She placed the phone back in its cradle and lay back on the bed in her apartment in Paris. She just knew that what had happened in the last hour and the decisions she had made were ones that she would look back on in the years to come and know that they were life altering. She may have been only 25 but she knew that the time had come. For the last 7 years she didn't feel like she'd had any control over her own life. She had done what she felt she had to do.
But not any more.
She knew that she was going to have to tell her mother about what she was doing - but she was delaying the inevitable. Julie was now engaged to Dan Forrest, the head of a large advertising and PR company and she had moved to England a month ago to live with him while they waited for his divorce to come through. She wouldn't have believed that she would ever miss her mother but living and travelling on her own this past month, she had been lonely, and it had just confirmed that now was the right time for her to make this change.
She'd had this type of opportunity come up before, but Julie had always talked her out of it or booked other jobs which meant she wasn't available when they needed her - but not this time. Marissa had decided it was time she did something that SHE wanted to do. Ever since her father had taken off in her Senior year of high school, Julie had been steering Marissa's course and Marissa had gone along with it because there didn't seem to be any other choice.
But not any more.
Looking back she knew she should be thankful for the fact that she was a very successful model commanding huge fees all around the world, they certainly didn't need to worry about money anymore. But none of this is what she had wanted for herself.
After Jimmy took off, some how or other it fell to Marissa to make a living for herself and her Mum so when she started to get some modelling work she had to take it, even though it meant moving away from Newport, first to New York and then to Europe.
Newport….. It had broken her heart to leave.
She had finished high school with a tutor and even though she had all the best intentions of going to college it just never seemed to happen. She was always too busy. Julie was her manager and it seemed that Marissa worked almost continually. Needing a break was part of the reason she was so determined to do this. She wanted to spend a few months in one place. She was fed up with living out of a suitcase. And the fact that she would be only an hour's drive from Newport didn't hurt either.
Maybe she could look up her old friends and see how they were doing.
She was sure that they would have moved on. She had tried to keep in touch for a while after she left, but the weekly contact became monthly, then yearly and it was now 2 years since she had spoken to Summer and even longer since she had spoken to him.
She knew that he had graduated as an architect and that after college he had started a Design and Development Company that was very successful. He had won a number of architectural design awards, was on all the hottest bachelor lists and had just been named Forbes magazines Young Businessman of the Year again.
Even though it broke her heart when he had stopped replying to her emails she still thought about him every day. She'd tried to stop but she couldn't help it.
Shaking her head to try to rid herself of the image of him she grabbed the phone and dialled Julie's number knowing that she wouldn't be able to sleep until she got it over and done with.