Broken: A Billionaire Love Story (6 page)

She deleted the messages and fed the dogs, laying out their bowls in a row. Kip and Natalie characteristically mauled after their food, but Parker and Mason, sensing Olivia’s unease, merely gave their own meals a quick sniff and obligatory bite before sliding underneath Olivia’s feet.

The dogs were good for that. Even without the pressure from Roderick, Olivia rarely came home feeling entirely herself. She invested so much into the people around her, every day, that it was a beautiful escape to come to these perfect furry beings, with simple, predictable needs and who thought she was terrific just for existing.

Foregoing dinner once again (an unhealthy habit, she knew, but one that had become more and more frequent as of late), she decided to go work on her model in the back of the house.

Olivia had, in recent months converted her own bedroom into a study of sorts. She slept entirely on the comfy couch in the living room, using her own bed as an extended sort of desk for all her painting materials.

The command had come down from Harriet after she landed in the hospice: empty out my bedroom, for goodness's sake. I won't be needing it.

Olivia had steadfastly refused. That could wait, certainly, at least for a little while. She didn’t like to sleep all that much anyway. Too often she had bad dreams, plagued by all manner of people telling her she wasn’t good enough. Her mother, disappointed. Dr. Strauss, shaking his head. Old patients wondering why they had relapsed after talking to her. Wasn't she supposed to do better?

Her anxiety in action.

The painting materials layered on her bed and the small desk with its built-in lamp were all for Olivia’s modeling hobby. She had started when she was fifteen, building scale model replicas of cars, ships, rockets, that sort of thing. As of late she had moved on to scenes from history. As a tribute to her mother, she was painting a woman’s suffrage assembly in a busy street in New York. People passing by had their heads turned, interested in the words of the powerful speaker up at the front.

She sat down, arranging her brushes, and started to mix together some paint. The mud-splatter on the corner buildings needed a little work.

It was a complex, involved, very long project. The construction of the various buildings and street lanterns and so forth had taken her over six months. Now all she had left to do was paint—which was a project unto itself. Sometimes Olivia’s friends would tell her she should sell this sort of work, but that wasn’t what it was for. It was, despite its complexity and difficulty, a way for Olivia to relax.

As she worked on the model, there was no one hating themselves for something they were genetically predisposed toward. No minds working away at themselves, trying to lay out the case every other minute to throw everything away and get that much closer to suicide.

There were no terrible ex-boyfriends, full of shoves and self-hatred, bones to pick against the entirety of the world.

And most of all, there were no sick mothers, wasting away on a bed.

It was just a moment, preserved in time, captured exactly how Olivia wanted it.

The fact of the model’s eventual demise wasn’t lost on her. Somehow, some way, sooner or later, the model would break apart or dissolve or erode away, or get tossed in the trash or in a fire. These things happened. Life was complex.

But she could pretend, at the least, that any such events would happen far after she was gone. There was no such pretending with the addicts at the center, and none, of course, with her mother.

Chapter 8:

The following morning, Shane walked through the well-lit confines of the facility over to the office of his new counselor, Olivia Martin.

He had not slept well. How did you sleep without a dumping of chemicals in your system? He had gone down initially, right away, but somewhere near dawn he woke up and tossed and turned the rest of the early morning until it was time for breakfast.

This Olivia he was due to meet was the same young woman who Rawls had told him was beautiful and was staring at him yesterday.

Frankly, Shane hoped she hadn’t been staring at him—at least, not with any romantic intent. He didn’t know if he could handle any of that kind of attention at the moment, and he certainly didn’t feel like he deserved any. He was going to drink again, after all, and he was no good to anybody as a drunk.

Shane hadn’t learned much in his time, but he had learned that much.

He had not had much luck in love—or maybe love just had no luck left for him. Most of the time, when women found out what he really was, heir to a billion-dollar company, they started to build all these expectations. They wanted money, they wanted the spotlight, they didn’t want him to keep hiding from his people or his “place.” They wanted him to run the business, they wanted him to give up on his “silly desires” with poetry.

