Page 3 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

MAREN

C harlie thrusts a typed letter in front of my face. I half expect it to be a lawsuit or test results because I can’t think of anything else that would trigger his current distress. Dear Charlie , it begins, If you’re reading this, it means that I’m gone .

Immediately my gaze drops to the signature line: All my love, Mom.

My eyes jolt up to meet his. His mother died ? She wasn’t even old. And how could no one have told me? I mean, for fuck’s sake, Roger could have mentioned it when he sent me over here to do the welfare check. “I’m so?—”

He shakes his head, his jaw tight. “Read it.”

I don’t want to read the letter. I don’t want to see this painful thing in all its glory.

Because even if Charlie didn’t see much of his mom after she left for South Carolina, I know he loved her.

Roger has never been allowed to voice even the mildest complaint about her without Charlie leaping to her defense.

Dear Charlie,

If you’re reading this, it means that I am gone.

I’m sorry to be letting you know this way, but I didn’t want our final memories together to be sad ones.

I’ve gone to the little retreat in Panama, where we buried Zoe.

I’ve asked them to cremate me and spread my ashes over her grave, so there’s nothing to be done.

My executor has been instructed to send this on to you as soon as he has word.

There’s not much to leave you with, aside from Riverbend.

Do you remember that summer you spent here after high school?

I loved that summer so much. You’d get up early and run on the path around the inlet, and you were so full of promise and hope.

I don’t see that in you anymore. I didn’t push you because I was scared, but now that I’ve got so little time left, I know I was wrong.

That’s why I’m saddling you with this dying wish of mine, one I know you’ll resent. I want you to go down to South Carolina and make the house into everything I dreamed it could be. And don’t just hire a crew: go down there and be a part of it. Get your hands dirty.

You could ignore all of this—I’m not there to stop you—but if you ever loved me, you won’t. You’ll let me be the parent to you I wish I’d been all along. One willing to make you suffer a little in order to come out happy in the end.

All my love,

Mom

I’m crying by the time I reach the letter’s conclusion. No wonder Charlie’s been taking this so hard. In one fell swoop, his mother burdened him with this job he doesn’t want, and also let him know that she died disappointed in him.

She had a hard life—Roger said that she never recovered from the death of Charlie’s little sister years ago—so as much as it upsets me that she’s left all this on Charlie, I’m also heartbroken for her. She died thinking her son had failed, but also that she had failed too .

“Charlie, I’m so sorry,” I begin again. “I…I’m…I hadn’t even heard.”

Charlie pulls his cup from the Keurig and dumps some cream in it. “No one’s heard. I haven’t told anyone, not even my dad.”

I blink. Obviously, Charlie’s parents are no longer together, but surely when your child loses his mother, someone gives you a heads-up?

“Why haven’t you told anyone?”

He scowls in the direction of the half-eaten muffins and coffee cups still sitting on the table. “Maybe because I didn’t want someone over here plying the women I bring home with muffins and suggesting that I’m lying when I try to usher them out.”

I wonder if he’s cried about this even once. I wonder if every single time he gets choked up, he decides he’d better take a drink or have a threesome.

As if on cue, he sets his coffee down, crosses the room, and grabs a bottle of Jack.

“Don’t give me that look,” he says, screwing off the top. “Hair of the dog. And we had an agreement. I told you, now you leave.”

I bury my head in my hands. I told him I’d go…but I can’t leave him like this. “Do you…need to go to Panama?”

“Already went,” he replies, taking a quick swig before he recaps it.

“Two weeks ago. She apparently had cancer. She knew it for a year and never said anything, not to me, anyway, and now there’s nothing there to even say goodbye to.

” He sinks into his big leather chair, and I follow, taking a seat on the ottoman directly in front of him.

“What are you going to do?”

“About the house? Nothing. I can’t move to South Carolina and refurbish the whole place by hand. And stop looking at me like I’m a tired toddler who needs to go to bed. ”

He’s acting like a tired toddler who needs to go to bed. Maybe that’s why I have this desperate urge to take care of him when he’s being a total prick.

I reach out and let my hand rest on his knee. It jumps, as if he’s reflexively repulsed by my touch, but I don’t pull it back and he doesn’t insist.

“Charlie, you’ve apparently been drinking yourself into a stupor for weeks and living as if you’re on borrowed time. Don’t you think it might have something to do with the fact that you’re conflicted?”

“Conflicted?” he groans, uncapping the whiskey again. “Unless you’ve built some sort of portal to the past where I can go say goodbye to my mother, there is nothing to be conflicted about.”

“It was your mother’s dying wish that you go fix that house, and I think what’s happening here is you feel guilty not doing it.”

He sets the bottle on the table beside him and pushes it away.

“Why the fuck would I feel guilty? It was an insane request on her part. A developer has already offered me millions, every building on the land is a wreck, and clearly, we aren’t discussing a woman who had her head in the right place if she’d choose to die without even saying goodbye. ”

He’s furious, and beneath that, he’s hurt.

