CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

A week later, Bea was sitting under leaden skies at an alfresco café for a breakfast meeting three blocks from Greet Cute HQ with Kim and Nozo. Mal was attending a dental appointment with his daughter, which Bea loved. She could only imagine how Charlie Hammersmith would have reacted to a man wanting to accompany his daughter to a dental appointment.

There’d have been much talk about lack of balls being tossed around in the boardroom.

They were meeting with Leilani Leota, a young Instagram influencer who had been born in Hawaii but was now living in LA. Bea had been watching her—she was smart, innovative, and from an advertising background, and Bea wanted to work with her really badly. She thought Leilani could bring something unique to the online space for Cranky Bea, but also several of the other lines in Greet Cute’s portfolio.

The menus arrived and they decided to go ahead and order, as Leilani had just messaged to say she was stuck in traffic—of course!—and might be twenty minutes late. Kim ordered an egg white omelet. Nozo ordered a chia bowl. Bea found nothing on the menu appealing. In fact, all she could think about was a piece of Annie’s key lime pie and a beer.

Sadly, there was no breakfast pie or breakfast beer on the menu.

And, had there been, she couldn’t even begin to imagine the shock on Kim’s and Nozo’s faces if she ordered something so carb-laden. And alcoholic. For breakfast. A Bloody Mary was acceptable, but a turmeric chai latte was more in vogue.

Sighing, Bea ordered what was expected of her—an egg white omelet—and hated herself for it, but mostly she was just too distracted by the silky underwear currently moving steadily north up her ass crack. All her LA underwear had been waiting for her when she got back to her apartment, and while she may have ditched the corporate power suits from her wardrobe and corporate America from her résumé, she hadn’t yet gotten around to purging it from her lingerie drawer.

Day-of-the-week underwear might not be sexy, but it sure knew how to cling to hips and ass cheeks. God, how she missed her Thursday panties…

Along with a million other things from Credence. Like Princess. And the lake. And dear lord, Annie’s pies. Also binge-watching TV shows on her laptop, her bunny slippers, and the golden oldie line dancers at Jack’s.

But most especially Sundays at the ranch. And Austin… Austin, who had walked into her office last week and turned everything upside down.

It had been so easy to keep him and their time together in a neat little box when she’d ended it over the phone. Much harder to ignore it when he’d been standing at her door, looking all freaking Wild West and causing a hundred different micro-memories to bombard her all at once.

I love you. That’s what he’d said. I’ve fallen in love with you. And she’d absolutely panicked. Because it was ridiculous—they’d known each other for three months, and worst of all, she’d realized in that moment, she’d become her mother.

The thing her grandmother had most feared and her father had most dreaded and she’d always told herself she couldn’t become. Because look at what had happened. Disaster. Tragedy. Grief. A household defined by a ghost. Her grandmother trying to erase the influence and a father trying to ignore it.

Austin had been right—she hadn’t ever considered them a couple. In fact, she’d deliberately avoided thinking of them as anything because of the age difference and how close that cut to the bone. He’d obviously been getting emotionally invested, though, spinning castles in the air about them living together, and she’d hit the retreat button as soon as it had fallen from his mouth.

No matter how much she’d ached for him since.

But that wasn’t love. That was lust and…nostalgia. She missed him. Of course she did. But she missed Princess, too. And Molly and Marley and Winona. She missed all of them.

She missed Credence.

Especially sitting here listening to Kim and Nozo chatter about the latest colonics on the market and the salon that had opened its doors nearby, offering all kinds of scrubs, a vast array of hair removal options, and the latest in injectables. Nozo was talking about getting fillers in her lips because she thought her perfectly nice mouth was a little on the thin side, and Kim was seriously considering getting some Botox in her perfectly smooth forehead.

They were both in their late twenties, for crying out loud. But despite their very nontraditional corporate life, they were LA natives through and through. Having work done was just what one did when young and upwardly mobile in LA.

Which made her miss Credence even more. Credence, where the content of a person’s character was more important than how they pouted or how many lines they had on their forehead. And people were always so genuinely pleased to see each other. And no one was twenty minutes late because of traffic.

And where it was perfectly okay to wear day-of-the week panties. And the sound of Austin’s boots on the stairs outside her door could make her pulse beat a little faster.

Goddamn it, Austin. Why’d she have to miss Austin most of all?