This was a problem, because if he didn’t tell women
what
he was, then they had to rely on
who
he was. And who he was, in so many words, was trouble.

Of course, there was more than that. He sabotaged relationships from the inside out. His mind was suspicious and clingy, and he couldn’t help but invent reasons that the women he was with already disliked him. Paulette, beautiful blond Paulette, he had transformed from a smiling supermodel babe with a heart of gold to a furious hellion, set on destroying him.

God, all that business with their coke dealer and his blood all over the bathroom...

He shook his head, opening the door to Olivia Martin’s office.

That was too much of a memory to sort through at the moment. Sure, Paulette had some part in their relationship’s destruction. No relationship was strictly one-sided. But to him, he had maybe eighty percent of the responsibility of their dissolution.

Olivia was in the room already when he got in. Rawls was right about one thing, at least—Olivia was beautiful. The way the light streamed in from the window, she only looked more lovely since the day before. Shane didn’t know that he had ever been so instantly taken with someone. Just looking at her, his heart caught up in his throat, and all the easy and effortless parts of his suave, cool facade suddenly began to cling for dear life. No part of him could stand to be fake in front of her.

Her legs, long and lovely, looked tastefully gorgeous in her calf-length gray skirt—just long enough to make him wonder what it was hiding. Her jacket and blouse swelled before her substantial breasts. He found himself wanting to stare at every small part of her all at once. She was thicker than Paulette, curvier, but he liked that.

Sometimes, in his worst moments, alone in whatever shithole he resigned himself to, he would dream about someone pulling him out of the hell he had created. Drunk, bottle in his hand, yelling at himself in the mirror and bemoaning all the lost pages of his poetry. Loneliness permeated his being in those states. A girl, he thought. A girl could save me—for whatever reason, he imagined a beautiful brunette.

And here was one now. He hardly imagined he was the first to think about her in the ways that his desperate, lonely mind had begun to.

She smiled and waved from her seat. “Come on in.”

The office was small—two windows on one side of the room, a desk facing the far wall, and Olivia sitting in a chair in front of that. There was a chair for Shane opposite her, which he took. All along the walls were small plaques with motivational sayings:

“
Fake it ‘till you make it.
”

“
The most sober among us today is whoever woke up earliest.
”

“
KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid.
”

They reminded him of a line he once wrote. That it was not lost in his memory, like so many others, surprised him:

Is it possible to dream

through a crisis

because I will sleep

myself sober if I can.

Something like that, anyway. It was tough to recall now, tougher than he thought it would be, with so many years past.

She stood up and offered him her hand. They shook briefly.

“Hi,” she said, smiling. “I’m Olivia. You’re Shane?”

Another good reason to not want this woman—clearly, she wanted nothing to do with him. Everything about her stance, her mood, was frozen and abrupt.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”

She nodded curtly.

Clearly, she had no clue who he really was—heir to billions and billions. Dr. Strauss was right—Shane really had been through the wringer and back. She would talk to him, then, like a normal person would.

That was actually a huge relief.

“How are you so far, today?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Okay. Still getting used to everything.”

“Sure.” She nodded again. “Okay, so. The way this works, just so you know—or the way it’s worked in the past, anyway—is that usually I ask a few questions about yourself. I know some things about you, but I’d like to get to know you the way you present yourself, okay? I don’t come in with any preconceived notions about you.”

“You mean, outside of that you think I’m addict.”

“I don’t know. Do you think you’re an addict?”

Starting already, huh? Fine. He had been psychoanalyzed by better brains than her. The best brains in the whole damn industry of medicine, as a matter of fact. His mother had worked him over with everyone she could find for more than two years before he finally took off on his own.

“I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “I always thought that an addict had to be skinnier.”

He laughed, and she laughed with him. That was surprising.

“Maybe you’re just one of the lucky ones,” she said, “to keep some of your body mass?”