That’s why Charlie has always been able to tug at my heartstrings like a master violinist. Because under every snide, shitty thing he says to me, I’ve always sensed something sweet but broken.

Which makes sense: he lost his little sister, but in some ways, he lost his mom, too, when she left.

I slide my hand into his. His remains limp, not returning my grasp.

“I’m not saying that you should feel guilty.

I’m saying that you already do, and maybe it’s better to face that than it is to bury your head in the sand, or in your case, bury your head in a bottle of whiskey and multiple vaginas. ”

“I think that I could continue burying my head in bottles of whiskey and multiple vaginas pretty successfully. I doubt that you have done either, but both are a delightful way to spend an evening.”

A strange, unexpected heat flashes through me, one I don’t want to consider too hard. I know for a fact that I am not interested in burying my face in a vagina, but the fact that Charlie is …well, yeah, I’m not going to think about it.

“There will be plenty of future opportunities to indulge in both those hobbies,” I tell him.

“But this sort of feels like the moment in a movie when a character can go really wrong or can turn shit around, and I’m pretty sure whiskey and drunk threesomes are not in the turning-things-around plotline. ”

“Maybe you and I watch different movies,” he says. “Let me get my laptop. I’ll show you some favorites.”

I laugh, even though I shouldn’t. Two seconds from now he’ll hurt my feelings, and before I’ve recovered, he’ll make my heart break for him. Some guys are a comedy, some are tearjerkers, and some snidely condemn everything about you. If Charlie were a movie, he’d be all three.

“Look,” he admits, “I know I’ve got to slow down. I mean, Jesus…I don’t even remember last night or the night before. The worst could have happened.”

“Having one of them murder you in your sleep?”

He frowns. “No, that’s like number three on the list.”

“What could possibly be worse?”

He holds up a hand. “Number two, getting someone pregnant. Number one, getting someone pregnant with twins. Can you imagine me as a father?”

I actually can see Charlie as a father. He’d accidentally make jokes about masturbation and porn in front of his toddlers, and his kids would get kicked out of preschool for profanity, but he’d also be fiercely protective and sweet beneath all that grouchiness .

“Anyhow,” he concludes, “I’m going to drink less, and you can now leave as promised.”

Oh, Charlie . He has every conceivable asset—he’s gorgeous, he’s charming, he’s smart—and he’s just throwing it away. Why?

“Don’t give me that look, Maren,” he growls.

“I’m not giving you a look.”

“Yes, you are. You are definitely giving me a fucking look.”

I swallow and he rolls his eyes.

“And don’t swallow either.” He rubs a hand over his face with a disgruntled laugh. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that to a woman. But don’t swallow like that.”

I can’t win with him. He’s mad if I speak, he’s mad if I’m nice to his overnight guests, he’s mad if I’m sympathetic. I’m about to concede defeat when he releases a weary exhale.

“Fine, I’ll go take a look. I’m not promising anything. My guess is the place needs to be razed, and I’m not doing a total rebuild if that’s the case. I have a job.”

I ignore that. Charlie does some kind of venture capital thing that I don’t totally understand—he’s currently bankrolling some new team in San Antonio—but his time is his own. He can go anywhere he wants.

“It’s in South Carolina, right?”

He slouches back in his chair like a beaten man, as if even the prospect of revisiting the state has exhausted him. “Yeah, near Beaufort.”

I close my eyes and picture it—sea pines, a sandy beach, the soft pulse of waves against the shore.

I have no idea what it’s actually like, but I want to be there regardless.

I need a break from my life here—Harvey’s demands and his constant complaints, the way my life has narrowed to nothing but him and this baby I don’t yet have. “Can I come?”

His head jerks. “With me ?”

I knew he’d object, but I didn’t realize the prospect would be absolutely incomprehensible in its horror. “It might be good to have someone with you, Charlie, and?—”

His jaw locks. “Don’t you have your husband and the dogs to deal with?”

“Harvey’s out of town. The puppies can stay with Lori. And I’ve done a lot of design stuff, Charlie. I have no idea if I’m good at it, but?—”

“Of course you’re fucking good at it,” he growls.

I fight a smile. The minute anyone insults me, he’s my angry knight in shining armor. Even if I’m the one hurling the insults.

“Aren’t you about to do IVF?”

“Next month,” I reply, no longer able to meet his eye.

I’m excited about IVF and dreading it at the same time.

Apparently my ovaries won’t produce eggs without some help, a fact I wish I’d known before we spent two years trying to get pregnant.

I want a baby. What I don’t want are the months of waiting, or the list of my failings from Harvey if it doesn’t work, along with the not-so-subtle reminder that he’d already have a kid by now if he’d married someone else.

Charlie studies me for a long moment, and then his shoulders sag. “You can come, but the second I hear the word shiplap, you’ll be driving your ass back home.”

An idle threat if I’ve ever heard one—Charlie knows I barely drive.

My smile is wider than it should be.

I’m doing this to help him escape his misery. But it might be a brief escape from mine too.