Lucy moved through the next day on autopilot. She dressed, worked and came home, and could hardly remember a thing about her day except for the hollow, gnawing darkness that filled her.
The following day, she took her darkness to the movie set and tendered her resignation. She handed in her uniform, radio and identification at the little office. Her resignation was accepted without a fuss. Since filming was nearly finished, some actors had already left and one medic was sufficient. Her task completed, she hurried away as soon as she could without speaking to anyone else.
When she got home on the second day, a neatly taped box sat outside her door. Lucy knew immediately what it was: a breakup box. She brought it inside and set it on her table.
When she pulled the box open, she was hit square in the face with a blast of Frederick. She filled her lungs with his rich, complicated smell of bergamot and men's grooming products. Lucy peeked at the contents of the box: some clothes, a few personal care products, two books. Nothing she couldn't live without for a while longer, though she was briefly tempted by her favorite lavender shirt, the one she had worn running on their first date-that-wasn't-a-date. Instead, Lucy closed the flaps of the box and pressed the edges of the tape together. She wasn't ready to part with this last bit of intimacy she had with Frederick. Not yet.
* * * * *
"I'm still not feeling it, Frederick. Run it again," called the director.
Frederick wanted badly to kick something. Instead, he held his limbs rigidly and blew out his breath in a rush of frustration. Three takes and the director still wasn't happy with this scene. Frederick marched back to his first mark.
"Do you need an espresso, Frederick? You look exhausted," said Neva, waving air at her face with the wooden folding fan that was part of her costume.
"No, thank you, Neva. I'm fine. Everyone has off days from time to time."
Except Frederick. This was his first. No, second. Yesterday was rubbish as well. The day before that had gone well.
Right up until he walked into Lucy's apartment.
He had been certain that he could talk her round to his side again, absolutely positive that if was patient with her and stayed steady, they could get through this crisis like they had gotten through so much in their short time together.
When she said she wanted to end things, he was certain he'd misheard. But when he saw her face, he knew that she had decided she wasn't coming back.
Frederick had plenty of experience with rejection. In his early years, he knew that if he got ten rejections for every one call-back, he was doing well. Every single rejection had hurt, but if he collected them all up together, they wouldn't fill the shoe of the rejection he'd faced two nights ago. He had been happy with Lucy. More than happy. He felt like he'd found someone who understood him, someone who fired him up and made him want to be his best. He craved Lucy in a way he'd never craved any woman before. Losing his job would be easier. Or even a limb.
That civilized, calm breakup—if you didn't count a bit of crying, and he certainly didn't—was one of the worst things he'd ever had to endure in his life.
He saw more and more now, though, that no matter how good they were together, chances of them having a future together were slim. She kept her life orderly, quiet, and predictable because that was where she thrived. If she joined him, she might put on a brave face for him for a while, but in the end, his chaotic lifestyle would crush her spirit.
"I'll go get my makeup freshened up a little. Buy you a few minutes," said Neva with an oleaginous smile.
Frederick had never counted Neva as a personal friend, but he had always been able to work with her. Now, however, he was plagued with fantasies about Neva falling off her horse and breaking something painful, Neva having an allergic reaction and her entire face breaking out in blisters, Neva getting into a fight with the director and being booted from the set forever. That last one was his favorite.
When he'd seen the newspaper article on the counter in his trailer, and the tape dangling from the top edge, he guessed that someone had stuck it to the door. As he'd driven to Lucy's place, he'd figured out who had done it. Someone ruthless, someone who had been flirting cloyingly with him since the first day of rehearsals, someone—and this narrowed it down quickly—who didn't like Lucy.
In a perverse way, Frederick felt like he should thank Neva. If she hadn't alerted the paparazzi to his new romance here in Squirrel Falls, Lucy could very well have uprooted her entire life before finding out that she couldn't cope. It was better that it ended early. But that Neva, likely via one of her lackeys, had rubbed Lucy's face in her worst fear by taping the article to the trailer door, making sure she knew that people were seeing and buying this particular paper, was beyond mean.
Eight days. Eight more days of shooting and he would never have to work with her again, he would make sure of that. He would suggest to his director friends that they didn't, either.
Neva, her makeup repaired, sauntered towards Frederick."Ready for another take, Frederick?" she asked, her bright voice about as sunny as powdered imitation orange juice.
"Ready," said Frederick. He needed to get calm, to soften his face and do his best to look like he was hanging on his costar's every word. Fortunately, that feeling of utter devotion was seared into his brain and came back with virtually no effort once he allowed himself to think about the memories he was trying not to think about: his days and nights with Lucy.
