She put her hand on the banister, ready to go upstairs.
He started talking again. “I want to explain, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear it. You were right, I’ve been writing around all the hard stuff.” She stopped walking. “For weeks, that’s all I’ve been doing. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to share it with you. I didn’t want to put it on paper, to face it, to make myself deal with it. I tried to ignore that, to pretend I could keep just going on as I was, that eventually it would just, poof, by magic, show up in the book and I would keep not having to deal with it. But then you called me on it, and you were right, and the thought of having to write about all of that terrified me. And so I said those horrible things to you, things I never should have said. And I’m so sorry.”
She turned around. “You hurt me,” she said. “I trusted you, and you hurt me.”
He didn’t look away from her. “I know,” he said. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.” He set the keys that she’d thrown to—at—him down on the table by the front door. “Take the car, go wherever you need to. Just let Michaela know where it is, someone will come get it whenever you don’t need it anymore. I won’t…” He swallowed. “If you were worried about this, I will only say great things to Marta about you and the work you did with me—great things that are all true. You’re really good at this, I hope you know that. You struck a nerve, only because what you said was totally true, and you were right. I wish I’d…I don’t know, talked to you, told you everything, asked you for advice on how to write about it. But instead, I just…” He shook his head. “Anyway. That’s all I wanted to say.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “Wait, no. I wanted to say one more thing. Thank you. For trying so hard with me. You didn’t have to do that. It made a real difference to me, and I didn’t say that enough. Or…ever, probably. Thank you.”
He turned and walked toward the back of the house. After a moment, Izzy went upstairs. She sat on the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest.
She thought about what Beau said in the hallway. When she’d seen him sitting there waiting for her, she’d assumed he was either waiting to kick her out of the house or that he’d try to laugh it off, brush it aside, try to convince her to stay there. But instead he’d apologized, really apologized, for everything he’d said. And he hadn’t tried to convince her of anything, other than how sorry he was, and how grateful he was to her.
She should pack. She should pull her suitcase out from under the bed right now, roll up the clothes that were in the dresser drawers and piled on the chair, stuff all her toiletries into plastic bags, shake all the sand out of this cardigan so she could wear it on the plane, text Priya.
But instead she just sat there and thought. About Beau’s apology, about what she’d decided on the beach, about how the past three weeks had made her like Beau and trust him. She wanted to know, really know, if he’d been worthy of her trust.
Finally, she walked back downstairs and into the kitchen. Somehow, she knew she’d find Beau there. He was sitting at the table, his notebook in front of him, staring out the window. He turned when she walked in.
Was she doing the right thing here? She was about to find out.
“Isabelle. I thought you—”
“You said you wish you’d explained everything to me,” she said. “Okay, then.” She sat down across from him. “Explain.”
He looked at her. “You don’t have to let me explain.”
She nodded. “I know I don’t.”
She was doing this for herself, not for Beau. She wanted to know if she’d been wrong to trust him, to care about him. She wanted to know if she’d been wrong to trust herself. And, selfishly, she wanted to leave Santa Barbara, and this house, with good memories—to remember this as the place where she’d started to write again, to believe in herself again.
He let out a breath. “Okay.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Okay. About a year after that Oscar night, my parents split up. They’d had a lot of fights like that before that night, but then a lot more afterward. With my dad loud and pointed, my mom silent. I never thought they’d actually get a divorce, though—they’d been fighting like that for years, it just felt like that’s how their relationship was. And then my dad took me out to dinner one night and told me they were splitting up. I should have expected it, but I didn’t—it felt like it came out of nowhere. He said it was because my mom was bitter, angry at him for all his success. He told me she’d turned to another man, that he’d had to file for divorce because of that.” He looked down at his folded hands. “And I believed all of it. She didn’t…This sounds like I’m blaming her, I’m not, but she didn’t say anything to me about it for a while. I’m pretty sure, now, that she didn’t even know he’d told me. And then when she did talk to me about it, he’d already been telling me all those lies about her for a while. When she moved out, she just said that she loved me very much, and that she would always be there for me, no matter what.”
He stared down at the table for a while before he started talking again.
“The divorce was really nasty,” he said quietly. “They fought over money a lot, my dad ranted about my mom to me all the time, and I took his side. My mom and I had always been close, but somehow…” He sighed. “That’s…When you said, in there, that I was originally going to write a very different kind of book, that’s what I’d planned to write. What I’d started writing. A vindication of my dad, who, yes, I had hero worship for, parroting back all the stories he’d told me about my mom, defending him against all the people who criticized him and his work, all that. When he died, some of the stuff I read about him—some of the stuff I heard people say—made me furious. I wanted to tell the world what a great writer he was, what a great person he was.”
He stood up. Izzy thought for a second he wasn’t going to finish.
“Do you want some water?” he asked.
Izzy nodded. She wasn’t particularly thirsty, but it seemed like he needed something to do.
He grabbed two glasses and poured them water from the tap. He started talking again almost as soon as he sat back down.
“Like I said—like I’m sure you know—he died two years ago. I kind of…lost it for a while when he died. You probably know that, too.”
She nodded.
He looked down at his hands. “The worst thing I did—the thing I’ll feel terrible about forever—is what I did, and said, to my mom, when she came to his funeral. She told me she came for me, and it infuriated me. I was just so…mad at the world then. And I was really mad at her. I blamed her, for him dying. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I didn’t make a lot of sense then. And so when she told me that, I said…” He stopped, and looked down for a few seconds. “I said such awful things to her. Like…like I did to you, in the library, except so much worse. I told her this was all her fault, that she was brainless, talentless, a leech on him. I repeated some of those things my dad said about her over the years.” He was silent for a moment. “She…I’ll never forget the look on her face when I said all of that. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I see it.”
Izzy tried not to react to anything he said, to just listen.
“Not too long after that, an agent approached me about writing a book. I jumped at the idea. I haven’t really had an acting career in years, and I wanted to write. I’d always sort of thought I’d turn to screenwriting eventually, like him, you know.”
He laughed quietly, but there was a note in his laughter she didn’t like. It was that same mean laugh from the first week.
“Don’t,” she said.
He looked at her.
“Don’t laugh like that. That’s not…I don’t like it when you do that.”
That sounded so silly, so pointless to say, but he nodded like he understood what she meant.
“I don’t like it either. I don’t like me, when I do that.”
He folded his hands together. She could see his nails biting into his skin.
“A little over a year ago, I was going through some of his papers. Partly because it had been almost a year since he’d died, and it was time to clean out the house, and partly to do some research for the book. I found the boxes full of drafts of all the screenplays he’d written. I started to flip through them, just, you know, to see how his work had changed from draft to draft. And that’s when I realized that my mom had done the bulk of the writing of them. All of them.”
She looked up at him, but he was still staring at his hands.