Today was one of those rare days I was home from work while the kids were at school. Rock had left for work and taken the kids to drop them off. I was supposed to relax and enjoy my day. At least, that was what my husband had informed me before kissing me good-bye.
I wasn’t sure what that was, exactly. My life was full and busy, and I loved that. Being a mom and a wife were the two things I had always wanted to be. When the kids went to stay with Preston and Amanda, I spent that time with my husband.
I had taken an extra-long shower this morning, then made myself an omelet for breakfast. I was about to call Willow, who I knew would be home with Eli, who was almost three now and very busy. Smiling, I thought about the last time we had gone shopping and how Low had run after him once he had unbuckled himself from the stroller. She had caught up to him in the window with the mannequin, where he was trying to pull the shoes off it. She had scooped him up just before the mannequin tumbled to its demise.
I reached for my phone at the same time my doorbell rang. Putting my cell down, I walked to the front door to find a wide-eyed Amanda Hardy. “What’s wrong?” I asked, reaching for her hand. If Preston Drake had done something stupid, I was going to slap him myself. He hadn’t gone through all the craziness to make this woman his only to mess it up weeks before the wedding.
“Sadie. She just called me,” Amanda said, looking ready to cry. “She’s coming home. Or here. She’s . . . Jax broke off the engagement.”
Jax Stone was the biggest thing in rock music, and each year he just got bigger. Sadie White had been a young girl from Sea Breeze High when he first met her and fell completely in love with her. It had been fun to watch a rock god fall for a girl I knew.
“What?” I asked, confused. The last time I had seen them, he was just as infatuated with her as I remembered. That was only a couple of months ago. Rock’s cousin Jess was engaged to Jax Stone’s brother, Jason. Jess was pregnant with a Stone kid. We had thrown them a baby shower and Jax and Sadie had come.
Amanda sank down onto my sofa and shook her head in a daze. “She sounded hollow. She wasn’t sobbing like I would expect with this kind of news. She was just . . . empty. Void of emotion. I don’t . . . I’ve never known Sadie to be so . . .” She trailed off.
Jax wasn’t a player. He had fought to make Sadie his, and, unlike other celebrities, they had a healthy, happy relationship. Heck, if you googled Jax, then a million pictures of them showed up on the Internet. The world loved them.
“She didn’t tell you why?” I asked.
“She . . . No. She . . . just said Jax ended things and she was coming home. That’s it.”
I went to get my cell and dialed Jess’s number. She’d know something.
Jax Stone and Sadie White were the kind that you expected forever for. The way he looked at her was the way Rock looked at me. Something was terribly wrong.
Epilogues
Jax and Sadie from Breathe
Sadie
Jessica, my mother, was coming to get me. When I had called her to tell her my plane arrived at ten at Pensacola International Airport, the closest major airport to Sea Breeze, she said she’d be there. We would have plenty time to get back to Sea Breeze in time to get Sam, my little brother, from school. He was in kindergarten this year.
I put my hands on my stomach and closed my eyes. I wasn’t ready to tell Jessica anything yet. She’d want to know. Jessica was nosy, and although she had grown up a lot from the woman who had raised me, and had become a good mom to my little brother, she was still not someone I wanted to talk to about this. I wasn’t ready to talk to Amanda about it yet either, and she was my best friend.
I needed to process everything first. This wasn’t just about me now. If I had told him, maybe he would have changed his mind and listened to me. But I didn’t want the fact that I was pregnant to control his decision. I wanted him to listen to me and trust me because he loved me.
We had been through so much together over the past five years. Until yesterday I thought that we were rock solid. That nothing could penetrate what we had built. Then he had pulled the rug out from under me and walked away. It hadn’t been my Jax who had done that. It was Jax, but he was different. It was a side of him I’d never seen.
It had also shown me I couldn’t trust someone that way ever again. I’d fallen in love with him so easily. I had stars in my eyes the moment he leveled that blue gaze at me. He hadn’t stolen my heart—I had laid it down at his feet after only knowing him a few months. And I had never taken it back. It was his.
Until now. When he had walked out of our house—or his house now—and not listened to me or asked me about what had really happened, my heart had shattered.
This morning, after I had stayed up all night crying and waiting on him to return, I had picked up the pieces of my heart and taken them back with me before stepping out of the mansion in Beverly Hills that had become my home.
It was his home. It had never been mine. And it never would be again.
The plane touched down and I looked out at the airport I wasn’t familiar with. We normally flew into Sea Breeze in a private jet. But I had used the money that I had saved in my bank account to get a plane ticket. All I had brought with me were the clothes I could fit into the only luggage I had: a Louis Vuitton set that Jax had given me for Christmas two years ago. Everything else I had I left there. Most of it he had bought for me anyway, and I didn’t want it.
There were some things, like my books and my pictures of Sam and Jessica, that I wanted. And there were some photos of Amanda and me at Marcus’s wedding that I kept on the mantel. I asked Barbara, the head of the house staff, to get it packed up for me, and I left her money and my mom’s address to ship it to me. She had hugged me tightly and told me that he’d come around. That she loved me and believed I’d be back soon.
I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that I’d never be back. I had I had squeezed back just as tightly and promised to call and check in soon. Then I had walked out of the house, leaving my memories and dreams behind.
When I walked off the plane and headed for baggage claim, the numbness that had settled over me remained. I wasn’t feeling anything. Nothing at all. Although I knew this was actually happening, I wasn’t processing it well.
When I stepped off the escalator, Jessica was standing there, looking entirely too beautiful to have a child my age. The look in her eyes, so full of pity and pain for me, did something. It flipped a switch. Tears filled my eyes and I walked straight to her and dropped my carry-on at her feet, then threw myself into my mother’s arms and began to sob.
“Oh, baby girl,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”