Eight more days.
* * * * *
"You what?" Violet said loudly enough that Kestrel's weensy arms flew in the air in surprise. "Sorry, honey," she said to the baby. Violet bounced a bit to soothe the little girl.
"Lemme get this straight. You, Lucy, dumped Frederick Asherton?"
"It was never going to work, Violet. We're just from two different worlds."
"So? Look at me and Colton."
"You're a physiotherapist and he's a logger...?"
"Exactly! I have to take super good care of my hands, twenty-four-seven. His hands? Sandpaper. Bricks. Bleh."
Lucy smiled in spite of herself. Violet was trying to cheer Lucy up, she knew. It was almost working.
"What happened, Luce?" Violet asked. The tender concern in her voice nearly had Lucy in tears all over again.
"Those damned pictures," said Lucy. "Everything else I think we could have figured out. I mean, there were still problems, like his crazy hours, and how he has to pick up and leave for months at a time, plus women are constantly hitting on him. Not to mention that it's literally in his job description to kiss other women. All of that, we could have managed. But living my life under a microscope? I am physically unable to do it, Vi."
"Yeah. Small town busybodies have nothing on the professionals, do they?"
"Not a thing."
"Are you okay, Luce?"
Lucy did a quick mental inventory. "No. Not really. I miss him, Vi, so much. Am I being stupid? Should I run over there and fling myself at him and beg forgiveness?"
"There's nothing to forgive. You didn't do anything wrong, hon. It's like you said, he just needed something you didn't have to give." Baby Kestrel made a complaining noise and Violet shifted her to her shoulder. "Now, are you being stupid? That's something only you can answer."
* * * * *
Just when Lucy thought she'd been through the toughest part of the break-up, she discovered that she had a whole new kind of trouble. When she'd had Frederick looking out for her, she'd had the use of his driver and the peek-proof car windows. Now, she was on her own.
Paparazzi followed her to and from work, waited outside the grocery store, and, after being told in no uncertain terms by Janelle that they were not to set foot on her property, possibly with a shotgun in her hand to emphasize the important words, they lingered exactly twenty feet from the property line.
At first, Lucy had nearly given up, canceled all her work appointments and decided to stay home for a month or two. Instead, after several pep talks from Janelle and Violet, Lucy decided to treat the clicking photographers like another local nuisance: the biting black-flies. They were ferocious, but only had to be endured at their worst for a short season. They were only looking for sustenance, even if you didn't like how they went about it. You ignored them the best you could, and when they got too close, you shooed them away.
Protective clothing helped, too. Lucy had taken to wearing her biggest sunglasses and a ball cap every time she left the house. It didn't stop her form being followed, but it slowed the clattering of the camera shutters that followed her like a hunter followed a prime buck. Lucy found it ironic that, now that Frederick was out of the picture, she was finally learning the basics when it came to dealing with photographers.
But like the season of black-flies and the season of deer, she hoped that the photographers would only stay a short while once the movie crew left and Frederick was no longer seen with her.
Lucy wondered if they'd gotten any nice pictures of her and Frederick. She hadn't taken a single one while they were together. Lucy wasn't sure she wanted to see such a picture in her current state, but it would have been nice to know that one existed. Sometimes the whole thing seemed so surreal, she would like to have a piece of hard evidence that she hadn't imagined the whole thing.
* * * * *
Word around town was that the movie was on its last day of shooting. Tomorrow, they would start to strike the set, pack up the mountain of equipment they had brought, and haul it all back South again.
Lucy found a card in her mailbox, handwritten by Miranda, inviting her to a party for the cast and crew that night. For half a heartbeat, she was tempted to go. She'd made quite a few friends that she wouldn't mind seeing one more time. But she wasn't ready to be in the same room with Frederick yet. She wondered if she ever would be.
The party was on her mind as she sat in her living room that night, one and a half knitted socks in her lap. She considered throwing them away, but a lot of good memories were in these socks. Hundreds of little moments in time, most of them happy, had been caught by hundreds of tiny stitches. Lucy had worked on these while waiting for Frederick to join her after filming. She'd taken them to the set and had them jokingly claimed by several people. She'd taken them to the clinic and done a few rows on her lunch break, eager to get them finished for Frederick. Not that he badly needed wool socks in the middle of summer, but she had been excited to surprise him with a gift, and she couldn't think of anything better to give a man who had, or could buy, pretty much anything.
Lucy thought about dropping the socks into the breakup box. Finishing them, holding those memories in her hands, would be difficult. But the practical side of her said that it would be a shame not to finish them when they were nearly done.
