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Maybe.
The single word seemed to throb in his head as Everett decided to find out as much as he could about Lila and what she was doing these days.
It had all started two months ago when he’d taken the day off, gotten another doctor to cover for him and had driven the 165 miles from Houston to Austin to pick up his sister, Schuyler. At the time, he was supposed to be bringing Schuyler back home.
Given to acting on impulse, his younger sister had initially gone to Austin because she had gotten it into her head to track down Nathan Fortune. The somewhat reclusive man was supposedly her cousin and the ever-inquisitive Schuyler was looking for answers about their family tree. The current thinking was that she and the rest of their brothers and sisters were all possibly related to the renowned Fortune family.
It was while Schuyler was looking for those answers that she decided to get closer to the Mendoza family whose history was intertwined with the Fortunes. She managed to get so close to one of them—Carlo Mendoza—that she wound up completely losing her heart to him.
Confused, unsure of herself for very possibly the first time in her life, Schuyler had turned to the one person she was closest to.
She’d called Everett.
Listening to his sister pouring out her heart—and citing her all uncertainties, not just about her genealogy investigation but about the direction her heart had gone in—he had decided he needed to see Schuyler and maybe convince her to come home.
But Schuyler had reconciled with her man and decided to stay in Austin after all. Everett returned home without her. But he hadn’t come away completely empty-handed. What Everett had come home with was a renewed sense of having made a terrible mistake thirteen years ago. And that had come about because while he’d been in Austin, he had run into Lila.
Sort of.
He saw Lila entering a sandwich shop and it had been a jarring experience for him. It had instantly propelled him back through time and just like that, all the old feelings had come rushing back to him, saturating him like a huge tidal wave. At least they had in his case. However, he’d been struck by the aura of sadness he detected about her. A sadness that had not been there when they were in high school together.
He’d thought—hoped really—that when he got back to Houston, back to his practice, he’d be able to drive thoughts of Lila back into the past where they belonged. Instead, they began to haunt him, vividly pushing their way into his dreams at night, sneaking up on him during the day whenever he had an unguarded moment.
He began wondering in earnest about what had happened to her in all those years since they’d been together. And that sadness he’d detected—was he responsible for that? Or was there some other reason for its existence?
He felt compelled to find out.
Like everyone else of his generation, Everett turned to social media in his quest for information about Lila Clark.
He found her on Facebook.
When he saw that Lila had listed herself as “single” and that there were only a few photographs posted on her page, mainly from vacation spots she had visited, he felt somewhat heartened.
Maybe, a little voice in his head whispered, it wasn’t too late to make amends after all.
Damn it, Everett, get hold of yourself. This is exactly what Schuyler warned you about. Don’t get your hopes up, at least not until you talk to Lila again and exchange more than six words with her.
Who knows, she might have changed and you won’t even like Lila 2.0.
Everett struggled to talk himself out of letting his imagination take flight. He tried to get himself to go slow—or maybe not go at all.
But the latter was just not an option.
He knew he felt too strongly about this, too highly invested in righting a wrong he’d committed in the past. Now that he’d made up his mind about the matter, he needed to make Lila understand that he regretted the way things had gone thirteen years ago.
Regretted not being more emotionally supportive of her.
Regretted not being able to see the daughter they had both lost.
Still, he continued to try to talk himself out of it for two days after he found Lila on Facebook. Tried to make himself just walk away from the whole idea: from getting in contact with her, from apologizing and making amends. All of it.
But he couldn’t.
So finally, on the evening of the third day, Everett sat down in front of his computer, powered up his internet connection and pulled up Facebook. Specifically, he pulled up Lila’s profile.
He’d stared at it for a full ten minutes before he finally began to type a message to her.
Hi, Lila. It’s been a long time. I’m planning on being in Austin soon. Let’s have lunch together and do some catching up. I’d really welcome the chance to see and talk with you.
