And then it hit me.
My head jerked back to the men. To the boxes. The lines.
How had I not noticed them before?
The baseline. The center mark. The service line and sidelines.
Seventy-eight feet by thirty-six feet. Two thousand, eight hundred and eight square feet.
He was building a tennis court.
All of a sudden, it wasn’t the sun’s heat that was raising the temperature, it was my fury. How could he! How could he be so selfish?What is with him and all this competition with his family? So, they have a tennis court and now he needs to act like a bratty child and build a bigger one, pretending it was for me, the failed tennis player?
The tennis player that for the next three hundred and sixty-five days will need to look out of her room to see this taunting symbol of how bad she messed up in life and how the only way out of the shambles is through lies and deceit.
“Sebastian, you’re a real piece of work, you know that?” I growled, the anger rising up in me swiftly before it turned into something different. Instead of a rage-filled outburst, the emotional turmoil came out as tears. Floods of them cascaded down my cheeks.
“Elly?” I couldn’t see his face through my tears but I could hear the surprise in his voice. “Elly, I don’t understand. It’s a tennis court. It’s a tennis court for you to play in.”
The tears kept coming. I had no control over them. Sebastian had opened up the door I had thought I could keep locked for the rest of my life. The door with big fat letters, “Tennis Career.” And an emptiness behind them.
“Elly.” I was sinking to the ground when I felt Sebastian’s arms around me.
“Let me go,” I whimpered.
“If I let you go, you’ll fall.”
“Don’t you see?” My voice was so full of sobs I could hardly recognize it. “I’ve already fallen. There’s nowhere else for me to go.”
“Elly, I don’t understand. Do you mean the accident? I think we should go inside and talk.”
My body felt limp. He helped me stand on shaky legs, holding my elbows protectively. Not that I needed his protection. It was too late now.
“Elly,” he said. “Please help me understand. Do you want a different tennis court?”
I snorted. I took an unsteady step away from him, then paused.
“It’s all money with you, Sebastian. No, I don’t want a different court. No amount of artificial grass is going to help me now. Your money is no good, Sebastian, not when I can’t even play.”
Sebastian was beside me. “Not for long,” he said softly.
I shook my head violently. “I’m never getting better. I’m never going to set foot on a tennis court again.”
I tried to leave, but he held my arm by the elbow. He turned to face me.
“What are you so afraid of, Elly?” The words were barely more than a whisper.
Failing, Sebastian. Is that what you want me to say?
“I’m afraid,” I breathed the confession out, tears streaming like a waterfall now. “I’m afraid I’ve lost everything. And now, I’m afraid if I were to walk back up there again, I will lose myself too.”
CHAPTER22
ELLY
“You don’t look very well, darling. Is everything okay?”
The network connection in Sebastian’s house was far more stable than the one at the hotel had been. I sat in the sitting room area of my quarters. Since a little after my arrival, the chaise longue in the far corner of the room had become “my place,” a little haven where I could journal, doodle, or sometimes just sit and get lost in my thoughts, staring out of the floor-to-ceiling window at the ocean in the distance.