“Would you do it again?” I ask. “Knowing that it hurt me, knowing how much my life would change?”
Sam tilts his face to the ceiling, and I watch as he blinks quickly, his cheeks growing red with emotion. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“You answer with a yes,” I say, “or a no.”
“We got another ten years with him.” He looks me squarely in the eye. His are red-rimmed. “So, yes. I would do it again.”
I don’t know where we can go from here. I turn to leave, but he stops me with a hand around my arm. “Tate. Don’t walk out after that.”
“We have to get back on set.”
“Devon will come get us. Just—” He gestures to the chair again. “Sit, please?”
I lower myself back in the chair, still feeling shell-shocked. We sit in tense silence for several long moments.
“I didn’t lie about anything I felt in London,” he says, and a painful spasm turns something over in me. “Leaving you the way I did really wrecked me, and it’s okay if you don’t believe me. But I loved Luther and Roberta with everything I have. They’d given me everything.” He pauses, and in the silence I can practically feel his turmoil. “I want you to know that.”
The truth is, I do know that. It’s evident in every word of his screenplay, in every nuance of the dialogue. Their voices come through so authentically; it could only have been written by someone who loved them beyond measure.
It makes it really hard to hate him, but anger isn’t so quick to diffuse in my blood. The relief that it hadn’t been planned from the moment I spilled my secret expands, taking up space before I’ve really made room for it. It makes it hard to breathe, like the air in my lungs is under pressure.
“Is there anything else you need to know?” he asks.
Through the chaos of my thoughts, the only questions that press forward with any clarity are ones that sound so young and selfish. Did you ever think of trying to find me? Was it easy for you to just disappear?
But I’m also wrestling with feeling obtuse for not seeing the truth from the second I knew Sam wrote the script. Even if it’s set in Iowa not Vermont, the story is so clearly Sam’s. I’m fighting the fear that I’m no more than a stepping-stone to every man who has ever meant anything to me. I feel small, and silly, and strangled by the realization that the longer I stay angry, the pettier I seem.
“I’m just trying to figure out how to feel,” I admit.
“I’m sure.” He clasps his hands, pins them between his knees. “I guess I assumed you figured it out—about Roberta and Luther—once you saw me on set.”
“I probably should have.”
“Maybe not,” he reasons. “You never met Roberta.”
Our attention turns as we hear Nick yelling something down the trail. I have a fondness for Nick—especially for Nick as Richard—that is starting to feel the way I might for an old lover, for someone I want to forever keep in my life. I think about Nick’s eyes when he’s staring at me, as Ellen. His hand when it engulfs mine. It feels so real, so intense. Was this what it felt like for Sam to grow up around Luther and Roberta? Witnessing a love like this all the time?
I know my love for this script has always been intense, even for someone who’s been looking her whole adult life for the perfect role, but I get now that it’s not only about being Ellen. It’s about wanting to know, for certain, that this kind of love exists.
But then it occurs to me . . . where is Sam in this film?
“You never come live with them,” I say. “There’s no character that’s your dad, either, when Ellen is younger. The script ends when they’re in their sixties, but you’re not in it.”
“The story is about how they fell in love in the middle of one of the most tumultuous times in our country’s history. They didn’t need me or Michael for that.”
I study him, trying to puzzle it out. Finally, he shrugs, and his smile is boyish. “It didn’t make them any more heroic at that point to have her be a single mom or bring in a three-year-old kid when they were empty nesters.”
Despite everything, this makes me laugh. “Artistic license means you cut yourself out of the story?”
He nods, and his shoulders seem to ease at the sight of my smile. “Can you believe me, though?” he asks quietly. “That the worst thing I ever did was for the best reason I ever had?”
His words spear through me, stabbing into a tender spot. Only for Sam Brandis have I felt such a complicated ache—devotion, desire, hurt, and envy of the wife who gets to puzzle out the man who, if what he says is true, would sacrifice his own heart to save someone he loves. Who could see true love so clearly in front of him and translate it into words on a page.
She gets to curl up against this man and be his best friend, his lover.
I push to stand, needing a few minutes alone to clear my head before Devon comes for me. At the door, I turn back. He’s watching me go with a tight expression I find unreadable.
