He wasn’t trying to prove anything to the Hollywood influencers and power players. That was just an excuse. He simply hadn’t wanted to admit the truth to himself or anyone else. Not evenMaria, the one person who’d probably understood that truth long ago, without his having to tell her.
Because if he admitted it, he also had to admit that he still cared what his father thought of him, after more than two decades of estrangement, and he didn’t want to care. Caring made him feel like that helpless child again, unable to make his dad evenlookat him, much less understand him and his choices.
It was pathetic, and he hated himself for it, and the realization should probably send him back to therapy for a while. But it was the truth.
He was still trying to prove he was worth something.
He was still trying to prove he’d been right to leave.
He was still trying to prove things that shouldn’t have needed proving in the first place. Even if they had, twenty-one years of staying afloat in Hollywood—no,thrivingin Hollywood—and six years of creating a new, tight circle of loyal, loving friends should havealreadyproved them. To his father. To himself.
So why was he still listening to his dad’s voice in his head?
And if he didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, what kind of life did he actuallywant? What would make him genuinely happy?
Did he even know?
Because he’d told Maria he did. He’d told himself and her and everyone else that he’d dreamed of having a multimillion-dollar home in an exclusive gated community from the start. That he’d always yearned for high-profile, well-compensated roles on shows likeGods of the GatesandFTI.
But that was a lie too. When he’d moved to LA, he’d simply wanted to make a living doing projects he found worthwhile.
He’d wanted love as well. He’d needed it,achedfor it. Love and friendship and a family.
And over the course of six glorious years, Maria had given them to him, one by one.
Before she’d begun her quiet but relentless campaign to connect him with his colleagues on a personal level, he’d been respected in Hollywood. Considered hardworking and professional. But no one especially liked him, and why would they? How could they even claim toknowhim, when he barely said a word to them off camera?
People had known he was a good actor. They hadn’t known whether he was a good man.
That question still didn’t have a definitive answer, did it?
Because when Maria, the woman who’d lit his lonely life and filled it with joy and companionship, had told him what she needed, what would make her happy, he’d heard her.
But he hadn’t listened.
Just like his father.
Maria hadn’t just told him once, either. She’d told him multiple times in multiple ways. At Alex’s charity event, when she’d shaken her head and said she didn’t know how a long-distance relationship could work for anyone. On the island, where she’d woven a disparate group of people into a loving, supportive community, a very real sort of family, and not simply because he’d needed that family and maybe everyone else had too.She’dneeded it.
She’d told him with all those regular, lengthy FaceTime calls with her siblings and parents, so many he’d marveled at the likely cost of their data plans. Even before he’d met the Ivarssons in person, only an idiot could have missed how important family was to her existence.
Then hehadmet them. And for the first time in his life, he saw how a functional family could work. How everyone could repair chinks in each other’s armor, always knowing their ownvulnerabilities would be shielded in return whenever necessary. How affection could be freely offered, and needing that affection wasn’t a source of shame or weakness. How people with very different personalities could still respect and appreciate one another.
He also saw how comfortable and content Maria became when the people she loved surrounded her. Then she’d sat surrounded byhim, cradled in his arms, between his legs, and literally opened the most painful reaches of her past to him in the form of a family photo album. The stories she told, the pictures she showed him, had exposed her vulnerabilities so starkly, he’d sat stunned behind her, touched and terrified and shaken to his core. Because from that moment forward, she was trusting him to shield those vulnerabilities, to keep her safe, in the same way she trusted her family—and no one else in the world. Just the Ivarssons and... him.
That first photo they’d taken of her would haunt him for the rest of his damn life.
The little girl in the plastic sleeve looked like Maria. Sturdy. Tall. Same features. Same hair. But the Maria he knew sparkled and shone, lit from within by joy, by warmth and humor and confidence and a determination to confront the world on its own terms without ever losing herself in the process.
Any light in the photo of that child came from the camera flash or the sun. Not from her. There wasn’t a single spark of warmth in her shuttered expression or those hard, suspicious brown eyes.
She was a young Medusa, powerful and angry and weary of a world that hurt her and hurt her again for no reason, and the chilly boldness of her stare should have turned that world and everyone in it to stone. But it didn’t.
So she’d turned herself to stone instead, because stone couldn’t grieve.
Except in the most basic of ways, she looked nothing like theMaria of today. She looked, in fact, much like Peter had in photos until approximately six years ago.
If she got him in a way no one else had, maybe that was why. She’d been a version of him once. Unlike her, though, he’d had no Ivarssons in his life to insistently chip away at his veneer, then return him to the world protected by something far warmer than stone. At least, not until Maria Ivarsson arrived at an LA sauna, wearing only a small red bikini, and cracked his impenetrable facade before she even began trying.