Page 20 of American Beauty

“You love this girl.” His statement is so direct, so matter-of-fact, it almost knocks the wind out of me.

My fingers tighten around the grip of my club as the truth comes out. “Yeah, I do. A lot.”

Dad’s face doesn’t change, doesn’t show a hint of surprise. Instead, he smiles—a knowing, satisfied kind of smile. “Your mother and I saw that from the start. Magnolia loves you for you. That’s rare when you have money and fame.”

He doesn’t know the half of my love for Magnolia or the way she rewrote the map of my heart. Not the way her laughter stitched itself into my life. He’s never seen the nights I lie awake, yearning for her in the dark. Never felt the hollow ache her absence has left behind.

She was mine before I even knew how to say it. She’s still mine now, even across the distance.

Dad reaches into his bag and pulls out a putter, handing it to me. “Here. Let’s see if you can at least clean up your short game.”

He isn’t only talking about golf.

He props his weight on his club, casual as you please, but his words hit harder than a fist. “The real question is what are you going to do about the woman you love being so far away?”

The weight of this conversation just shifted.

He steps aside, watching as I line up my shot. The green stretches before me, the hole just a few feet away, but my father’s voice keeps me from focusing.

“Your mother almost slipped through my fingers.”

I glance up, surprised. I’ve never heard that story. “How?”

He crosses his arms, looking toward the horizon like he’s seeing something long past. “Before we were married, Malie returned to Samoa. She had her life there, her family. I had mine here. We both thought we were making the right choices, choosing the lives we’d built before each other. Being apart from her were the worst months of my life.”

I understand that all too well. “What did you do?”

He smiles, like the answer should be obvious. “I got on a plane and went to Samoa.”

“Just like that?”

“It wasn’tjust like that.Nothing about it was easy. There were a hundred reasons to stay put. But there was one damn good reason to go. Sometimes, you have to move the pieces around—hell, flip the whole damn board if you need to, to protect what’s yours. You have to know what’s worth the fight.”

His words sink in. My dad’s not just giving me advice. This is a challenge.

He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Do what you must for love, Alex. It’s the only thing that matters.”

I study the endless stretch of green before me and settle into my stance. The weight in my chest hasn’t lessened, but something inside me has shifted. I understand what I need to do.

I draw my club back, steady and controlled. When I swing, everything clicks into place. The ball launches clean and smooth, cutting through the air in a perfect arc before landing dead center on the fairway.

Dad watches the shot and releases a low whistle. “That’s more like it.”

I exhale, gripping the club a little tighter.

It’s time to clean up my short game and work toward a future where Magnolia and I are not separated by an ocean.

Chapter 6

Alex Sebring

Unread emails have piledup like an avalanche, burying my inbox in a mess I have no patience to dig through. My personal assistant should handle this—sorting the urgent from the useless, deleting the spam, and spoon-feeding me what matters.

But I don’t have a PA anymore.

Not since I fired her.

Even with the heavier workload, I don’t regret it for a second. She leaked my Soul Sync involvement to Celeste—I’m sure of it. She lied to my face, swore she didn’t, but I’m not stupid. And I know damn well I didn’t match with Celeste. Someone helped rig it, and she was part of it. No doubt.

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