Lucy sat and worked a few rows. Instead of being painful, it was a balm to hold all those hours of contentment in her hands. When Lucy heard a knock at her door, she dropped the sock back into her knitting basket. She wondered if Janelle had come up to see if she wanted to watch a DVD. The woman had been trying not to let Lucy spend too many hours alone.
Her jaw dropped when she saw Frederick standing at her door, looking like a casual fashion page from a men's clothing catalog in his dark jeans and button-up shirt rolled to the elbows. He held a covered paper plate in his hands.
"Frederick!" she gasped.
"Hello, Lucy. Sorry to drop in this late."
Dropping in late was practically their thing, Lucy thought.
"It's fine. Did you want to come in for a minute?" she asked after a moment's hesitation.
"For a minute," he agreed.
He followed her inside, but did not sit down.
"We finished filming today," he began.
Lucy nodded. She knew this much.
"There was a wrap party tonight. To celebrate. I brought you some cake," he said, pulling the tinfoil off the paper plate he carried, revealing a slice of white cake topped with nasty green icing. "The cake was a giant zombie, for the movie. I think this was a bit of its head," he said, heading for Lucy, then changing his mind and putting the plate on the coffee table.
"Ten people asked me where you were tonight. You made a good impression on a lot of people, Lucy."
"Thank you for telling me."
"I'm leaving town tomorrow."
Lucy's heart tightened. She knew he was going, but it was still difficult to hear those words spoken out loud.
"I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye," he said. "I wanted to tell you..." He ran his hand through his hair and started pacing.
"Tell me what?" she asked.
He stopped. "I don't regret it," he said in a rush. "I mean, I regret some of it. Lucy, I'm so sorry for the pain you went through because of me. But our time together, I don't regret it. Not one second of it."
"I don't either." Lucy gave Frederick a watery smile.
"It's late. I shouldn't keep you," said Frederick after the silence stretched between them.
"The party's probably still going."
Frederick shook his head. "I'm not in a party mood tonight." He gave Lucy a look filled with a thousand feelings: sorrow, guilt, affection, and most of all, the regret that he had just denied.
"Can I give you a hug?" he asked. Lucy stepped towards him and wrapped her arms around him. She tried to feel him with every inch of her body, to memorize all of him, his strength, his warmth, his smell. He put a hand at the back of her head and pressed her gently to him. Lucy willed herself not to cry. Not now. She wanted one last moment of quasi-contentment to savor.
Far too quickly, Frederick let go. He pressed her hands between his, almost like a handshake between strangers.
"Goodbye, Lucy. Take care."
"Goodbye, Frederick," she said. This time, she knew it was for good.
* * * * *
Once the movie crew had driven off with the last of the equipment, the photographers faded to a trickle, then one night, Lucy realized she had made it through the entire day without seeing a single one.
She was glad that Frederick had returned for one last goodbye. When thoughts of him ambushed her, she remembered her final minutes with him, that tender moment of closure.
She thought of him less frequently as the brief summer turned to an even more brief, but spectacular autumn. But thoughts of him always returned. His gentleness, his occasional splashes of arrogance, his sea-green eyes, his deep, rumbling voice.
With winter coming soon, Lucy decided to go on an out-of-town shopping trip to look for a good coat and winter boots. Finding that the city had decent cell phone reception, Lucy looked up the planned release date for the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie. Seven more months. She wondered if, seven months from now, she'd be able to watch it. Maybe when it came out on DVD, she decided, when she imagined herself a becoming a dripping, sobbing mess in a public theater during a zombie movie .
Lucy also looked up Frederick's recent movements on a celebrity gossip website. He'd done a late-night talk show, as well as two daytime ones, since he left. There was a link to the video of one of his interviews. The link to the video showed a still shot of Frederick looking dapper in a dark gray suit. Though not, she thought smugly, as good as he had looked in his black suit the night of her 'birthday' in his hotel room. She did not click on the link. She wasn't ready to hear him being charming again yet.
Knowing that whatever she found would hurt, she was still unable to resist searching for "Frederick's Forest Fling." The story was on several websites, a couple of which had followup stories featuring a grainy photo of her and Frederick walking out of The Restaurant. But the story seemed to have fizzled as quickly as it had appeared. Just like their relationship, she thought with only a hint of bitterness.
She was placated by the fact that she did not find mention of Frederick with any other women in recent months, even before he came up North. She hoped that she'd meant enough to him that he didn't jump into bed with anyone else right away, but he was, of course, free to do what he wished now. If she'd ever had any hold over him, she certainly didn't now.