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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  Excerpt from Something True copyright © 2015 by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  Cover design by Brian Lemus. Cover images © Shutterstock.

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Forever Yours

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  forever-romance.com

  twitter.com/foreverromance

  First published as an ebook and as a print on demand: June 2018

  Forever Yours is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  The Forever Yours name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2703-4 (print on demand); 978-1-5387-2704-1 (ebook)

  E3-20180502-DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  Also by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Karelia Stetz-Waters

  About the Author

  To the crazy friends who keep us sane and, always, to my beautiful wife, Fay

  Chapter 1

  Avery Crown stood on the veranda of the Vale Academy Alumni House, looking out over the Hawthorne District. Nestled under its canopy of heritage oaks, it was not nearly as beautiful as Catalina Island, where she had just spent a month in a rented villa with ostriches (at no extra charge!). And yet this familiar view filled her with a feeling she hadn’t experienced in years: homesickness.

  Beside her, her costar, Alistair King, lifted a flute of chardonnay to his lips. “You know,” he said, “part of going to your high school reunion is going to your high school reunion. Get out there. Talk to them.”

  “I can’t.” Avery fingered her Bellito Bellatoni Gemstone Moments charm bracelet.

  One of the reunioners hurried over, her young daughter in tow.

  “This is Avery Crown,” the mother said. “She’s on TV.”

  The girl looked up with large blue eyes. “Television is make-believe,” she whispered.

  Her mother corrected her. “This is reality TV.”

  Avery knelt before the girl. “You’re right,” she said. “Alistair and I are real, but we’re a little make-believe too.” She slipped a charm off her bracelet. The little silver pony had sapphire eyes, just like the girl. Avery handed to it her. “For good luck.”

  The Bellito Bellatoni representative would be pissed, but that was the price of product placement. Things got lost.

  “They love you,” Alistair said when the woman and her daughter moved away.

  Really, the Vale Academy alumni were not the King & Crown set. They were more Oregon Public Broadcasting. But a recent Sentinel Survey suggested that every single human being in America had at least

  seen a King & Crown product line advertisement

  bought a King & Crown Decorate the World travel guide

  used a King & Crown Real-Feel Decorating Solutions product.

  In trailers in Appalachia, women stored buttons in old King & Crown paint cans. The problem, which was becoming clear to the executives at TKO, was that more people had used King & Crown paint than watched the show. And another survey said that 29 percent of viewers thought the show was a spin-off of the products.

  “I can’t believe I’m back here,” Avery said.

  “We’ve been everywhere twice,” Alistair said.

  They’d been to the O’Hare Airport so many times they had the terminals memorized, and they were back in L.A. every three months to meet with TKO network’s latest producers. But Portland was different. She’d been a normal teenager in Portland. It was in Portland that she’d last seen tough, beautiful Merritt Lessing—the girl she had loved in high school. Fifteen years ago. On this veranda. She remembered Merritt sweeping her short dark hair out of her eyes, shy and cocky at the same time. Merritt had been so beautiful it had taken her breath away.

  “What do I do if she’s here?” she asked.

  “Say hello.”

  “And if she’s not?”

  “Say hello to someone else.”

  They had been over the possibilities so many times Alistair’s eyes had glazed over, and he had propped his chin on his hand the way he did in their L.A. meetings. This is my listening-to-you face. But he had listened. He was that good.

  “I was crazy about her.”

  Avery had spent the last month imagining their reunion: how surprised she’d act when she saw Merritt, how they’d run into each other’s arms for a friendly hug, how Merritt would whisper, I missed you, Avery. She had spent three hours blotting and reapplying her makeup, not that it had helped. Every woman’s face: that’s what she had, the kind of face that made plain housewives think, Oh, look, even I could be on TV. But in her fantasy Merritt told her she looked beautiful.

  Then again, maybe Merritt was still angry. The reality of how she had left Merritt had been sinking in ever since her mother and agent, Marlene Crown, had suggested Avery attend the high school reunion. Merritt had been so young and so alone, so happy to have someone in her life after all the boarding schools she had been shuffled through. The more Avery thought about it, the worse it seemed. She wanted to race back in time, fling her arms around Merritt, and tell her, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.

  “She hates me.”

  Alistair sighed. “You stood her up at prom.”

  “It was more than that.”

  “Aves, you stood her up at prom fifteen years ago. If she’s still thinking about that, it’s not your fault. She’s regressed or something. You know what you’re supposed to remember about prom? The first five beers.”

  “It’s just so real being back here.” Avery leane
d into Alistair’s massive chest. He towered over her. “Don’t you think people remember things like that? That they make a mark on you?”

  Alistair put his enormous (albeit beautifully proportioned) arms around her.