Those four simple sentences took him close to half an hour to settle on. He must have written and deleted thirty sentences before he finally decided on those. Then it took him another ten minutes before he sent those four sweated-over sentences off into cyberspace.
For the next two hours he checked on that page close to a dozen and a half times, all without any luck. He was about to power down his computer for the night when he pulled up Lila’s Facebook page one last time.
“She answered,” he announced out loud even though there was no one around to hear him.
Sitting down in his chair, he read Lila’s response, unconsciously savoring each word as if it was a precious jewel.
If you’re going to be here Friday, I can meet you for lunch at 11:30. I just need to warn you that I only get forty-five minutes for lunch, so our meeting will be short. We’re usually really swamped where I work.
Everett could hardly believe that she’d actually agreed to meet with him. He’d been half prepared to read her rejection. Whistling, he immediately posted a response.
11:30 on Friday sounds great. Since I’m unfamiliar with Austin, you pick the place and let me know.
After sleeping fitfully, he decided to get up early. He had a full slate of appointments that day. Best to get a jump on it. But the minute he passed the computer, he knew what he had to do first.
And there, buried amid approximately forty other missives—all of which were nothing short of junk mail—was Lila’s response. All she’d written was the name of a popular chain of restaurants, followed by its address. But his heart soared.
Their meeting was set.
If he’d been agile enough to pull it off, Everett would have leaped up and clicked his heels together.
As it was, he got ready for work very quickly and left the house within the half hour—singing.
* * *
The second Lila hit the send button on Facebook, she immediately regretted it.
What am I thinking? she upbraided herself. Was she crazy? Did she actually want to meet with someone who had so carelessly broken her heart? Who was responsible for the single most heart-wrenching event to have happened in her life?
“What’s wrong with you? Are you hell-bent on being miserable?” she asked herself as she walked away from her computer. It was after eleven o’clock at night and she was alone.
The way she was on most nights.
Maybe that was the problem, Lila told herself. She was tired of being alone and when she’d seen that message from Everett on her Facebook page, it had suddenly stirred up a lot of old memories.
“Memories you’re better off forgetting, remember?” she demanded.
But they weren’t all bad, she reminded herself. As a matter of fact, if she thought back, a lot of those memories had been good.
Very good.
For a large chunk of her senior year and a portion of her first year at community college, Everett had been the love of her life. He’d made her happier than she could ever remember being.
But it was what had happened at the end that outweighed everything, that threw all those good recollections into the shadows, leaving her to remember that awful, awful ache in her heart as Emma was taken out of her arms and she watched her baby being carried away.
Away from her.
She’d wanted Everett to hold her then. To tell her that he was aching as much as she was. That he felt as if something had been torn away from his heart, too, the way she felt it had for her.
But all he had said was: “It’s for the best.” As if there was something that could be described as “best” about never being able to see your baby again. A baby that had been conceived in love and embodied the two of them in one tiny little form.
Lila felt tears welling up in her eyes even after all this time, felt them spilling out even though she’d tried hard to squeeze them back.
She wished she hadn’t agreed to see Everett.
But if she’d said no to lunch, Everett would have probably put two and two together and realized that she hadn’t the courage to see him again. If she’d turned him down, he would’ve understood just how much he still mattered to her.
No, Lila told herself, she had no way out. She had to see him again. Had to sit there across from him at a table, making inane conversation and proving to him that he meant nothing to her.
That would be her ultimate revenge for his having so wantonly, so carelessly, ripped out her heart without so much as a moment’s pause or a word of actual genuine comfort.
“We’ll have lunch, Everett,” she said, addressing his response that was posted on her Facebook page. “We’ll have lunch, and then you’ll realize just what you lost all those years ago. Lost forever. Because I was the very best thing that could have ever happened to you,” she added with finality.
Her words rang hollow to her ear.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. She had a couple of days before she had to meet with him. A couple of days to practice making herself sound as if she believed every syllable she uttered.
