“Yes. Now I’m going to tell you what I think.”
I remain silent and take another sip of my drink.
“What Mitch said is realistic, I’m not gonna lie,” she says slowly. “He’s yourdad.He sees the most likely outcome of all of this. He has seen you work so hard to get to where you are, and he’s terrified of you not only losing it, but being destroyed by social media in the process, Isla.”
“But I—”
“No, no, let me finish.” Hadleigh throws up her perfectly manicured hand in a stop motion.
I shut my mouth.
“Looking at it on paper, his advice is bang on. This is why your parents are highly worried about you. The odds of this crashing and burning are spectacular. But there’s one variable they can’t truly measure or account for. And that is what you and Maxwellfeelwhen you’re alone together. How it feels when he listens to you talk. How it feels when he touches you or gives you a friendship bracelet. How you feel when he looks at you. Orhow you feel when you make him smile. When he shares a bit of himself with you, parts very few people get to see.
“That’s special, Isla. I’ve never seen you light up the way you do when you talk about him. I believe in love. And after seeing the dumpster fire that was my parents’ marriage, I know if I had a chance to be with a man like that, I would risk everything for it. Because that is what I want. A love story. Is that what you want, Isla?”
Hadleigh’s words hit me in the heart. A love story was never a priority for me before. All I wanted was my career. Love could be later. Way later.
But that’s not the way my story is turning out.
“I want a love story,” I confess, “but only if I can have it with Maxwell.”
“And he feels the same way, right?”
“Yes,” I say without hesitation.
“Then I think you know what to do,” Hadleigh says, taking another sip of her iced tea. “Remember, your parents love you. And they will continue to love you no matter what you do.”
The fear of disappointing my parents dissolves with her words. Yes, they won’t like it. Yes, they will hate the end result when we first go public.
But that doesn’t mean they are disappointed in me.
Even if they are? This ismylife. My story to write. My parents made their choices. They wrote their love story. Now I have a chance to write mine.
It’s not how I planned for it to happen. Or when I wanted. Falling for an F1 driver is the last thing I would have chosen in an ideal world.
But Caleb has been put into my life at this time for areason. I have to trust the universe on that, even more than I trust my parents’ good intentions.
He’s worth every risk I’m going to take for him.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I can’t believe it’s time to say goodbye.
I turn around from the kiosk, where I’ve just checked two big suitcases filled with as much as I could pack with the weight limit for London. I have an overnight flight to Heathrow, and my bags are officially checked now.
I meet the gazes of Mom, Dad, and Hadleigh, who have all come to the airport to say goodbye.
“I can’t believe I won’t see you again until August,” Mom says, choking up.
My throat feels a bit thick. Even when I was at Georgia, I came home once a month for a visit, or my parents went to Georgia to see me. But the first break in the F1 schedule doesn’t come until August, after the Hungarian Grand Prix on the third. Racing won’t resume until the last week of August in The Netherlands.
I am going to spend this part of the summer in London and traveling the globe for Formula 1.
I hug her tightly. “I will be home before you know it.”
Mom embraces me, then steps back and puts her hands on my face. “I know I promised not to give you any more advice on you know who, but please, please, please be careful with your heart.”