Page 208 of Between the Blue
“Are you talking about Addie?”
I rub a hand over my face.
“Bennett, what the fuck do you mean she’s gone?”
“She’s leaving,” I mutter.
“What?”
“She got a job. In Paris.”
Silence stretches between us as the news settles in.
“She’s already there?” Rhett eventually asks.
I open my mouth, but then my phone beeps.
I pull it away from my ear. See it’s my agent calling. Decline the call.
“Hello?” Sutty’s saying when I put the phone back to my ear.
“She packed her desk up today,” I tell him.
“So she’s not gone,” he says.
“She got her dream job. She’s one foot out the door, Sutty.”
“And what about the other foot?”
My agent starts calling again.
I decline him again.
“She’s not gone yet,” Rhett says.
“But she–”
“Bennett,” he demands. “Listen to me.She’s. Not. Gone.”
I start to argue with him, but it dies on my tongue.
“What are you saying?” I finally ask him. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Whatever you have to, man,” he tells me, exasperated. “Just don’t let her go. She’s too goddamn good. And you deserve some good in your life. I mean, fuck, Jamesy, you’ve been punishing yourself for a decade for something you didn’t have control over.”
I blow out a steady breath, my voice coming out weak. “I shouldn’t have left her.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Ishould haveknown–”
“She pushed you away,” Rhett tells me. “She didn’t want you to know. That was her choice.”
“I lost her,” I breathe. My gaze shifts to the other scrapbook in the cabinet. The green one covered in little glittery lightning bolts. “And now I’ve lost Addie too.”
My phone beeps again. I curse silently. I know it’s my agent again before I look at the screen.
“Not yet you haven’t,” Sutty says. “And, this time, you have the power to keep her. So do something about it, man.”
