The Things We Leave Unfinished by Yarros, Rebecca (best free e reader .TXT) 📗

“You are!” She damn near squealed in excitement.

“Drop it.” The last thing I needed was her filling Mom’s head.

Adrienne scoffed. “Yeah right. Have you met me?”

“Fair point.” I rubbed the skin between my eyebrows. “The second I leave here, it’s over, and I don’t want it to be, but Ellsworth scarred the shit out of her.”

“So don’t leave,” Adrienne stated like it was the simplest answer.

“Yeah, if it were only that easy. She said it herself: this is a book-writing fling. Once the book is finished, so are we.” And it was done, just waiting to be attached in an email to Adam.

“Okay, so don’t finish the book?” she suggested, her voice pitching upward.

“Helpful.” I flipped to the wedding pictures and covered Ellsworth with my hand so only Georgia smiled out at me, then peered closer. She was happy, but that smile wasn’t as bright as the ones I’d been gifted with.

“I’m serious. Stay. Push your deadline back for once in your life. I’ll bring Mom here for Christmas, you can call in. Trust me, if this gets you married and settled—”

“Adrienne,” I warned.

“Eventually,” she amended. “Mom will be all about it. We both just want you to be happy, Noah. If Georgia Stanton makes you happy, then fight for it. Fight for her. Pretend you’re one of your own characters and help her fix whatever Ellsworth broke.”

“Are you done with your inspirational speech?” I teased halfheartedly.

“Do you need me to launch into the rarity of finding someone to truly love?”

“God, no.” I glanced back at the laptop. “Don’t count on me for Christmas. But I love you.”

“I love you, and I’ll forgive you for missing out if you give me a sister-in-law!”

“Bye, Adrienne.” I hung up, shaking my head and scoffing. If it were that easy to heal Georgia, I would have done it already.

I lifted my hand and stared down at Georgia’s wedding picture, hearing her words from that day play like a soundtrack. There’s a warning, a sound your heart makes the first time it realizes it’s no longer safe with the person you trusted.

It all came down to trust with Georgia. Ellsworth had broken hers so completely that she didn’t have any left. But she’d given me Scarlett’s story. She’d climbed the wall. She’d opened her home. She’d unabashedly offered her body without reservation. She trusted me with everything but her heart, because she’d been left, abandoned—

The first time…

“Oh, shit,” I muttered as it hit me. I never said he did.

I flew back through the album as her words hit home in a way they hadn’t when she’d said them. I passed her high school graduation, the birthday Ava had reappeared, and slowed when I’d backtracked as far as her first day of kindergarten.

The pictures just before showed Georgia living with Ava, her eyes bright, her smile a younger version of the dazzling one she gave me these days. Real love has to be choked out, held under the water until it stops kicking. And that’s exactly what the pictures showed year after year. The slow drowning of love.

It wasn’t Ellsworth who had broken Georgia—it was Ava.

Ava, who had disappeared, then shown up whenever it suited her.

Whenever she needed something.

“If this were a book, what would you do?” I asked myself, flipping through the pages and landing on that twelfth birthday picture. “You’d use the past to heal the present.”

The studio opening—I could fly Ava in. If you’re still here in seven weeks. Georgia had already given her everything she wanted, and without ulterior motive… It could work. I could slowly start to repair the canyons Ava had left in Georgia, if I started with the cracks. I just had to make sure Ava wanted to be there for Georgia’s happiness alone.

I slammed the album shut, then took my seat at the desk, parted the boxes of manuscripts to pull my laptop in front of me, and opened it. How the hell was I going to convince her to let me stay another seven weeks?

I shot a healthy heaping of side-eye at the picture of Jameson and Scarlett that sat on the left side of the desk. “Any advice?” I asked him. “It’s not like I can fly her off into the sunset, and let’s be honest, you had a hell of a wingman in Constance.” It also hadn’t hurt that the pair had lived during a time where being reckless was a wise use of whatever time you had left.

I drummed my fingers on the desk, staring at the two finished files on my desktop.

If Jameson had won Scarlett by bending the rules…maybe the same would work to win his great-granddaughter.

I pulled out my phone and called Adam.

“Please tell me you’re about to send me the finished manuscript.”

“Well, hello to you, too,” I drawled. “I’m still two days early.”

“You know the print deadline on this is tighter than my mother-in-law’s Spanx.” I heard his chair creak.

“Yeah, about that…” I cringed.

“Do not tell me that for the first time in your career, you’re going to blow a deadline. Not on this book. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to edit it? To constantly question if I’m messing with Scarlett-freaking-Stanton?” His voice pitched upward.

“You sound stressed. Have you been for a run since I left?”

“You’re the reason my blood pressure is high in the first place.”

And I was about to ask him to raise it even higher, all so I had a shot at winning Georgia. What kind of selfish prick did that to his best friend? You, apparently.

“Noah, what’s going on?” Adam’s tone gentled.

“On a scale of one to ten, how good of friends would you say we are? Because I’d probably go with—”

“You were the best man at my wedding. You’re my best friend. Now, are you talking to me as your editor? Or as my kid’s godfather?”

“Both.”

“Shit.” I could picture him rubbing his temples. “What do you need?”

“Time.”

“You don’t have it.”

“Not mine. Yours. How