Hot tears pricked at her eyes, and she was glad for her sunglasses to cover it up, but they didn’t help with the tightness in her chest or the ominous internal cracking as small chinks became deep fissures in the wall around her heart. The one she’d built to block thoughts and feelings of Austin out. His appearance had been the first chink, and with every memory of Austin this past week, more had appeared. And now they were deepening into ravines.

How much longer until it disintegrated entirely?

…

Fifteen minutes, it turned out.

When their meals arrived and she looked down at her plate, at the healthy lump of plain, congealed egg white with three drops of truffle oil and a sprig of alfalfa. All the things that she disliked about her life in LA—which had only been amplified by Austin’s visit—were suddenly represented on this plate that would have had any LA food critic in absolute rhapsodies.

Tears more than pricked her eyes this time—they spilled out as, in one pure moment of clarity, she realized she’d made a huge mistake. She’d made the wrong choice. Because the omelet wasn’t a piece of pie, and her fancy decaf soy latte—the foam made into a freaking swan—wasn’t a beer.

And because…she loved Austin Cooper, too.

She’d let her humiliation and rage at Charlie Hammersmith and her pride override everything else. She’d let that prick of a man goad her into something she’d given up months ago because her need to prove to him that she could make it had superseded everything else.

Why in God’s name was she proving anything to that man?

She must have sniffled a little then, because Kim and Nozo stopped talking and stared at her. “Bea?” Kim frowned. “Are you…crying? Are you okay?”

Hastily wiping at a tear that had slid beyond the rim of her sunglasses, Bea gave a half laugh, half sob. “No.”

“Oh my God,” Kim said as both women reached their hands across the table and placed them on Bea’s forearms. “What’s the matter?”

“I want pie.” And she did sob then as her composure really started to slide.

The women looked at each other. “Okay?” Nozo said gently. “I’m sure the kitchen could rustle you up a piece.”

Yeah, but it wouldn’t be Annie’s, would it? “I’m sorry, but…do you think you guys could handle this meeting without me? I need to… I need to think awhile.”

Bea felt guilty because they were taking this meeting at her insistence. But both the competent women opposite had been part of her strategy to bring Leilani into the fold and were completely on board. They could easily handle it without her.

“Of course,” Kim said, patting her arm. “Go and think.”

…

Bea had no plan or clue, really, where she was going after she left the restaurant on foot. She just walked. Aimlessly. The pavements beneath her feet unfamiliar and yet an intricate part of her DNA. Thoughts churned around in her head. About Austin. And love. And Credence. And how badly she’d screwed up. About Greet Cute and her future.

About her mom and her dad.

Shards of memories from her childhood—good and bad—flitted through her head like sunbeams she couldn’t quite catch.

At one point, it started to rain, and Bea ducked into the nearest store for shelter, one of those places crammed full of knickknacks and trinkets from a mishmash of art to furniture and ornaments. Wicker baskets, linen, pretty glass, and old china shared shelves and wall space with fake moose heads and gawdy, waving cats. She wandered aimlessly here, too, waiting out the storm, her brain deciding its best way to cope with this morning’s whammy was just to check out for a while.

Which was how she found herself standing in front of a large, gilt-framed painting of wildflowers, the style as distinct and individual as a fingerprint.

A style she knew as intimately as she knew her own heartbeat.

Bea’s breath stopped in her throat. Her pulse throbbed through her ears. A hot rush of moisture pricked at her tear ducts and overflowed, spilling down her face. She hadn’t seen this piece for almost thirty years, but she remembered it as if it was yesterday. Sitting with her mother as she’d put the finishing touches on it. Feeling the sheer breathtaking beauty of the bloom as viscerally as if she had been there.

Just as she was right now.

It had lost none of its vibrancy, the kaleidoscope of color as vivid as it had been back when it was first painted. It had obviously been well cared for.

A guy wearing a name badge pulled up beside her. “Art can get you like that sometimes, can’t it?” he said gently, like he was used to random customers crying in front of paintings.

Bea nodded, not bothering to wipe away the tears. “Uh-huh.”

“It’s called Wildflower Blooms on Carrizo.”

Yeah. Bea remembered. She didn’t look at him—she couldn’t move—she just asked, “How much?” her voice raspy and foreign to her ears.

“For you, seven hundred dollars.”

Without thinking twice, Bea dug in her handbag for her credit card. “I’ll buy it,” she said, passing it over.

