Page 44 of When Stars Fall

“Yep.” She crosses her hands and lays them on her stomach, kicking off her sandals. “I love sitting out here at night.”

The silence is companionable before Ellie takes a deep breath. “So if you’re better,” she says, “how do you maintain it?”

“Willpower?” I squint. At its most basic level, that’s the secret. She doesn’t want the simple answer. That answer never worked for me before.

“I’m serious.”

With a sigh, I stare up at the starry night, letting the cool ocean breeze blow over me. “I have Camila. She keeps me on the straight and narrow.”

“And Camila would be?”

“I call her my sponsor whenever anyone asks. The easy explanation. Everyone knows what a sponsor is. But I pay her a lot of money to do more than talk me out of the bottom of a pill bottle or a line of coke or a glass of lean.” Ellie’s face isn’t giving anything away. “She’s an addiction specialist.”

Ellie sinks deeper into her seat. “She’s not here, so what’s stopping you now?”

“Camila’s not usually with me anymore. A few years ago, when I first tried to get a handle on my addiction, I took a year off from everything. I’d been doing back-to-back roles for a while. People were tired of me. I was tired of me. I cleared my schedule and focused on being better.”

“Any relapses?”

“At first, yeah. A lot. I almost gave up. Being clean is hard. It’s still hard. Stress balls and chewing gum live in my pockets. I work out. Run. Channel those urges into other things. I don’t even take aspirin for a headache anymore.”

“Alcohol?”

“What about it?” I still drink, but it’s too early to admit that to Ellie. We’re starting to get somewhere. There’s no mixing of prescription drugs or codeine cough syrup with it anymore. The danger she’d see doesn’t exist.

“You used to carry around water bottles full of Jim Beam or lean or both.”

“I don’t do that anymore.” At least that part is true. “I’m committed to this change.”

She sits forward in the lounger, bringing her knees up and encircling them with her arms. She rests her cheek on her knees and looks at me. “I want to believe that.”

“I will prove it to you. It’s going to take more than a week. I realize that. At the end of this week, though, you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to take the risk.” I drop my feet off the side of the lounger, resting my forearms on my knees. The breeze carries a whiff of her familiar perfume.The memories. I close my eyes.

“My reluctance is the drugs and alcohol,” she whispers. “But it’s not just that. I don’t enjoy the spectacle you crave. When we were younger, some of the attention was fun, until it wasn’t. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, and who knows what else—I can’t keep up, but you do. Most of it didn’t even exist when we were a couple. That kind of exposure isn’t good for me and for—well, I don’t want it.” Her face is lit by the soft interior lights flooding through the doors and windows. Her hair catches on the breeze, lifting and swirling. She brushes it behind her ears.

“I’ll quit all of it. I’ll scale it back. Whatever. I don’t care about that noise. It’s fun, and it doesn’t bother me. But if you hate it, I’ll stop.”

From my pocket, I take out the stress ball. I squeeze it and toss it from hand to hand, waiting for Ellie to come up with another obstacle to jump. Whatever blockade she erects, I’m scaling it, smashing it, removing it.

She snatches the ball from me in midair. “I don’t want to live in LA again, ever.”

Shit. Compromise on this point is going to be tricky. Anna and Jamal are in LA, not to mention Tanvi, who only has me left. “We could split our time.”

“No.” She tosses the ball back.

I catch it. “Come on, Ellie. You gotta be reasonable.” I reach for her hand, but she scoots over to the far side of the lounger and stands.

“You should probably call Calshae for that ride.” Ellie heads into the house without a backward glance.

I race after her and catch her arm in the living room. “You’re being irrational.”

She rounds on me in a burst of anger. “I’m being irrational? You showed up here ten years too late. You expect me to flip my life, to start over again with you. My house and family are here, not in LA.”

I close the space between us, and she doesn’t back away. I lace her fingers with mine. She deflates, the anger going out of her. She was always this way, quick to ignite, quick to burn out. Yet another reason I thought she’d come back to me. But she never did.

“Are you happy?” I ask.

“You want me to say I’m happy?”

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