She felt like a displaced person with nowhere to go—until she realized there was one place she could curl up and be alone in peace. She stopped by the shop only long enough to tell Beth she was taking the day off, detoured into Norman’s for a sandwich and soda to go, before going up to her apartment, changing her clothes, and ducking out onto the fire-escape-cum-terrace, her treasured book, Glamorous Getaways, in hand.
Some people chose comfort food. Charlotte chose comfort books. One in particular. A breeze fluttered the pages and she turned to the one she studied most, the famous HOLLYWOOD sign. She sat back against the wall, legs out in front of her, book resting on her knees. She sighed and traced the letters she knew by heart, then propped her chin in her hands and stared at the glossy pages.
Ironic, that this same book that gave her peace also represented her greatest pain. Charlotte understood why. Glamorous Getaways brought her back to a simpler time. A time when she still believed in Prince Charmings and happily ever afters. A time when she thought her father would come home and sweep Charlotte and her mother off their feet and onto an airplane to Los Angeles. To join him and give her back the security she’d lost. He never had.
So this book should be unsettling, yet it soothed her in a way only innocent childhood beliefs could. Charlotte didn’t delve deeper. Life was complicated enough. And the Chandler brothers’ coin toss had certainly mixed up her life and emotions in a way she’d never imagined possible.
Charlotte wasn’t into pity, nor did she believe she’d done anything to deserve this twist of fate. But, all things considered, she couldn’t say she was surprised. Psychiatrists had a field day with the notion that girls fell in love with men who reminded them of their fathers. A statement she’d once have disputed with a vengeance, but of which now she was living proof.
The Chandler brothers were many things: dedicated bachelors, devoted sons, and intensely loyal men. She knew Roman had never set out to hurt her. She believed he’d discounted her from his list of available women because of her family history. But she’d certainly simplified his life by falling into his baby-needing arms.
After finishing with his brothers, Roman locked himself in Chase’s office and got lost in what he did best. Writing. He tuned out everything and everyone else and spent the late morning and better part of the afternoon typing up an article on small-town life. Slice-of-life articles weren’t his thing, but somehow, this time the words poured from his gut.
Big cities, bigger stories. Large continents, even larger human interest stories. But at the heart of each of those broader pieces, Roman realized he could find the essence of people—their ties to each other, their community, their land. Just like the people of Yorkshire Falls.
When Roman wrote a news piece—whether he was driving home the inequities of poverty or famine, the brutal truth of ethnic cleansing in foreign lands, or the need for a variance or new zoning laws so someone with degenerative arthritis could own a pet and walk him without pain—the stories centered on people and what they needed and did to survive.
As a journalist and as a man, the objective view had been easier for Roman, and so he’d chosen to tackle the outside world while putting up blocks against his feelings for those people and stories back home. Because home represented Roman’s greatest fear—pain, rejection, loss. The kind he’d seen his mother experience.
The kind he was experiencing now because of what he’d done to Charlotte. This story was a catharsis. He’d never sell it, but he’d always have it as proof of what his mother had told him: If you haven’t loved, you haven’t lived. For all his extensive traveling and experience, Roman realized, he hadn’t really lived. Now, how to convince Charlotte?
After trying the shop, he’d stopped in Norman’s, who said he’d packed a sandwich and sent Charlotte on her way. Without trying her apartment first, gut instinct told Roman exactly where to find her. He never discounted his gut.
It was that same gut feeling that had insisted should Charlotte find out about the coin toss, he’d be in deep shit, and he’d been right. Same gut that now let him know she’d never get out of his system completely. He knew that was correct as well. He rounded the corner that led to the back of her apartment.
The sun shone low in the sky. In broad daylight, he knew he was risking being seen lurking around her apartment. He didn’t care. He wanted to make sure she was okay, though he knew better than to try to talk reason with her so soon.
He stood in the shadow of the trees and looked up at her sitting on the fire escape. Alone by choice, not answering her doorbell or phone. He shook his head, hating that he’d caused her pain. Stray tendrils of hair escaped the confinement of her ponytail and blew around her pale face. She was reverently touching the pages of a book. He figured it was one of her damn travelogues. She was a dreamer and longed for things she thought were out of reach. Travel. Excitement. Her father. And Roman.
She had the nerve to start a cosmopolitan business in a sleepy upstate town, but lacked the guts to take a gamble on life. On him.
What if reality is a disappointment? she’d asked when he’d questioned her about her books, her dreams. He hadn’t answered her then, so certain he could make her fantasies come true. But a weekend getaway was a far cry from fulfilling a lifelong dream. He’d been sure he could do both.
Right now he wanted to kick himself in the ass for being so damn arrogant, so sure of himself, when Charlotte’s feelings were at stake. Thanks to her father, Charlotte expected life to let her down. Instead of proving her wrong, Roman had fulfilled every negative expectation she’d had of men.
He muttered a curse. One last glance, and he headed on home.
Raina gathered her purse and waited as Dr. Leslie Gaines jotted notes in her chart. With Raina seeing Eric outside of work, she had begun using Dr. Gaines as her primary doctor. She had two reasons. She didn’t want to put Eric in the uncomfortable position of lying to her sons, and she wanted some mystery to remain for them as a couple. Silly as it sounded. If he listened to her chest with a stethoscope and viewed her as a patient through his doctor’s eyes, how could he look at her as a man would a woman?
“So your cardiogram is fine, no change.” Dr. Gaines flipped the manila folder closed. “You’re healthy, Raina. All I can say is keep up the exercise and watch the rich food.”
“Yes, Doctor.” But Raina knew the words were easy. Keeping up the charade of sickness with her boys was not. Though her little fraud, as she’d begun to think about it, still gave her fits of guilt, she believed in her cause. She wanted her boys settled and happy with families of their own.