She’d have bought it no matter the cost.

Thanks to her grandmother’s purge and her father’s passivity—or maybe complicity—in the less-than-flattering narrative that had been constructed around her mother’s life, Bea had none of her mom’s art. She hadn’t even gone online as an adult and tried to track some of it down, because her gut too often churned with her own conflicted feelings, and it had felt disloyal to the people who had raised her as best they knew how.

Her father and grandmother had tried to shield her from the worst of the mood swings that marred her mom’s mental health, to give her stability and structure both before and after her mom’s death. As an adult, Bea could see that. She didn’t blame them. But in doing so, Bea had lost that thing vital to every human being—connection.

To the person who had known and loved her first. And she still felt that loss today. Despite her determined denials otherwise.

It flared inside her now, standing in front of her mother’s painting, as bright and as strong as ever. Connection. To her mother. But more than that, to this thing that had nagged and nagged at her over the years no matter how hard she’d tried to suppress it.

Her muse.

The guy whistled as he took the card. “You have a very good eye, and lucky, too. It’s just come in this morning from a deceased estate and won’t last long. It’s from an LA artist called Phoebe Archer who was highly acclaimed back in the eighties. Super collectable,” he added as he walked away to ring up the sale.

“I know,” Bea said. “She was my mother.”

…

Twenty minutes later, she was back on the street, with the wrapped painting at her feet, waiting for an Uber, which was six minutes away. Without giving it much thought, she called her father. He picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hey, Bea, how’s that corner office going?”

He and her grandmother had been thrilled that she’d come to her senses and was back working in LA. Even more so that she’d started out with an executive position and that much-coveted corner office. She drew in a shaky breath, knowing he wouldn’t like what she was about to say. “I think I’m about to quit.”

“Beatrice.” He sighed a sigh leaden with disappointment and exasperation. “Why?”

“Because”—she sniffled as more tears threatened—“I’m standing here on the sidewalk outside a curio store in downtown LA, and one of Mom’s paintings was on the wall and I bought it and it just…speaks to me.” She took a breath. “I’m an artist, Dad. I’ve denied it all my life because I didn’t want to hurt you or Granny and make you worry, but…I just can’t anymore.”

He didn’t say anything for the longest time, and Bea waited for him to lecture her about getting a reputation as being unreliable and flaky, but when he eventually spoke, he simply asked, “What painting?”

“Carrizo.”

She didn’t have to explain which one it was; she could tell from his silence that he remembered the circumstances and upheaval around its creation as vividly as she did. “Yeah…that one’s really pretty.”

Bea swallowed the sob that rose in her throat. “I wish Granny hadn’t gotten rid of her paintings.”

“Me too,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. It just…felt like the best thing at the time.”

Bea shut her eyes to stop the tears from falling. “Did you love her?”

She’d never asked her father that question. And he’d never volunteered the information. The topic of her mother was one that had been rarely ever directly broached. But Bea needed to know. She wanted to talk about her mom.

And maybe her father did, too.

“I loved her more than was good for me or her.” So often, he’d been brusque in any reference about her mother. Not today. His voice was wistful and tinged with sadness. “But it’s hard to love someone like your mom. She was such a free spirit, and trying to hold on to her was like trying to hold on to a moonbeam. But I did try, and when it worked, it was…wonderful.”

Bea remembered those times. Probably more vividly than the other times. Her father laughing. Her mother sparkling.

“And even when it wasn’t, even with everything that happened, I still loved her, Bea. I still do.”

It couldn’t have been easy for her father. To have been the straight man, the steady hand in a roller-coaster relationship, always trying to hold on when the other person was always trying to pull away. Loving someone whose capacity for love was so big and all-encompassing, it could never be contained to just one person.

“I’m not her, Dad.”

“I know, love.”

“But I need to know her, to connect. Which kinda sucks considering she’s dead.” Bea gave a brittle half laugh. “Until this morning, I had nothing of hers, but now I have this painting, and when I look at it, I feel her and I feel me in her, and I know how to connect to her now. Through my art.”

There was another pause that went on for so long, Bea almost asked if he was all right, but she didn’t. This was a conversation they should have had a long time ago; it was okay that he didn’t know what to say.

“Then that’s what you should do,” he murmured, when he finally spoke.

Bea shut her eyes. She didn’t need his permission or his approval, but she did need him to understand. “Thank you,” she said, then hung up the phone.