, she’d felt inspired, fulfilled, excited about the future. She didn’t want to let Beau Towers, or Marta, or anyone else take that away from her. She’d almost decided to quit writing because of Gavin—she had to stop letting other people decide her life for her. Just because Marta made her miserable, just because Beau was a jerk, that didn’t mean she had to leave publishing completely. There were lots of other publishing jobs out there.
What she’d wanted when she’d made this deal with herself three weeks ago was to know, one way or another, what she should do. And now she knew.
She wasn’t going to stop fighting for her dreams, not yet.
Izzy gave herself a pep talk as she drove up the hill to the house. She would go inside, pack, and text Priya from the Uber on her way to the hotel. She wouldn’t even have to see Beau. And when she got back to New York, she’d take another look at her résumé and start applying for new jobs right away.
But Beau was sitting on the front steps when she drove up.
He stood up when he saw her, but she ignored him. She steeled herself as she turned off the car. All she had to do was get through this one encounter, and then she could get out of here and never have to see him again. She could do this.
He watched her as she walked toward him. She dangled the keys from her finger, and when she got close enough, she tossed them to him.
“I didn’t steal it,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be gone soon.”
He caught the keys but shook his head. “Izzy, I wasn’t—”
“Don’t call me that,” she said. Suddenly, she couldn’t hear her nickname on his lips anymore.
He stopped. Swallowed. “Isabelle. I’m sorry. For what I said in the library.”
Sure he was.
“Great, thanks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pack.”
He moved to the side so he wasn’t in between her and the front door, but he kept talking as he followed her inside.
“I know you don’t believe me. I don’t blame you. What I said to you—that was awful, why would you believe me? I figured you’d want to leave now. But please know that I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean any of it, that I’m so sorry for every word of it. You’ve done more for me in the past month than almost anyone in my life has, and you were right, of course you were right about everything you said about my writing, about me, about all of it. I learned that from my dad, to hit below the belt. That sounds like I’m blaming him, and I guess I am, but this is all my fault. I am so sorry. For everything.”
Her steps slowed as she walked down the hall toward the stairs. She hadn’t expected a real apology. She’d thought, if he apologized at all, it would be one of those sorry-if-you-were-offended kind of apologies. Or like one of those apologies toddlers gave when forced to do so, just to get it over with, the single word Sorry like he’d left on her tray that first night, so everything could go back to normal, be the same as before.
She knew she could never be the same as before.