Page 3 of The Bride Bet
She let it ring twice, then she pressed the green circle and her mother’s voice came through the car speakers, warm and close.
“Hey, Mom.” Jasmine swallowed, hoping her cheerfulness didn’t sound too forced.
“There she is. I’ve been pacing a hole in my floor all afternoon. Well? What did the new doctor say?”
“Well, I have a diagnosis. Finally.” She started the engine and kept her tone light. “It’s called fibromyalgia. It’s a real thing. It’s not in my head, which honestly is kind of a relief. It explains the tiredness. The aches. All of it.”
“Fibro…” Her mother tried to sound out the word. “And they can fix it?”
Here was the part Jasmine had been dreading. She eased the car down the ramp toward the daylight.
No, Mom. They can’t fix it. It’s mine now, for good, and I’m scared down to the soles of my feet that it’s going to take everything — the work, the houses, the version of me you’re so proud of.
“They manage it,” she said. “Medication, rest, being smarter about my schedule. I’ll be fine. I just have to stop running myself into the ground.”
“That’s what I’ve said for years. You work like the rent’s due tomorrow, and it isn’t, baby. You made sure of that.” A pause. Jasmine could picture her exactly — at the little table by the window, both hands around a mug of the terrible instant coffeeshe still preferred to anything in the world. “You’d tell me, though. If it was really bad. If you were in some kind of trouble.”
Jasmine almost did. The multi-episode guest star role she’d had to drop out of because of the aches and fatigue. The audition Monday. The numbers — the mortgage, the bills to her publicist and lawyers whether she worked or not, her mother’s condo eating its quiet share, all of it balanced on the assumption that she could keep standing on a soundstage for sixteen hours.
“Of course I would,” she lied. Her voice didn’t shake. “It’s just a tired body, Mom. I’ve got more to be grateful for than I can count.”
“That you do.” She could hear the smile in her mom’s voice, and it nearly undid her. “Now go home and rest. Real rest. Promise me.”
“Promise. Love you.”
The call ended, and the silence that rushed in to replace her mother’s voice was enormous.
She drove up into the hills. The streets narrowed, the traffic thinned, and the city fell away below her into a haze of late-afternoon gold. The higher she climbed, the easier she breathed. At last she turned off the road and her own gate slid open to meet her, and there it was, waiting at the top of its short curving drive, and something in her chest finally loosened.
She’d fallen for the house the moment she’d seen it. The beauty sat back behind a wall of evergreen, with cream stucco and a roof of terracotta tiles. Four bedrooms arranged around an inner courtyard. Arched doorways, dark beams overhead, floors of hand-painted tile worn soft by decades of feet that weren’t hers. A lemon tree by the kitchen door dropped fruit she nevermanaged to use in time. Out back, the pool was tucked into a green tangle of ferns and climbing rose, half-shaded by trees, a fig and an old olive. Hummingbirds came to the garden in the mornings. A fountain ran in the courtyard, day and night. The place had history, warmth. Love.
She soaked it in like it was necessary for her survival.
This home was hers. It was hidden. It was the one place on earth where no one wanted anything from her, where she didn’t have to be the celebrity she’d exploded into overnight, only Jasmine. She loved it with a fierceness that sometimes worried her.
She parked, let herself in, and kicked off her heels in the cool tiled hush of the entry. The fountain went on running. Through the kitchen’s open shutters, the garden showed green, and the light came in soft.
And for once, the quiet didn’t help.
She stood in the middle of her beautiful house and felt alone inside it. There was no one to tell. No one to sayI’m scaredto and have them sayI know, come here.
She hadn’t told her mom her true feelings because she didn’t want her to worry any more than she already did.
Jasmine thought of the apartment off Fountain that she and her best friend Eden had shared years before — four hundred square feet, paper-thin walls, a downstairs neighbor murdering the trombone at all hours. They’d been too broke for a couch and had sat on the cushions on the floor instead, splitting cheap wine, reading each other’s audition sides in terrible accents until they wept with laughter. She’d had no money and no certainty, and she had not been alone for a single minute.
She’d wanted exactly this. A place to disappear. An escape from the world.
She just hadn’t understood, until right now, that an escape was also a place the world couldn’t reach you when you needed it to.
CHAPTER 3
NATE
Nate always woke at fifteen past six, a result of years of habit. This morning, when he woke, there was something new waiting for him. Memories of the night before that made him cringe.
The lounge. The whisky. Graham’s bright, hungry grin. A woman in emerald silk turning under the lights on a muted screen. And then his own voice, loud and certain, saying a thing no sober man would ever say.
I’ll marry her.