Shrugging, he leaned back in the chair, still openly admiring her legs. Man, she was pretty. There was something about the way a woman’s knees slid into a skirt like that...her skin looked so healthy and vibrant.

He should focus. “I don’t know if I’m an addict, to answer your question,” he said. “I know...I don’t know. I know I don’t drink like other people. I know it creates a lot...I don’t know. A lot of debris. But I thought . . . I don’t know.”

He said that as if he had more to say, but there was nothing more to say.

Olivia didn’t press him on the issue. Instead, she asked, “What do you like? Is it only drinking? Are there other drugs?”

“Like cocaine? Pot?”

“Sure, like those.”

“No. I mean, I’ve tried them, but no. I did them for a while, had them for a while pretty hardcore. But cocaine was too much trouble to get and carry around. Got me into too much trouble. Pot is easier to get, but I don’t like the way it makes me feel. I’m more of a whiskey or vodka type of guy.”

“Has it caused problems in your life? Drinking?”

“You see me here, don’t you?”

“It’s a problem that you’re here?”

He chuckled. “Of course it is.”

“Well,” she leaned forward. “I’m curious if you see it as more of a symptom of a larger problem that you’re here—that it could be seen as emblematic as a problem that you have. Or, whether you see the problem as being here, being kept away from things you want to do.”

He took a moment to think about that.

“I guess it’s a bit of both, to be honest.”

“Let’s talk about that last bit, then. You’re here for another twenty-nine days.”

“That’s right.”

“Have you given any thought to what you’ll do when you’re out?”

Drink, he thought instantly. Drink a lot.

“I’m not sure.” The lie was instant and easy. “I guess a little.”

“It probably wouldn’t be too much trouble for you to steer straight into a liquor store, I’m guessing?”

“That’s possible.” Confirm nothing. Avoid everything. If he didn’t come down on something, it could never be said he was really, actually lying. Change the subject, he decided, get the talk off that line. “You’re pretty direct, huh?”

“Well. It’s not a mystery to me, exactly, as to why you’re here. I think it might be to you, though.”

“It’s no mystery.” He rubbed his hands on his thighs. It was a bit cold in the room. “I just need to figure out how to get my drinking under control, is all.”

“Have you considered that getting drinking under your control is outside the realm of possibility?”

“Ugh,” he shook his head, groaning. “I know where this is going.”

She smiled. “Do you? Where’s that?”

“You want me to join AA, isn’t that it?”

He had heard this line of talk before. Friends from college laid it on him after sobering up. They were always the same—inviting him out to coffee, asking him his life was, how was the writing going, and then bam—why don't you clean your life up, you loser?

“Have you joined AA so far?” Olivia asked him.

He laughed. “Of course not.”

“And where did that get you?”

Shane took a moment to consider. “Beat up and stuck inside of hospital, I guess is the answer you want?”

She shrugged. “You don’t have to go to anything or join anything you don’t want to. You’re an autonomous person. I’m just saying it’s worth considering that the places that you’ve gone to already have put you on a path that ends in...”

“Hospitals.”

She smiled. “I was going to say heartache.”

“You think my heart is aching?”

“I would be surprised if it wasn’t. People need company. Someone to care about them. Love them, like them, all of that. If you didn’t, you’d be a sociopath.”

Shit, Shane wished he could be a sociopath. Who wouldn’t want to be able to feel nothing, when everything that he felt regularly was so awful to begin with? What a relief that would be, the complete denial of emotions. Instead, his emotions lunged upwards from the abyss he cast them down into, like monstrous leeches, sucking away at his brain and steering him into more piles of shit to try and forget.

“Anyway,” he said after a minute. “I don’t want to join AA. I don’t like all that religious nutjob bullshit.”

“That’s fine.” She set her clipboard to one side, crossing those beautiful legs again. “I don’t know that AA has quite the make-up you’re imagining, at least not meetings I’ve sat in on, but you don’t have to join AA. But probably you should do something different. Some kind of community. You’re not alone in your suffering.”