Oh and it’s my birthday. I was given a case of Bushmills. I wonder how long it will take me to get through it? Perhaps I should give it away rather than take a bet on that.

Great news. Turns out Savannah has a new studio being built, and a huge film grant ever since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil increased tourism to the city by over forty percent. Also, the money guy in London is obsessed with the “deep south” and was all over the idea. And … I’m getting a writing and directing credit on this! Alistair is pissed (pissed off and pissed drunk). Still.

I want to tell her. I want to call her and tell her. I even pulled up her number on my phone and stared at it between takes today.

I told my mother about Keri Ann today. It was time we had a really good talk. I’ve been working on dealing with some of the shit about my father, too. Asking her stuff I just never wanted to know before. She was happy I was talking, said I always bottled stuff up and found it hard to express my own emotions. “You’re really good at it when you are being someone else,” she said. “Why can’t you just do it for yourself?”

She called me a man-sized “message in a bottle.” A love story waiting to happen if the right person found me, and if I would only open up and embrace who I am.

She always was a bit cliché.

The movie’s wrapping soon. It’s been an amazing experience professionally. Personally, not so much. I’m trying not to think of what’s next. I’ve been drinking a lot, more than usual. When we all go out, I just want to get hammered. My few photo opportunities may have led to a bit of a “party guy” image. In a way, I don’t care because it’s probably pissing Audrey off, and that satisfies me in a small way. Although why anyone would want to poke at a snake, I have no idea. And of course underneath it all, I’m worried I’ve probably really killed the last chance I had with Keri Ann because of it. The end of the contract is coming up which means I have no reasons not to go back to Butler Cove. And then there’s the movie in Savannah. I’m definitely headed back there either way. And I’ve done everything I can to ensure she’ll never want to see me again.

Something almost happened last night with one of Suzy’s friends. It didn’t get too far. But it was bad. Picture taking bad. And then after … well, I thought she knew the deal, but she started kissing me and before I knew it we were in the back of a town car. She smelled really good, like strawberries, and she was soft, and damn but I was drunk. Like really. But all of a sudden her hand was in my pants and she was telling me it was ok, that she knew I was in love with someone else and that she was too, and we should just have fun and no one would know … I’d think at that stage I’d be too far gone, but there I was grabbing her hand, squeezing it as I pulled it from me, telling her she couldn’t possibly really be in love with someone if she was doing this with me.

I almost want to laugh at myself writing this. The old Jack wouldn’t have thought twice, I almost couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. It was an out of body experience. That’s when I remembered why I liked her smell so much, Keri Ann’s hair always smelled like that. Strawberries.

I feel like I may have built this all up in my mind. The chance she ever wants to even see me again is so fucking remote. I realize this makes me sound pathetic. But I really don’t give a shit.

I’m hung over, and I lost the copper sea turtle, which really pisses me off.

And I’m giving it up. Getting wasted, I mean. I really don’t want to end up in another situation in the back of a car. I’m also getting a reputation as a drunk. Not good. I don’t want to be lumped in with the Alistairs of the industry. At least I don’t molest the crew. We have about a week left of production then I need to figure out what’s next. How soon I go back. If I do.

Should I?

I can’t change what I do. But I can show her who I am. That I’m more than the Jack Eversea the world thinks they know. I’m also going to use whatever assets I have at my disposal to win her back. Even if I have to fight dirty.

My fingers trembled as I turned the last page. My other hand was pressed to my mouth. I’d just seen real Jack, with all his insecurities and weaknesses. His fragility. It was hard to imagine the man I saw out in the world, in the media, even the one who boldly whispered hot words to me in an effort to seduce me in my truck, was the same person who’d written these words.

I’d spent the last five months thinking I’d been an interesting diversion for him. He’d spent the last five months struggling to do the right thing by everyone in his life. And missing me.

My skin throbbed and my heart pounded out heavy beats. Reactions cascaded over one another in my head.

I started again at the beginning. Each entry was on a separate page. For all I knew there were horror stories written between, but somehow, I didn’t think so.

After reading them through a second time, and having his words still hit every raw nerve I had like I was reading it for the first time, I ran to my room and shoved my feet into my running shoes. Swinging past the bathroom, I wiped my eyes and brushed my teeth, and then took the stairs two at a time, tripping on the last one. “Shit!”

“You okay, love?” called Mrs. Weaton.

“I’m fine,” I called and entered the kitchen.

“Well?” She was doing a crossword puzzle at my kitchen table. She’d put on a set of readers and after appraising me a few moments went back to her puzzle.

I pulled up a chair opposite her. “I’m stunned. In a good way.”

“Good.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Yes, well, I could see he was upset, and,” she peered up at me through her eyeglass rims, “as crazy as it seems, just yesterday before he came by, I had my score book with me that I’d taken to Canasta, and blow me down if a letter didn’t fall out of it while I was standing in my own kitchen. And not just any letter, neither.” She raised her penciled-in brows.

“Not …” I was going the say The letter, one of grandpa’s letters, the one Nana says changed her mind about marrying him. I glanced over to the campaign desk. I could just see the edge of it in the parlor from where I sat in the kitchen.

Mrs. Weaton scowled. “I know. I know exactly where you keep the letters, where this one was. But I’m telling you it ended up in my scorebook.”

“The letter?” My skin chilled. “Really? You’re not messing with me?”

“Honey, I would’ve thought it a coincidence or whatnot, if that boy hadn’t but five minutes later been on my doorstep with pages of a letter asking to make sure you got them.”

“They were pages from his journal.”

“Oh. Well.”

“It was better than a letter. It was his diary from when he was away all this time.” God, it was so much more than some letter or email or text he may have conjured up in a fit of rejection and depression.

I still wasn’t totally sure about him and Audrey and the pregnancy, but whatever had happened before, I could tell from his journal that they were definitely over now. And that he’d struck some kind of deal for me.

The thought of sharing my diary, my innermost thoughts and insecurities with anyone, made me shudder. The fact that Jack, a guy who people sold out on a daily basis, whether for a picture, an autograph, or a sordid exclusive, gave me these pages was shocking. The fact he trusted me not to share them, or Mrs. Weaton, for that matter, was …