Page 84 of Love Deep

When I look at him for answers, it’s suddenly clear to me that this has nothing to do with business.

He pushes his hands into his pockets and shakes his head. “I think I’m going to go and finish unpacking. I’m feeling the altitude. Maybe I need to lie down,” he announces in a louder voice, which catches Mrs. Franklin’s attention.

“Gerry, are you okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine. I just need to get used to the altitude.”

The whir of helicopter blades in the distance makes me smile. Vivian’s gone now. Gerry’s not even going to catch a glimpse of her. I know her departure isn’t a complete victory for me. He won’t give up on trying to poach Vivian and my other artists… but now he knows I’m going to be watching. I won’t just stand by, trying to be the bigger person anymore.

Now, I’m fighting back.

TWENTY-NINE

Fisher

I hand Juniper a glass of wine and she pats the space next to her on the bench. “You look like you have a lot on your mind.”

“Yeah, I just can’t shake something Gerry said to me. It’s probably bluster, but he said something about how I’ve taken something that’s his, and how he’s trying to level the playing field.”

“He’s trying to make things equal between you?” she asks, and leans her head on my shoulder.

“I suppose that’s what he means by levelling the playing field, but why? What does he think I’ve done to him?”

“Have there ever been any romantic entanglements?” she asks. “Like maybe—and I’m not saying you knew—but maybe you dated his girlfriend, or maybe a girlfriend left him for you?”

I shake my head. “Gerry’s been married since before I knew him.”

“Huh. I thought for sure that would be it. Did you go to college together? Like, was he at your college and you didn’t know? Maybe something happened there?”

“I was a geek at college,” I say. “My mom and dad went through a really bad divorce just before I left for college, and I spent my college years a little dazed. Their divorce came out of nowhere, as far as I was concerned.”

“I’m sorry, Fisher,” she says, and slides her hand into mine.

“It was a long time ago,” I say. “But it had lasting effects. I went off to college determined that I wasn’t ever going to fake anything.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

I sigh and set down my wineglass. “I spent my entire childhood thinking my mom and dad were the happiest parents of all my friends. Some of my other friends used to have parents who argued all the time. Others never spent any time together. But my mom and dad seemed to genuinely love each other. We’d spend the weekends as a family doing stuff. Even as a teenager, my favorite thing to do was to hang out with my parents. How geeky was that? They were just so much fun. I look back on those days, and I just remember laughing and… like you and Riley when we were having the kitchen disco. Every day was like that.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Juniper says.

“It really was,” I reply. “They made it wonderful.”

“Do you know why they decided to divorce?”

Darkness gathers in my chest at the memories of the conversation around the kitchen table. “When they told me, it was as if they were telling me that we were moving house or something. Mom was still full of smiles. Dad was cracking jokes. It was all so… fake.”

She squeezes my hand, like she wants to transfer her strength to me.

“I stopped believing what I saw from then on. I learned to read what was under the surface in people’s words and actions.”

“You stopped trusting people,” she says. “Because if you can’t trust your parents, whocanyou trust?”

“Exactly. So I was a bit of a loner in college. I kept to myself until I learned to operate in this new world where no one was who they said they were. Music was my sole companion.”

“Oh, Fisher,” she says. “That sounds terribly lonely.”

Itwaslonely. It felt like when I left home, I took nothing with me. No sense of security. No understanding of what was right and wrong. No real ability to cope with the world. I didn’t trust anyone and I didn’t trust myself.