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“What’s the story going to be this time?”
“No story. No spin. I’m done with that. Kevin can take his lies and shove them. But I may need some creative wording.”
“Do I want to know what you’re going to do?”
“Nope. Because you’d talk me out of it. I’ll call you later when I have a task for you. Just, maybe, keep praying.”
“Always,” Staci said before Reese hung up.
Before she set the phone down, Reese sent Sterling a quick text. Even if he didn’t want her to, she wanted him to know that she was praying.
Reese pulled out her laptop and set it on the table. Despite how horrible everything was, she had a plan that would hopefully help Sterling as much as possible. A verse kept coming to mind as she worked. She hadn’t ever been good at memorizing Scripture, but it was somewhere in Romans. Maybe Romans 5? When she stopped to take a breath, she would look it up. It said that few people would die for a good man, but Jesus lay down his life while we were still basically still acting like his enemies.
Sterling might not want her praying. He definitely would not want her help right now, especially the kind she was going to give. He wasn’t exactly an enemy, but he had definitely been cruel to her. And now she was going to lay herself down for him. Because this plan? Putting it into action meant that Reese would be taking a very big and very public fall.
Chapter Twenty-One
When he pulled up to his mom’s house, there were already a few cars outside. He hadn’t been home in at least three years. In his mind, he realized that he was still calling it home. Though it really hadn’t been in a long, long time. His heart sped up in his chest and he got out fast, partly because he was a few minutes late and partly because he was afraid if he sat much longer, he might just drive away.
His mother said that May would likely be sleeping. The interventionist wanted to meet them all beforehand. Apparently, that was a thing—hiring an interventionist. Sterling had come with something he had written for May, but wished he’d had more time. Last night when he looked over it again, he wished that he could have asked Reese to read it. Then again, maybe not. Since Reese was like his mother, hoping in things that didn’t make logical sense. He was still trying to wrap his brain around how he had gone from kissing her and feeling like he was falling headlong into something real to the way things had ended: him furious, leaving her at her door without a backward glance.
He still felt hot thinking about it. Angry, but also something uglier. He felt ashamed.
Sterling simply hadn’t been expecting Reese to start talking religion. And to sound like his mother. He hadn’t been prepared, so it felt like a slap in the face, like a betrayal of some kind. His jaw ticked, and he reached for his pick. He had overreacted. Not for the first time in his life.
The crushed look on Reese’s face haunted him. He was angry at his father. Yet he had made it about her, pointed his words toward her like a weapon. The same way he had been angry with his mother for years. Sterling felt like a truly terrible person.
He sighed and pulled out his handwritten letter to May, stuffing the police warning into the glove compartment. If the officer had been right in his cryptic philosophizing about warnings, Sterling had no idea what the messages of the last day were trying to tell him. Probably nothing. You couldn’t read signs into everything.
Sterling debated about calling Reese to apologize before going inside. Pulling out his phone, Sterling’s fingers hovered over his text messages. But he couldn’t apologize over text. Hopefully, Reese would enjoy the spa and he could find her after and tell her what a jerk he had been. For now, he needed to be present. For May. Later, he could beg for forgiveness from Reese. He felt like he would need her steadiness and her kindness after this intervention. If she still wanted to be there for him.
With his letter to May in one hand and the pick in the other, Sterling walked to the front door like he was walking toward war. That was dramatic. Like he was walking toward a business meeting with the record label that he really didn’t want to attend. Better.
At one time, he would have simply walked in. But now he knocked. As though she had been waiting on the other side, his mother threw the door open. For a moment, they both stood there, staring at each other. She looked older to Sterling, her face more heavily lined and her dark hair less pepper and more salt. But it was her eyes that caught him. He had expected to see anger there or a cold detachment, since that was the feeling that marked their relationship the past few years.
Instead, her eyes brimmed with tears and her gaze only showed love. His mouth went dry. Before he could speak or move, she closed the distance between them, wrapping him up in a hug.
“You have no idea how good it is to see you, James,” she said.
Sterling hugged her back, feeling a sense of relief at her reaction. It was confusing, since she hadn’t wanted him to come home for the intervention. He thought this would all be an uphill battle. “I thought you didn’t want me to come,” he said.
She pulled back and touched his face, lightly, as though she was afraid he would pull away. “I was worried,” she said. “I didn’t know how May would react. I didn’t know what kind of frame of mind you were in either. But I think above all, I was afraid you wouldn’t want to come. Rather than letting myself hope and be hurt, I thought it would be better. That was wrong of me and I’m so sorry.”
Again her eyes filled and she hugged him. He hugged her back, trying to reassure her with his grip. The scent of her perfume sent a rush of warm memories through him. She still wore Trésor by Lancôme. He would know that smell anywhere.
“I’m here, Mom.”
“I’m so glad. Though this isn’t going to be easy.” She pulled back again, holding him by his upper arms. “Let’s go inside. It’s almost time and the interventionist wanted to say a few words before we start.”
“Where is May? How are you getting her here?”
His mother smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “She’s here, asleep. Came home around two in the morning and usually she’ll sleep until eleven. I’ll wake her up in a few minutes and bring her out.”
“Wow. She’s slept through this?” Sterling asked as they reached the formal living room that was at the front of the house.
“She sleeps like the dead,” his mother said. “Trust me, she has no idea.”
There were just a few people in the room. His Aunt Rebecca jumped up and hugged him. Aunt Bex, as he and May had always called her, was his mother’s sister and lived in Arizona.
