Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64354 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64354 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 257(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
I was terrified of losing him.
That was why I’d put off telling him the truth about who I was.
It felt like I’d started living the day I met Armando Cortez. How could I go back to living without him, if he decided my past was unforgivable?
11
Salvatore
As our visit with Arie’s family drew closer and closer, I was running out of chances to tell him the truth about me.
I’d been right not to tell him last weekend, when we were staying at that vacation home in San Clemente. He’d tried so hard to make everything perfect, and it would have been awful to ruin it.
Then he went home to San Diego and got busy with work, and I’d returned to L.A. It didn’t feel right to drop this bombshell over the phone, so several days passed.
I thought about telling him on Friday night when I drove down for our weekend together, but his cook had to leave early, so he ended up working until closing. He was exhausted after that and fell asleep about ten minutes after he got home.
Now it was Saturday, and we were on a flight to San Francisco. He’d been a bundle of nerves all morning because he’d never flown before, and it was even worse now that we were on the plane. Clearly this wasn’t the right time either, but I was determined to come clean before we met his son and son-in-law for dinner this evening.
Even after all this time, Arie hadn’t tried to get me to talk about my past. He’d figured out there was something I was ashamed of, and he waited patiently for me to reveal it when I was ready. But his family was going to have questions for me, and I couldn’t make all of this worse by lying to them.
I was going to have one more opportunity to talk to Arie, though. After brunch with my relatives, we’d have a few hours to ourselves before dinner. I’d made a reservation at the same hotel where we’d met. It would be the perfect time and place to tell him everything.
I was cutting it close, and I needed to be careful, because Arie had to hear the truth from me. I’d texted Dante and asked him not to bring up my past when we gathered at his grandmother’s house. If Arie found out I was a criminal before I had a chance to tell him, it would destroy his trust in me. There was probably no coming back from that.
But at the moment, my focus was on helping him through his first plane ride. Now that we were making our descent into San Francisco, his nervousness was bordering on panic.
“This is the part I’ve been dreading the most,” he muttered, as one hand clutched mine and the other white-knuckled the armrest.
He pressed his eyes shut as the plane approached the runway. Fortunately, it was a smooth landing. Arie let out the breath he’d been holding and opened his eyes, and I asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Because there was no reason to act the way I did,” he said.
“It was all new to you, so I can see why it’d be unnerving.”
Once the plane came to a stop, he grabbed me in a hug. He was shaking, so I rubbed his back and told him, “If you don’t want to fly back, we can always rent a car and drive.”
“No, I want to fly. I think it’ll be easier the second time, now that I know what takeoff and landing are like.”
We grabbed our overnight bags, and as we left the plane I said, “Brunch with my relatives is in a little over two hours. Since you were too nervous to eat breakfast, let’s find a café, so I can get you something to eat.”
“That sounds great. I could use something to settle my stomach.”
There were several cabs waiting in front of the arrivals terminal. We climbed into one, and I asked the driver to take us to North Beach. I couldn’t remember the name of the café where we went the night we met, but I was pretty sure I could find it again.
As we pulled away from the curb, Arie took his phone from his pocket and switched it out of airplane mode. A few text messages popped up right away. He read them and murmured, “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Kit messaged me. He and Devon are on their way to the airport. Devon’s mom had an accident this morning and broke her leg. The boys are flying to Baltimore, Devon’s hometown, because she’s scheduled to have surgery.”
“So, they won’t be able to meet us for dinner.”
“That’s right.”
I was flooded with relief, followed immediately by guilt for feeling that way. I’d been dreading meeting Arie’s son, both because I was worried about what he might ask me, and because I thought there was a good chance he’d hate me. Now I’d been granted a temporary reprieve.