47

Alistair

I pulled Liliana’s number up and stared at my phone.

After the tasting ended, I’d driven by her house to make sure her car was there. I needed to know she’d made it home safely.

She had. I almost pulled in and knocked. But I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk to her yet.

I backed out of my contacts and put my phone down. I still wasn’t ready, mostly because I didn’t know what the hell to say.

If I knew everything was going to be okay despite what had happened, I would have called her and at least told her that. But we hadn’t talked since I’d quickly hung up the night before, upset about Julian.

I didn’t want to call her and have to tell her how badly things had gone after she left.

“You’ll have to excuse us,” Reginald had said abruptly after Carl and Aaron had managed to get Julian into a cab.

“If you’ll let me explain,” I’d said, but Veronica had shaken her head. “We can’t have our brand associated with this kind of thing, Alistair. Drunken brawling? I’m sorry, but we need to go.”

I couldn’t convince them to stay and let me explain, but I hoped that tomorrow they might listen to me. I was sure they were shocked, and I didn’t blame them for not wanting their company name associated with anything like that.

The news all seemed pretty bad, and that was the last thing I wanted to share with Liliana. I

also didn’t know quite what to say about Julian and the rest except that I was sorry for the way he acted. And I was sorry for our conversation the night before.

I really hadn’t meant to accuse her, and I knew how I’d sounded. She hadn’t told Julian, and it wasn’t really her fault that he’d figured it out by looking at her.

How could she control something like that?

No, the fault lay solely with Julian here, for letting himself go back to his bad habits the minute he was upset about something. I understood that he was an alcoholic and an addict. But that wasn’t an excuse to get away with terrible behavior.

At least, it wasn’t going to be with me. Not anymore.

That was a conversation that had to wait too.

There was no point in trying to reason with Julian until he was sober again. I hoped I could catch him sober while he was in town, at least. I didn’t know if he’d regret what he did or just try to keep comforting himself with booze.

As soon as he was sober enough to understand me, he and I were going to have a talk. And I was going to draw a hard line on what behavior I would find acceptable from him from there on out.

If he couldn’t abide by that, he’d need to steer clear of me until he could.

‘Tough love’ they call it in addiction circles. And it was that. Because it was pretty damn tough on the person trying to give it too.

I hoped Julian could understand that someday.

I pulled up a photo of Liliana on my phone and touched the screen just under the apple of her cheek. I’d gotten so used to having her with me almost every night, and I missed her.

What if she was right? I suddenly wondered.

What if this is all a sign that we weren’t meant to be after all?

I hated having that thought, but it felt like everything good that happened recently was falling apart before my eyes.

I decided to go to bed and try to sleep. And hope things looked brighter in the morning.