“Actually,” I tell him quietly, “I think Milkweed is the best thing you ever did. And if that’s the best thing you ever did, I’m okay being the worst.”
twenty
MY CABIN’S SCREEN DOOR slams behind me, and the sound seems to hang in the fog of the early morning air. The farm has turned cold so fast. Indian summer left and abandoned us in the chilly vacuum of Northern California fall.
I don’t ever want to leave Ruby Farm. It’s more than just a quiet retreat; it’s like a warming of my bones, some settling of the frenetic beat that seems to always course through me. My house in LA feels sterile and uninhabited, doing little to calm me down between projects. But I’m so seldom there that it’s never felt worth the effort to make it into a homey place. And then when I am there, I regret not making the effort. The prospect just feels so overwhelming.
Here, each morning, I wake up in my cabin and try to pretend this is where I live now. I’ve put my clothes in the dresser and closet, stocked the small kitchen with a few staples. I go for long runs. I keep flowers on the table and had Mom ship me a few blankets from my house. Up here, I can pretend the chaos and exhaust and clatter of LA not only isn’t my home anymore, but it doesn’t even exist.
The birds in the tree beside my door let out a cacophony of sound when I emerge, squawking and rustling overhead. Down the hill, in the pasture, the cows yell to be milked and fed. But there’s no human sound. Everyone is taking this day off to sleep in. I hope I’m not the only one up early, unable to turn off my brain.
I stretch before heading down the trail in an easy jog. Leaves crunch beneath my shoes, and the sound must echo down the path because Sam is already looking up as I pass his cabin. He’s sitting outside, clearly more accustomed to the cold than I am, because he’s only wearing a thick cream sweater, jeans, and socks.
“Tate.” He puts a notebook down on the small table, picks up a steaming mug of coffee. “You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
He takes in my leggings, long-sleeved layers, and gloves. “Going for a run?” When I nod, he motions to the abandoned journal. “Was just writing some things down.”
“For another screenplay?” I hike up the small incline, stopping at the foot of the stairs leading to his porch. It’s the first time we’ve spoken since our blowup yesterday, and the part of me that will always be eighteen and infatuated with him wants to climb the steps and curl up on his lap.
“Maybe,” he says. “Don’t know yet.” Sam studies me over the lip of his mug as he takes a sip.
“You writing yourself into this one? Maybe it’s about the heart you broke in London.” The words are out before I’ve weighed whether or not they’re a good idea.
Sam blinks a few times before smiling gently. “I don’t think that’s my story to tell.” An awkward pause. “This time, at least.”
We face each other in strained silence.
“Want some coffee?” he finally asks. “The stuff they brew in the Community House is awful.”
I really need to keep moving, but he’s not wrong. “Sure.”
“Come on up.” He stands and tilts his chin for me to follow him inside the cabin.
Trudging up the stairs, I feel so anxious and excited that it makes me nauseous. It isn’t just the proximity of Sam, now it’s the proximity of Ellen’s, well, Roberta’s, grandson. He knew her. She raised him. I marinated in that reality all night, skipping dinner at the Community House, skipping the campfire I could hear all the way down the trail. I curled up in bed and re-read the script with new eyes. His formidable, brave grandmother. His tenderhearted, fun-loving grandfather. Was it even a question that he would do anything he could do to save them?
I didn’t take much time to look around yesterday, but it wouldn’t have taken much to absorb everything here. Sam’s cabin is one big room, almost like a loft, with a bed in the far corner, a little kitchen to the left of the door with the table and chairs, and a small sitting area in between. It’s cozy from the country decor, and he’s got a fire going in the fireplace. I make a beeline toward it, holding my hands out to get them moving again.
“You’re such a Californian,” he says, laughing.
“It’s cold!”
“It’s probably fifty-five degrees out,” he says, opening a cabinet and reaching for a mug.
“Exactly.”
Sam laughs again as he sets a pot of water to boil and scoops some fresh grounds into a French Press. Something has eased since he told me the truth yesterday; it feels like there’s so much more air in here.
But with that space, it means I’m not working to ignore him, which in turn means I notice him again. As he goes about the business of brewing me a cup of coffee, I start to zone out a little on the shape of his broad back beneath his sweater, his enormous hand reaching for the whistling teakettle, his ass in soft, faded jeans.