  “What if she gets here and she rages at me? I was cruel to her. I would rage at me.”

  “If she rages, she’s got more problems, and we’ll get Bunter to eighty-six her before she can get two words in.”

  Alistair hugged her closer. She could feel the reunioners watching them. The perfect couple. All those women wished they had what plain Avery Crown and the dashing, blond Alistair King had, not realizing that what they were looking at wasn’t a romance; it was friendship.

  “You’ve never been cruel to anyone in your life,” Alistair said. “And we get a pass on everything we do in high school. Your brain hadn’t grown in yet.”

  A squeal of “It’s King and Crown!” startled Avery.

  Alistair released her. He waved to a group of women by the wine bar. Avery lifted her hand reflexively.

  “You didn’t sleep with her.” Alistair’s smile was fixed in place like a ventriloquist. He knew how to whisper so that only Avery heard him, and she knew how to listen.

  “I wish.”

  “You didn’t date her.”

  “No.”

  “You were just friends who had a falling out.”

  “I guess.”

  “And you haven’t seen her in the last fifteen years. She hasn’t called the show? She hasn’t stalked you on Twitter? Why would some woman show up at your high school reunion and try to mess with you? You’re fine.”

  “I guess.”

  Avery fiddled with her charm bracelet.

  “Sweetie,” Alistair said, “you’re the best friend I’ve ever had and the only costar I ever want to work with. But you are not so fabulous that you break people’s hearts fifteen years in the past. She’s fine. You’re fine. And now”—Alistair turned Avery around, his hands on her shoulders—“you’ve got a high school reunion speech to give, and you’re going to be fantastic.”

  A ray of sunlight cut between puffy clouds, illuminating the distant hills like a Hudson River School painting, all beautiful, unblemished Westernness. Avery took Alistair’s hand and walked across the courtyard and into the school. Like a scene from some Portland indie movie—the kind she had secretly always wanted to star in and which her mother not-so-secretly thought she didn’t have the talent for—she was back at Vale, once again holding Alistair King’s hand, once again scanning the crowd for Merritt’s dark eyes and her dark hair threaded with strands of mahogany, once again realizing it was too late.

  Chapter 2

  Merritt Lessing stared at her reflection in an antique French Victorian gold trumeau mirror, the patinaed glass reflecting the face of a woman who would soon be holding a plastic flute of white wine and fake-hugging women she did not remember. She turned to her friend Iliana Koslov, who was lounging in a wicker chair, her girlfriend curled up in her lap.

  “I am the best friend you have ever had,” Merritt said. “I was not going to go to this thing, except for you.”

  Merritt could be in her apartment, sipping a Sadfire Reserve whiskey and watching traffic on Burnside, but Iliana’s girlfriend, Lei-Ling Wu, was desperate to meet Alistair King and Avery Crown, the honored guests of the Vale reunion. No, it was more than that. Lei-Ling wanted Merritt to talk Avery into giving Lei-Ling and her food truck a cameo on King & Crown. It would be an awkward request even if Avery had not been the long-lost love who had broken Merritt’s heart into a million little pieces of adolescent misery.

  “You”—Merritt nodded to Lei-Ling—“had better appreciate this.”

  “You are the best!” Lei-Ling exclaimed. “You’re going to get me on King and Crown.”

  Merritt turned back to the mirror. Behind her, the labyrinthine aisles of Hellenic Hardware rested in the glow of the skylights. In the center of the ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse, Merritt had installed a fountain. A Grecian woman poured water into a pool. Beside it a wrought-iron gazebo sheltered a pair of white wicker chairs. The white-painted gazebo had come from a Colonial house on Cape Cod. Together the chairs, gazebo, and fountain made their own landscape. For a second Merritt imagined sitting on a bluff or in an English garden with Avery by her side. She pushed the thought out of her mind. Beyond the gazebo was ephemera, windows and doors, tubs and sinks, kitchen, and the Land of Lamps, so named by her interns from the youth shelter. Perfect, uncomplicated hardware.

  “But you’ll miss it if you don’t hurry.” Lei-Ling had been bouncing around the hardware store all day. “You have to go. You have to see Avery Crown. You have to tell her how much you missed her, even if you didn’t. Tell her I am in love with her and Alistair, and they have to put me on the show. Even if it’s just for two seconds. She won’t regret it. They want to film Portland, and nothing says Portland like my dumpling truck.”

  Merritt couldn’t deny that. Lei-Ling’s bike-powered, Slipstream RV covered in papier-mâché dumplings kept Portland weird.

  “You’ve been hot for Avery Crown for fifteen years,” Iliana drawled. “She’s a big star, and you know her in real life. Who wouldn’t go to the reunion? Go already.”

