Loe raamatut: «The Fortune Most Likely To…»

Chapter One

“Your problem, brother dear,” Schuyler said after having listened to him tell her that maybe he’d made a mistake talking Lila into giving up their baby all those years ago, “is that you think too much. You’re always overthinking things and making yourself crazy in the process.”

“Says the woman who always led with her heart,” Everett commented.

“And that seems to be working out for me, doesn’t it?” Schuyler asked.

He could hear the broad smile in her voice. It all but throbbed through the phone. Everett had no response for that. All he could do at the moment was sigh. Sigh and feel just a little bit jealous because his little sister had found something that he was beginning to think he never would find again: love.

“By thinking so much back then about how everything would affect your future,” Schuyler went on, “I think you blew it with Lila. You were so focused on your future, on becoming a doctor, that you just couldn’t see how badly she felt about giving up her baby—your baby,” she emphasized. “And because you didn’t notice, didn’t seem to feel just as badly as she did about the adoption, you broke Lila’s heart. If it were me, I would have never forgiven someone for breaking my heart that way,” Schuyler told him.

“Thanks for being so supportive,” Everett said sarcastically.

This was not why he’d called his sister, why he’d lowered his guard and allowed himself to be so vulnerable. Maybe he should have known better, he thought, about to terminate the call.

“I am being supportive,” Schuyler insisted. “I’m just calling it the way I see it. I love you, Ev, and you know I’m always on your side. But I know you. I don’t want you to get your hopes up that if you just approach her, she’ll fly back into your arms and everything’ll be just the way it was back then. Not after thirteen years and not after what went down between the two of you back then. Trust me, Lila is not going to get back together with you that easily.”

“I know that and I don’t want to get back together with Lila,” he insisted defensively. “I just want to talk to her.” Everett paused because this next thing was hard for him to say, even to Schuyler, someone he had always trusted implicitly. Lowering his voice, he told his sister, “Maybe even apologize to her for the way things ended between us back then.”

He could tell from Schuyler’s voice that she felt for him. But she was far from optimistic about the outcome of all this. “Look, Everett, I know that your heart’s in the right place, but I really don’t want to see it stomped on.”

“No worries,” Everett assured her. “My heart is not as vulnerable as you think.”

What he’d just said might have been a lie, but if it was, it was a lie he was telling himself as well as his sister.

He had a feeling that Schuyler saw it that way too because he could hear the skepticism in her voice as she said, just before she ended their call, “Well, I wish you luck with that. Maybe Lila’ll listen to reason.”

Maybe.

The single word seemed to throb in his head as Everett decided to find out as much as he could about Lila and what she was doing these days.

It had all started two months ago when he’d taken the day off, gotten another doctor to cover for him and had driven the 165 miles from Houston to Austin to pick up his sister, Schuyler. At the time, he was supposed to be bringing Schuyler back home.

Given to acting on impulse, his younger sister had initially gone to Austin because she had gotten it into her head to track down Nathan Fortune. The somewhat reclusive man was supposedly her cousin and the ever-inquisitive Schuyler was looking for answers about their family tree. The current thinking was that she and the rest of their brothers and sisters were all possibly related to the renowned Fortune family.

It was while Schuyler was looking for those answers that she decided to get closer to the Mendoza family whose history was intertwined with the Fortunes. She managed to get so close to one of them—Carlo Mendoza—that she wound up completely losing her heart to him.

Confused, unsure of herself for very possibly the first time in her life, Schuyler had turned to the one person she was closest to.

She’d called Everett.

Listening to his sister pouring out her heart—and citing her all uncertainties, not just about her genealogy investigation but about the direction her heart had gone in—he had decided he needed to see Schuyler and maybe convince her to come home.

But Schuyler had reconciled with her man and decided to stay in Austin after all. Everett returned home without her. But he hadn’t come away completely empty-handed. What Everett had come home with was a renewed sense of having made a terrible mistake thirteen years ago. And that had come about because while he’d been in Austin, he had run into Lila.

Sort of.

He saw Lila entering a sandwich shop and it had been a jarring experience for him. It had instantly propelled him back through time and just like that, all the old feelings had come rushing back to him, saturating him like a huge tidal wave. At least they had in his case. However, he’d been struck by the aura of sadness he detected about her. A sadness that had not been there when they were in high school together.

