When Stars Fall by Wendy Million

Chapter Seventeen

Wyatt

Present Day

Haven keeps a running commentary during dinner. Who knew a young girl could be so chatty with strangers?

“What do you think, Wyatt?” Haven takes another heaping spoonful of pasta.

The amount of food she’s eating is surprising. She’s a tiny slip of a thing. I’ve tuned out the conversation, and I glance at Ellie for help, but she offers none.

“Sorry, I think my mind wandered,” I admit. “What were you wondering?”

“Kayaking and snorkeling tomorrow after school. There’s a cool reef not far out. Do you want to go with me and, uh, my aunt?” she asks.

“If you want to come, you’re welcome to.” Ellie shrugs.

“Sounds like fun.” I nudge Haven’s arm.

Haven gives Ellie a triumphant look. A curious exchange. Having me back tomorrow is a victory? Nice to have someone in my corner. My support club is pretty thin on this island. Ellie shakes her head at Haven, love for her niece shining out of every pore.

Pushing back my chair, I clear my plate and grab Haven’s. She thanks me, and I wink. Ellie trails behind me to the kitchen.

“I have to help Haven with her schoolwork.” She puts her plate straight into the dishwasher.

“That’s fine,” I say over my shoulder. “I’ll clean up here.”

“I’ll have to take you to the hotel before Haven goes to bed.”

She’s beside me, her shoulder almost, but not quite, brushing mine. As the sink fills, I focus on Ellie. Do women keep the same perfume for this many years? She smells like vanilla and flowers—exactly like I remember. The small space between us vibrates, two magnets struggling to stay apart. She adjusts the plug for the drain, and her arm brushes mine. She snatches her hand back like I’ve shocked her. It’s too humid here for static electricity. I know what she feels; I feel it too.

“Calshae said she’d pick me up if it’s too hard for you to get me to the hotel.” The more time I get with Ellie, the better my chances will be at the end of the week.

“Is that so?” She chuckles, leaning her hip against the counter to face me. “Trust you to get the hotel owner’s daughter to volunteer to be your personal driver while you’re here.”

“She’s very concerned with customer service,” I tease Ellie as I sink my hands into the soapy water.

“I bet she is.” She pushes off the counter and puts away the leftovers before disappearing to help Haven.

Not wanting to disturb Haven’s homework routine with my presence, I take my time cleaning. I’m wiping down the counters when Haven comes in and throws herself at me, enveloping me around the middle. With a chuckle, I drop the cloth to pick her up. Her weightlessness amazes me. Her eyes are a striking blue, and she scans my face in return, grinning.

“No one ever picks me up anymore unless they’re carrying me to bed,” Haven says.

“You’re pretty light.” I bounce her in my arms to prove my point. She’s slight like her grandmother and aunt. There’s almost nothing to her.

She shrugs. “I guess.” She loops her arms around my neck. “I’m done my schoolwork, so I have to go to bed.”

“Already?” I check the clock. Later than I thought.

“Yeah.” Her eyes connect with mine and she says, “You have pretty eyes.”

“I get that a lot.”

“I do too,” she whispers.

“You must get the color from your grandmother and your mother,” I say. “They both have blue eyes too.”

Ellie appears in the doorway. “You ready?” she asks Haven.

Haven hesitates for a beat longer, as though there is more she wants to say, something I’m not getting. She stares at Ellie in a silent exchange.

“Let’s go.” Ellie motions with her hand for Haven to follow.

“Want me to carry you to the room you’re sleeping in?”

Haven hesitates, and Ellie half turns. Haven shakes her head, and I set her down. While I stand in the kitchen entry, they disappear behind the opaque door that conceals the hallway and bedrooms.

On the back patio, I grab a seat in one of the recliners. The ocean waves lap against the towering cliff edge, and the tree frogs serenade me. Life is good here, in this house. I unlock my phone to find a host of social media alerts and Throwback Thursdays dedicated to me and Ellie. Ah, yes. The media storm is still swirling far away from us. I scroll through the posts with my fake accounts, liking some, reposting others. The temptation to write something, anything, almost gets a foothold in me. But if I fan the flames more and bring the press to her doorstep, I’ll be dead in the water. No one knows I’m here. She loves her privacy as much as I love the publicity. #Wyllie is still trending across several platforms.

I click on my email. My manager has a note to call him. The costar in my next film dropped out, which is going to delay production. Camila sent me an update on Anna and Jamal. Everything seems well with them. I breathe a sigh of relief. Anna is a loose cannon, but I pay Camila well to provide stability when I’m not there to do it.

Ellie comes out the doors and flops down beside me. “Success,” she says.

“She’s sleeping?” I close my phone and stuff it into my pocket. I don’t want to remind Ellie about the world out there waiting for us to emerge.

“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?”

I release one of her hands and put my arm around her waist, tugging her close. “I want you to be happy.”

She stares at our joined hands and makes no move to step away. “I’m content.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I know. But being happy with someone means they can make me sad too.” Tension crackles between us. We’re so close my breath stirs her hair.

A buzzing noise interrupts the silence. I curse the vibration in my pocket. Ignore it.

She steps back as though she’s come out of a trance. “It’s getting late,” she says. “You should call for that ride.”

I remove my phone from my pocket and see my home number. “Sorry,” I say to Ellie. “I’ll be a minute. I need to take this.” With a grimace, I head into the kitchen and press Talk.