Page 54 of Comfort Read

This earns Kit a sliver of a smile from Wayne, but his eyes are still sharp, probing. It’s obvious he won’t accept anything less than an answer to his question, and Kit did come all this way to give him one.

“I don’t expect you to forgive him,” Kit says, forcing the words out around the lump in his throat. “And I don’t expect him to forgive me, and it probably is audacious of me to say this, but the thing is, I spent enough time with Sage to know he doesn’t have that many, um… people? In his life?”

“Really? The way I figure it, he’s got a whole army of them. Seline and his friends and his legions of fans, no? Not to mention all the drivers and bodyguards and stylists and that publicist of his, Freddie or Farrah or whatever her name is⁠—”

“Frankie,” Kit says, on a sigh. “And yeah, to be clear: You’re right. In terms of volume, there are always people around him. But—especially after what you told me—I think maybe he’s more like you than he ever was like his father. He takes care of everyone close to him, but I don’t think he’s very good at letting them do it in return.”

The paperweight hits Wayne’s palm with an audible thwack; he stops moving it, sets it down. “Could you say more about that, please?”

“So, like: his bodyguard? He gave her the money that started her and her wife’s business.” Kit looks down at his thighs, his fingertips pressing hard against the chair beneath them. “He put up the funding for his best friend’s restaurant, too. When he originally hired Frankie, he was a client at a big PR agency that she was temping for. But she’d just gotten out of a rough marriage, and it was a part-time, entry-level gig that didn’t include health insurance. When she told him, he left that agency and brought her on full-time. Basically the minute he heard the story, too: I guess she cracked from the stress one day when they got stuck in an elevator together, and he’d hired her before the week was out.”

Kit swallows hard, trying to keep his voice even, trying not to sound as heartbroken and lovesick as he is at losing this strange, wounded, complicated person, this person he’d been hoping to spend the rest of his life puzzling out. “And I heard all of this from them, by the way. Not from him. He never talks about it. He never takes any credit, or complains about how little space he has to just be a person. He never even told me what happened with Nick, and I know that whatever it was tore him up⁠—”

“Nick told Sage that John wanted him to be an actor,” Wayne says quietly. When Kit risks a glance up, he’s staring out the window, his eyes far away. “When he was a kid. Said that going into show business was the only way he could honor his father’s legacy. But what John wanted was to protect Sage, and keep him as far away from the industry as possible. I guess it came up a lot in those journals I sent him.”

“Jesus,” Kit breathes, the context slotting too much into horrible, searing clarity. “That’s—that’s to my point, really. He needs someone. Someone to talk to. Someone to trust. If it can’t be me, if I ruined my chances, then you know what? Okay. I mean, devastating for me, obviously, add it to the list of things I’ll regret until the day I die, but: Okay. But, Wayne, for God’s sake, it has to be someone. Someone who doesn’t work for him, who isn’t beholden to him, who he doesn’t feel like he has to shield or protect. Someone who knows him.”

Wayne lets out a snort. “What, you think I know him? The last time I spent any real time with him, he was a toddler⁠—”

“Yeah, well, the thing about that is that one of you has to try!” Kit nearly yells this, which is more than just audacious; it’s rude, and he drops both his voice and his eyes as he hastily murmurs, “Sorry, Jesus. I’m sorry. It’s just—I understand that he lied to you, and that you’ve been hurt. Honestly, it sounds like you’ve been through hell. But the thing is, so has he, and you’re his uncle, and the thought of him going through this alone is—I can’t bear to⁠—”

Kit cuts himself off, choking both on the words and the humiliation of the break in his voice, and has to ball his hands into fists to force the rest of it out. “He’s not John. I don’t blame you for wanting some source of stability in his life before you funded a multimillion-dollar movie project—I really don’t blame you, now that you’ve told me what you’ve told me. But I think you should strongly consider trying to be a source of stability, instead of tasking him with going out and finding one. Even if it scares you, or you think you’re going to mess it up. Don’t you think he’s scared, too? He’s the best person I’ve ever met, and besides that, he’s your family. Don’t you think it might be worth it?”