He’d thought—hoped really—that when he got back to Houston, back to his practice, he’d be able to drive thoughts of Lila back into the past where they belonged. Instead, they began to haunt him, vividly pushing their way into his dreams at night, sneaking up on him during the day whenever he had an unguarded moment.

He began wondering in earnest about what had happened to her in all those years since they’d been together. And that sadness he’d detected—was he responsible for that? Or was there some other reason for its existence?

He felt compelled to find out.

Like everyone else of his generation, Everett turned to social media in his quest for information about Lila Clark.

He found her on Facebook.

When he saw that Lila had listed herself as “single” and that there were only a few photographs posted on her page, mainly from vacation spots she had visited, he felt somewhat heartened.

Maybe, a little voice in his head whispered, it wasn’t too late to make amends after all.

Damn it, Everett, get hold of yourself. This is exactly what Schuyler warned you about. Don’t get your hopes up, at least not until you talk to Lila again and exchange more than six words with her.

Who knows, she might have changed and you won’t even like Lila 2.0.

Everett struggled to talk himself out of letting his imagination take flight. He tried to get himself to go slow—or maybe not go at all.

But the latter was just not an option.

He knew he felt too strongly about this, too highly invested in righting a wrong he’d committed in the past. Now that he’d made up his mind about the matter, he needed to make Lila understand that he regretted the way things had gone thirteen years ago.

Regretted not being more emotionally supportive of her.

Regretted not being able to see the daughter they had both lost.

Still, he continued to try to talk himself out of it for two days after he found Lila on Facebook. Tried to make himself just walk away from the whole idea: from getting in contact with her, from apologizing and making amends. All of it.

But he couldn’t.

So finally, on the evening of the third day, Everett sat down in front of his computer, powered up his internet connection and pulled up Facebook. Specifically, he pulled up Lila’s profile.

He’d stared at it for a full ten minutes before he finally began to type a message to her.

Hi, Lila. It’s been a long time. I’m planning on being in Austin soon. Let’s have lunch together and do some catching up. I’d really welcome the chance to see and talk with you.

Those four simple sentences took him close to half an hour to settle on. He must have written and deleted thirty sentences before he finally decided on those. Then it took him another ten minutes before he sent those four sweated-over sentences off into cyberspace.

For the next two hours he checked on that page close to a dozen and a half times, all without any luck. He was about to power down his computer for the night when he pulled up Lila’s Facebook page one last time.

“She answered,” he announced out loud even though there was no one around to hear him.

Sitting down in his chair, he read Lila’s response, unconsciously savoring each word as if it was a precious jewel.

If you’re going to be here Friday, I can meet you for lunch at 11:30. I just need to warn you that I only get forty-five minutes for lunch, so our meeting will be short. We’re usually really swamped where I work.

Everett could hardly believe that she’d actually agreed to meet with him. He’d been half prepared to read her rejection. Whistling, he immediately posted a response.

11:30 on Friday sounds great. Since I’m unfamiliar with Austin, you pick the place and let me know.

After sleeping fitfully, he decided to get up early. He had a full slate of appointments that day. Best to get a jump on it. But the minute he passed the computer, he knew what he had to do first.

And there, buried amid approximately forty other missives—all of which were nothing short of junk mail—was Lila’s response. All she’d written was the name of a popular chain of restaurants, followed by its address. But his heart soared.

Their meeting was set.

If he’d been agile enough to pull it off, Everett would have leaped up and clicked his heels together.

As it was, he got ready for work very quickly and left the house within the half hour—singing.

The second Lila hit the send button on Facebook, she immediately regretted it.

What am I thinking? she upbraided herself. Was she crazy? Did she actually want to meet with someone who had so carelessly broken her heart? Who was responsible for the single most heart-wrenching event to have happened in her life?

“What’s wrong with you? Are you hell-bent on being miserable?” she asked herself as she walked away from her computer. It was after eleven o’clock at night and she was alone.

The way she was on most nights.

Maybe that was the problem, Lila told herself. She was tired of being alone and when she’d seen that message from Everett on her Facebook page, it had suddenly stirred up a lot of old memories.

“Memories you’re better off forgetting, remember?” she demanded.

But they weren’t all bad, she reminded herself. As a matter of fact, if she thought back, a lot of those memories had been good.