Coming Home (The Santa Monica Trilogy Book 2) by Jill Blake Read Free Book Online

of the benefits of taking medication and following up regularly with his doctors. He wouldn’t listen to me, felt I wanted to undermine him, hold him back from achieving his full potential. I tried to get his parents to understand, but it was like talking to a wall. They lurched from one crisis to the next, and in between managed to convince themselves that everything was fine. That he was fine.”
    “But he wasn’t.”
    “No.” She sighed. “The problem was they wanted to believe things were going well. So when Harry told them not to worry, they didn’t. No matter what I said. I was the outsider. Harry was their son.”
    Logan didn’t like the bleak note that entered her voice. “You were their daughter-in-law. And a physician, training to be a psychiatrist.”
    “Fat lot of good that did.” Her lips thinned. “I didn’t recognize it, you know. The fact that Harry was bipolar. Not in the beginning. In retrospect, I think he probably lived in a hypomanic state for years. He was funny, charming, constantly in motion. The life of every party. Some people are just like that. It’s their personality, or their upbringing. His behavior fit the image of someone who grew up with wealth. You know what I mean. That sense of entitlement, like everything revolves around you. He was very sure of himself. Charismatic.”
    “And you fell for Mr. Charisma.”
    Her sharp intake of breath made him wish the words back almost as soon as he said them. She didn’t need him to underscore her error in judgment.
    He leaned forward, ready to apologize, but her soft voice stopped him.
    “I was lonely,” she said. “Living in Manhattan, cut off from everything I’d known. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I went. Glad I had the opportunity to find my dad and get to know him. But he had his own life. I was in my third year of med school when I met Harry. Most of my classmates were already married, or paired off with each other. So yeah, I was lonely. Maybe even feeling a little sorry for myself. And there was this guy, larger than life, ready to sweep me off my feet.”
    Logan didn’t want to hear any more, but it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Too late to undo the past. He’d pushed Grace away all those years ago, rejected the possibility of a long distance relationship, refused to even consider a compromise. In retrospect, he realized he should have done whatever it took to stay together. Skype, FaceTime, flying visits on the weekends and during school breaks. Maybe he could have even given up Caltech in favor of something closer to New York. One of his post-docs had done a PhD at Columbia. Another had gone to MIT. Both schools had terrific neuroscience programs, and were a whole lot closer to where Grace had gone than Pasadena was. They could have worked something out.
    Instead, here they were, like two near-strangers, trying to come to terms with all the baggage they’d accumulated during their years apart.
    “I didn’t know about Harry’s psychiatric history until later,” Grace said, recapturing Logan’s attention. “I had no idea about the hospitalizations that his parents had hushed up, the suicide attempts.”
    “You mean there was more than one?”
    “Yes. But he’d been good for a while. And he didn’t have a full-blown manic episode until after we were married.” She paused while the waiter replaced their appetizers with entrées and refilled their glasses. “You remember that movie, The Wolf of Wall Street ?”
    “Vaguely.”
    “It was about this stockbroker who lived the high life on money he scammed from clients. Gambling, drugs, prostitutes, every excess you can imagine. True story.” She stabbed a piece of grilled eggplant. “That was Harry, in a manic state. Everything except the financial fraud.”
    He left that to his father, Logan thought . But he didn’t say it. Now that she was finally talking, he didn’t want to say anything to discourage her. “What did you