Page 109 of Love Me Tomorrow

I need to get off this floor. I need to be proactive. Those are all things I know, but God, everythinghurts. Haven’t the tabloids taken enough? Haven’t they dragged me through the mudenough? Fear and dread mingle like the most debilitating cocktail, swirling in my system until I’m barely aware of my office door crashing open.

“Savannah—Savannah.”

Dad.

A sob wracks my body. He’ll never forgive me.Ameliewill never forgive me. And my mom, who’s waited all this time to tell my sister face to face, to answer all of her questions . . .

Self-loathing slithers inside me, and I can’t stem the cry that rips from my mouth just as familiar black tennis shoes round the corner of my desk and stop inches away from the trash can.

“Cherie,” he utters, and I hear it in his voice—the brokenness, the pain.

“I’m so sorry.” I whisper the words, or maybe I bawl them out, but I lick my dry lips and try again, determined to make things right.If that will ever be possible.“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I don’t even knowhowit h-happened.”

I hear the crack in my father’s knees as he drops to his haunches. The trash can is moved to the side, and then I feel his lean arm come around my shoulders as he drops his head on top of mine. “Listen to me,” he says, the shallowness of his breathing undercutting his tough tone, “this is not your fault. Do you hear me? This isnot your fault.”

I feel five, not thirty-five, when my hands coil in his white T-shirt. “Pops, everyone knows. About what you said to Amelie, about Mom’s affair. Everyone.Knows.”

“Get up,cherie.”

“Pops, did you hear anything of what I just said?”

His hands clasp my head, forcing me to look at him. His eyes are red-rimmed. It’s obvious he didn’t have time to shave before Frannie’s call woke him up because his stubble is thick and uneven. He looks fragile and exhausted, and it hits me again that my father is not so very young anymore. When he sees that he’s caught my attention, he demands, “What did I tell you and your sister as kids?”

I swallow, roughly. “Success is only halted by the lazy.”

“No.” His voice cuts like a whip through the room, like he’s determined to reach past my tears and my panic and my fears. “Are you dead?” He says it, just like he always did when we were young—when we scraped our knees or when we failed a test or when we tried our hardest to make something happen, only to be met with failure. “Are you dead,cherie?” he repeats, his jaw tight.

I shake my head, my answer nothing more than a whisper: “No.”

“Then get back up.”

Then get back up.

The Rose way.

Our way.

He stands, leaving me to do so on my own because that’s how my father raised us. Tears cloud my vision for an entirely different reason. I’ve spent so many years looking at my dad as though he’s ruled our lives with an iron fist—instead of considering all the ways he’s worked to see us as independent, strong-willed individuals. He made usfighters, and never once did I stop to appreciate it.

My legs are weak, and my face feels tight, but I push myself off all fours and climb to my bare feet. “I love you, Pops.”

“Love you, too, Sav.” He grabs my phone from my desk, shoving it inside my purse. “We have twenty minutes to get to the airport.”

I eye my laptop like it’s the gateway to hell, then jab the power button. “We’re leaving?”

He shoves my things toward me. “We’re not going anywhere. Amelie called last night—she used the ticket. The ticket that I”—he rubs the back of his neck, looking sheepish—“I bought for her. She asked me to pick her up, so we could talk. But now . . .” My father’s shoulders hunch, before he’s standing upright again with a look that tells me he means business. “Twenty minutes, then we get home to your mom.”

“Is Mom—is she okay?”

Dad’s fingers brush mine. “She’s a Rose,cherie, and she isn’t dead. She’ll get back up too.”

32

Celebrity Tea Presents:

BREAKING NEWS! Owen Harvey’s Secret is EXPOSED!

My, my, Dear Reader, what a day it has been! It’s the sort of day that I’ve been waiting for my entire life—and now that it’s here, there is simply not enough time to put fingers to keyboard to collect all of my thoughts.

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