Page 19 of Win Some Love Some
But now, looking at her from fifty feet away – I could see everything. All the pain she tried to hide. The humiliation and the embarrassment.
“She’s been shaken,” Roy said, arms crossed over his chest as he stared out over the park. “Badly. I knew that TikTok thing would end badly.”
“My guess is, you still don’t even know what TikTok is.”
“I know it gave her a lot, but it took away even more.”
That was the truth.
It all happened by accident. She’d started an account – innocently enough. An American in Paris. It was her walking around Paris, studying abroad, trying new food, figuring out the Metro, being Nora. Which meant being irresistible and funny and charismatic. The world took notice.
Rene Tartempion took notice.
“Have they found him?” The last update from Roy was that both Interpol and the FBI were after him.
“No,” Roy said. “She’s so embarrassed she won’t even let us say his name in the house.”
That sounded like Nora.
“We should have gone over there and picked her up the second she realized what was happening,” Roy said and I nodded. I knew we shared the same dream. Getting our hands on that asshole.
“Do you think she…” I stopped myself, because it didn’t matter. Honest to God, it didn’t.
“What?”
“Do you think she loved him? Like for real?” I’d looked at pictures of that asshole and couldn’t even imagine her falling for someone so slick. So loud and flashy. The opposite of everything I was. Not that she ever seriously loved me. I’d been nothing more than an out of control crush.
“No,” Roy said. “I never heard it in her voice. Never when she talked about him. I think she got swept up by it all and paid for it.”
I didn’t know the number on how much Rene took her for, but I knew she had to sell basically anything of value she had to pay off her credit cards.
No doubt Roy’s reluctance to move on from his ancient truck had to do with bailing Nora out of trouble. He’d told me that Vanessa, who had access to her family inheritance, could havewiped out the debt completely, but Nora was adamant about fixing it on her own.
Which was why she was back in Calico Cove, living in her parents’ house, in the same bedroom where’d she grown up as a child.
Which was also why she was sitting alone on the bench, watching the festivities play out in front of her, when she’d always been the person to be right in the center of all the action.
She looked totally defeated.
I’d never seen her like this. Ever. Nora’s super strength was self-confidence. She had always known who she was. She’d known she was loved by her family. Adored by the town. There was nothing she couldn’t do, including picking up and moving to Paris, learning to speak the language fluently, going to school and then setting the world on fire.
Now her social media account was deleted, her followers gone. She’d sold off everything to pay off the debt that asshole got her into.
She was no longer on the world stage.
Just a resident of Calico Cove.
Maybe it was wrong or selfish, but I still thought this was the right place for her to be.
Paris be damned.
“She’s going to work on the boat with me,” Roy said.
I shook my head. “You know she can’t do that. She gets seasick.”
“She’ll never admit it.”
“Doesn’t make it not true.”