  “I’ve not been anything for Avery Crown. I once said, ‘Avery Crown and I should have fingered each other in high school to get it out of our systems.’”

  Of course, if that were true, she wouldn’t have been thinking about Avery every day for the last month, tidying the shelves of her hardware store and putting everything in the wrong place because she couldn’t shake the longing she thought she’d killed years ago.

  “Did you do anything with her?” Lei-Ling’s eyes got big with delight. “Of course you did. She’s adorable.”

  Lei-Ling and Iliana were adorable. They could not have made a more unlikely couple. Tall, muscular Iliana, still in her aikido gi, and tiny Lei-Ling with a rainbow stripe dyed in her hair and every single color on the RBG pallet (and gold lamé) represented in her dress and graffiti-printed jacket.

  “She’s straight,” Merritt said. “That’s the show. She and Alistair King run around the country decorating houses to capture the spirit of the city they’re in and fixing dry rot.”

  “You’ll seduce her!” Lei-Ling said, as though she had just won at Clue. It’s Miss Scarlet!

  “Straight,” Merritt said again. “In love with Alistair King.”

  “You’d just do that thing you do at the Mirage.” Iliana tossed her blond braid over her shoulder, a gesture that had always meant, You can’t fight this one.

  “I play pool at the Mirage.”

  “Oh, the thing.” Lei-Ling nodded. “Everyone knows your thing.”

  “You lean up against the wall,” Iliana said. “You say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” Iliana imitated a deep alto. “Then you date her for two months, ghost, and repeat.”

  She didn’t. She wasn’t the one who left, but no one seemed to notice. The last girl she had dated had text-dumped her. Merritt had called the girl, pushing down the lump in her throat. You couldn’t at least tell me over coffee? The girl hadn’t hesitated. You don’t care, she’d said. You’re fucking gorgeous, Merritt. And you use it to hook people. And you’re so goddamn cold. It was like being savaged by a puppy. The girl had pigtails. She knit socks for her nieces. She’d seen Frozen twenty-three times. And her niceness drove the words in deeper. You’ll always be alone. As if Merritt hadn’t already known that. She wanted to stand in front of Iliana and Lei-Ling and demand, Don’t you think I want what you have?

  Merritt had thought she had it with Avery, not romantic love but a friendship so deep it erased all those nights Merritt had lain awake at yet one more boarding school, gazing out of the window above her bed, trying not to cry. And then Avery had left. Without warning. Without apology. Without one word to say that just a moment of that friendship had been important. Avery hadn’t been the first to leave or the last, but her leaving threw everything in shar
p relief, like the security spotlight Merritt turned on in the hardware store when she heard a strange sound. Suddenly all the familiar shapes were cold and bright and lonely. Avery was why she hadn’t cried over the girl with pigtails even though she’d wanted to. Avery was the reason she knew if she started crying over lost loves, she’d never stop.

  “You have a fear of commitment,” Iliana added. “It’s because of your parents.”

  “Your inner child,” Lei-Ling said knowledgeably.

  If someone’s happy inner child sprang to life, it would be Lei-Ling’s. Her parents loved her. Her siblings were kind. And she had met the perfect girlfriend long before she could get jaded about love. It was annoying, but it made Merritt want to follow her around, moving sharp objects out of her way.

  “This is closure,” Iliana added. “She’s going to have fake breasts, plastic surgery, that kind of hair that’s real but it’s not real. You’re going to get that body snatchers feeling, and then it’ll all be over. You can stop lusting after her.”

  “I have never lusted after her.” The lie was big enough to bring a flush to her neck.

  She had lusted after Avery. She had lain awake in her dorm room bed and touched herself for luxurious minutes she could never stretch out long enough, dreaming of Avery. Then she’d felt bad for fantasizing about sweet, straight, oblivious Avery. It was probably a form of sexual harassment. When the government invented mind readers, she’d be charged with something. She could still remember the details of each fantasy. And later, when her uncle learned she was at Vale and took custody of her and whisked her from the dorm into his spare bedroom, she had hung a framed photo of Avery beside her bed and gazed at the picture for hours. Yeah, she had lusted after Avery.

  “Lust can be a substitute for intimacy,” Iliana said.

  Iliana seemed to think dating a twenty-two-year-old waitress had given her insight into the human heart. Merritt missed the old Iliana. The old Iliana would have said, Hit that or not. Why are you telling me about it? Then Iliana would have pulled her baseball cap down over her eyes and sucked down a Montucky Cold Snack beer, and in her silence, Merritt would have felt Iliana’s sympathy because they both knew about wanting things and not getting them. Now Iliana had Lei-Ling and throw pillows that read, LIVE, LOVE, LAUGH.