Kit finally looks up, then, expecting to see Wayne red-faced with rage at being spoken to like this. But Wayne’s face is ashen; his eyes are wide.

Abruptly, Kit feels like a clockwork soldier in desperate need of fresh winding. It’s an effort to stand, to keep himself from bursting into mortifying tears as he says, “That’s what I came here to say, and I understand if it was, um… too much, or too far, or whatever. Thank you for your hospitality, and for talking to me. I have to go now.”

“Kit, wait, I⁠—”

“Seriously,” Kit says, with a laugh that feels wild in his throat, “I have to go. If I miss my flight, I’m stranded; I can’t afford another one.” He turns before Wayne can reply and flees, all but running out the office door and through the house, without looking back once.

He does cry, in the car on the way to the airport. He’s been doing that more the last few days, like some dam broke in that conversation with Maggie, and everything he’s held back for years is finally seeping out. His rideshare driver is nice enough not to comment on it, though Kit catches a few nervous looks in the rearview mirror that he does his best to ignore.

By the time they get to LAX, however, he’s put his emotions carefully away, just in case there’s a repeat of the paparazzi swarm. Either the news cycle’s moved on or no one’s bothering to track his movements now that he and Sage are no longer linked: He gets into the building and through security without a second glance from anyone.

But when he’s waiting at his gate, a woman in the airline’s uniform approaches him and taps him on the shoulder. “Are you Kit Forrest?”

“Um, yes?” Kit’s mind reels briefly with visions of being hauled off by the TSA for accidental luggage crimes, but then she smiles brightly at him.

“I just got off the phone with our billing department,” she says, “and I’ve been instructed to let you know that both of your flights today have been taken care of. The funds will be returned to your card within seven business days.”

“What?”

“I’m also supposed to tell you, ‘Wayne says thanks,’” she adds, looking slightly mystified by this. “I’m not sure why, but they said you’d understand what it meant.”

Kit stares at her for a long moment before: “I understand, yeah.” He’s not sure if it’s the truth or not.

TWENTY-THREE

Kit goes home.

His grief goes with him, as it was always going to. He hadn’t expected to outrun it by flying across the country and back again, and if he could, he doesn’t think he’d want to. Grief is a wild animal: Fleeing only encourages it to chase you, and if you lie down prone before it, it takes the opportunity to tear your throat out. The trick is in taming it, circling carefully and tossing little scraps of nourishment its way until it isn’t quite so hungry.

If he’s honest with himself, Kit doesn’t want nourishment. He wants Sage, wakes up every morning starved for him, an ache in the pit of his stomach that never seems to fade. But he doesn’t want to wither away, either, to let what he’s lost eat at him until he’s a shell of who he was. If he learned nothing else from Wayne’s story, he learned that. Those haunted eyes linger in his mind, as does the framed review of the first Ballard Brothers film that now hangs on Wayne’s office wall instead of John’s, a permanent reminder of ruin and woe.

Kit still has people who love him, people he loves, even if he can’t have what he wants most. He’s not going to put his family through the hell of watching him waste away. He’s not going to put himself through the hell of seeing his despair reflected in their eyes.

The Christmas season has arrived by the time he settles back in, which helps. He thinks maybe it wouldn’t if he were still living out of Sawyer’s; it had been horrible after Emerson left, that first holiday alone. He’d stayed up too late every night and hurt his own feelings, going through the motions of their shared traditions on his own and hearing each one ring hollow and false. Things that had once been comforting and familiar, an annual balm on the wounds every friction-filled year seemed to incur, had grown barbed in Emerson’s absence. By the time January rolled around, Kit had felt more like a pincushion than a person, and it had taken him weeks to fully recover.