A Love Like Ours

Chapter 44

"Hm?" I asked, tearing my gaze away from a woman standing just outside the restaurant. She was talking on her phone, but she kept glancing in here every so often, and we'd made eye contact a couple of times. It didn't look like there was any recognition in her stare, but I couldn't be sure. I'd already decided that at any moment, she was going to stop pretending to talk on the phone and point her camera in our direction.

Mads laughed a little, and maybe if I was paying more attention, I would've noticed the small hitch in it—the worry. When I finally met her eye, her gaze slid to Mum and back to me quickly. "It would be nice if we could get our Moms together soon. Don't you think?"

She emphasized each word, and I was too distracted by that woman to even feel guilty for not paying complete attention.

"Yeah," I said, relieved I hadn't missed anything important so that I could turn to the window again—only to find that the woman had disappeared. "Definitely."

Perhaps if our food hadn't arrived right at that moment, I would've found myself being questioned for my short response. But as the waiter set down each of our dishes, Mum and Mads seemed to once again forget me completely as they "oohed" and "aahed" over each other's meals. And I was grateful for their distraction because it allowed me to continue surveying our surroundings.

I wasn't angry at Mads. That much I'd been able to determine almost immediately after closing my laptop last night. But I was angry. And that anger didn't feel like it had completely left me yet.

We were living in a fish bowl, she and I, and it was all my fault. Since the start of my career, I'd had to deal with this kind of scrutiny, and it had always had a pretty profound effect on the ones I loved as well. For one thing, I was never home often enough to really feel part of the family anymore, but even when I was, I brought the world back with me.

Cameras had taken some time to find their way into Holmes Chapel, but the fans had found their way around much more quickly. I was still only sixteen the first time they'd found my house, and I remembered being more excited than anything else when I'd gone outside to greet them and take pictures. But Mum had stood at the door, her arms crossed as she watched with a polite, but sort of wary smile. Because she'd known what all that fuss over me had meant. She'd known things would never be the same again.

But we couldn't have anticipated the way it would all turn negative so quickly. The names I'd be called. The stories they'd concoct to make me out to be something I wasn't. The perception of me the world received on a daily basis.

And it had taken some time and some real soul-searching to decide that silence was my best bet to ensure that none of those stories rang true. It was my only way to shout a big FUCK YOU to all of them without having to say a word. It was the only way I could stay sane, even if sometimes, I felt the need to respond and correct every single one of their misjudgments of me.

I'd had to fight the urge every time.

That would have done no good. And it only would've made me seem like I had something to defend. Something I was trying to keep hidden.

It took a while for me to learn that—to believe it. It took a while for me to no longer feel the sting of their barbed words. It took a while for me to be okay with my black and white truth, no matter how they tried to splatter it with only the ugliest of colors.

But now that I had Mads—now that those colors were aimed at her as well—I went back into defense mode. It was amazing how easily it came back to me. The anger. The frustration. The desperate need to do something—even if it was just analyzing every single face that passed us by—to feel like I was protecting her somehow.