She’d have it letter-perfect by the time they met, she promised herself.
She had to.
Chapter Two (#u87ac6494-0466-5ccd-81c7-c6a2115ac6e2)
Half the contents of Lila’s closet was now spread out all over her bed. She spent an extra hour going through each item slowly before finally making up her mind.
Lila dressed with great care, selecting a two-piece gray-blue outfit that flattered her curves as well as sharply bringing out the color of her eyes.
Ordinarily, putting on makeup entailed a dash of lipstick for Lila, if that. This morning she highlighted her eyes, using both mascara and a little eye shadow. She topped it off with a swish of blush to accent her high cheekbones, smoothed her long auburn hair, then sprayed just the slightest bit of perfume.
Finished, she slowly inspected herself from all angles in her wardrobe mirror before she decided that she was ready to confront a past she’d thought she’d buried—and in so doing, make Dr. Everett Fortunado eat his heart out.
Maybe, Lila thought as she left her house, if she took this much trouble getting ready for the occasional dates she went out on, she might not still be single at the age of thirty-three.
Lila sighed. She knew better. It wasn’t her clothes or her makeup that were responsible for her single status.
It was her.
After breaking up with Everett, she had picked herself up and dusted herself off. In an all-out attempt to totally reinvent herself, Lila had left Houston and moved to Austin where no one knew her or anything about the past she was determined to forget and put totally behind her.
She’d gone to work at the Fortune Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing assistance to the needy. Through hard work, she’d swiftly risen and was now manager of her department.
And because of her work, Lila’s life went from intolerable to good. At least her professional life did.
Her personal life, however, was another story.
Sure, she’d dated. She’d tried blind dates as well as online dating. She’d joined clubs and had gone to local sporting events to cheer on the home team. She’d gone out with rich men as well as poor ones and those in between.
It wasn’t that Lila couldn’t meet a man, she just couldn’t meet the man.
And probably even if she could, she thought, that still wouldn’t have done the trick. Because no matter who she went out with, she couldn’t trust him.
Everett had destroyed her ability to trust any man she might become involved with.
Try as she might, she couldn’t lower her guard. She just couldn’t bear to have a repeat performance of what had happened to her with Everett.
Rather than risk that, she kept her heart firmly under lock and key. And that guaranteed a life of loneliness.
At this point in her life, Lila had decided to give up looking for Mr. Right. Instead, she forced herself to embrace being Stubbornly Single.
As she took one last look in the mirror and walked out the door, she told herself that was what she really wanted.
One day she might convince herself that was true.
* * *
Her upgraded appearance did not go unnoticed when she walked into the office at the Fortune Foundation that morning.
“Well, someone looks extra nice today,” Lucie Fortune Chesterfield Parker noted the moment that Lila crossed the threshold. “Do you have a hot date tonight?” she asked as she made her way over toward Lila.
“No, I don’t,” Lila answered, hoping that would be the end of it.
Belatedly, she thought that maybe she should have brought this outfit with her and changed in the ladies’ room before going to lunch instead of coming in dressed like this.
Lucie and she were friends and had been almost from the very first time they met at the Foundation, but Lila really didn’t want to talk about the man she was having lunch with.
Initially from England, Lucie was married to Chase Parker, a Texas oil heir who had been her teenage sweetheart. Because of that, Lucie considered herself to be an expert on romance and she felt she had great radar when it came to the subject.
Her radar was apparently on red alert now as she swiftly looked Lila over.
Studying her, Lucie repeated, “Not tonight?”
“No,” Lila said firmly. She never broke stride, determined to get to her office and close the door on this subject—literally as well as figuratively.
“Lunch, then?” Lucie pressed. “You certainly didn’t get all dolled up like that for us.”
Lila looked at her sharply over her shoulder, but her coworker didn’t back off. The expression on her face indicated that she thought she was onto something.
When Lila made no response, Lucie pressed harder. “Well, are you going to lunch with someone?”
