“People come for a week. Some live out their stay on the planet here. It’s addictive, this place.”
“I can see that.” I move Elizabella’s drink a bit farther from her reach. She’s diligently coloring her place mat and not paying much attention to things that spill.
“So you might not sell, then.”
I meet his gaze. Green-gray eyes. “Is that what Tasha said? That we might be selling?”
He glances in the direction of my left hand. Perhaps he’s looking at the ring I keep touching. “She mentioned it, yes.”
“Maybe we’ll have to see if the island swallows us.”
“Can I . . .” He massages the scruff on his chin. “This might be out of line. But are you married? Will your husband be joining you? I don’t want to . . . well, it looks bad, maybe. My being here. If he’s meeting you.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t see the ring back at the house. I wasn’t looking for it or anything, but—”
“No.”
He shuts up.
“My husband is . . .” Dead. I can’t say the word aloud, despite its replaying in my mind. He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead. “He won’t be joining us. He’s . . .” I can’t say it! “We’re not together anymore.”
“My wife—ex-wife, that is—was . . . well, let’s just say I respect the institution of marriage. She didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So if I’d noticed the ring, I probably wouldn’t have taken it upon myself—”
“He’s dead.” I hiccup over the wave of grief that hits me full force, like the water beating against the red, yellow, and black buoy not far from here. “He was a pilot, and there was an accident—”
“God, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.” I dab my napkin at my eyes. “So I don’t know how long we’ll be here, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with the house, and I don’t know how I’m going to exist without him, and—”
The waitress appears with drinks, prompting another uncomfortable silence.
I glance at Bella’s drawing. A sea creature, judging by the waves of blue crayon. Lots of red squiggles around a circular object. A mermaid maybe. Could be an octopus.
Once the server retreats, Christian raises his glass a few inches off the table. “I know something about how that feels.” He clinks the bottom of his glass to mine, which I have yet to touch. “For different reasons, of course. But no matter how it happens, it isn’t easy.” He takes a sip.
“No, I guess it isn’t.” I raise my glass to his and offer a clink in return.
“You know what worked for me? After throwing things and breaking things—”
I stiffen and feel the flush of embarrassment crawling up my neck to my cheeks. I wonder if he heard my destructive tantrum through the vines in the backyard.
“And after a night in the clink?”
“In . . . in jail?”
“One of the things I broke”—he smiles a little—“the guy’s nose.”
I feel more than hear my own laugh, brief as it may be. It isn’t funny. But it is.
“He came at me first, I swear.” His hands rise in an I surrender pose. “The judge saw it the same way. But anyway, the point is . . . it’s hard to be angry forever in a place like this. I mean, look around you. Nothing’s fair in this world, but this place, this island, is a pretty decent consolation prize. You might want to stay.”
Echoing in the caverns of my mind is Micah’s song, the offbeat cha-cha: Stay with me. Stay some more.
“Sway,” I whisper to the memory. Tears bead up in my eyes.
“Excuse me?”
I shake off the memory of my last dance with Micah, shake off the fact that it’ll never feel warm and fuzzy again, and ward off the tears. “So. Tasha.”
My neighbor raises a brow.
“Is she . . .”
This is crazy.
Micah wouldn’t have . . . he loved me, loved our daughter, wanted more children.
But I’ve seen the proof in the pictures I smashed.
I clear my throat. “Is she married? I never met a husband.” It isn’t a lie. If Tasha is Natasha Markham, I never met her husband.
My phone chimes with a voice mail alert. Claudette left a message.
“I . . .” He bites his lower lip and sort of squints at me for a split second. “I don’t know if they were married, but . . .” Again with the squint. “She wasn’t always alone.”
“Alone,” I repeat. I’m alone now.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” There’s something in the way he’s looking at me. Something that tells me I’m a pathetic shadow of what I used to be . . . and lately, I haven’t been much of anything beyond a pincushion for IVF needles. “It’s recent, huh?”
“Yes.”
The warm sensation in my cheeks intensifies, like mercury about to burst a thermometer. I meet the challenge of his stare.
He takes a long draw on his mojito.
His straw becomes a stir-stick, chasing mint leaves around his glass. “I wore my ring for about a year after it was over. Just couldn’t bring myself to take it off. It had been part of me for so long that I just . . . I couldn’t part with it for a while. Couldn’t bear the thought of being with other women, either, but—”
“I heard wearing a ring doesn’t quite deter women.”
“It wards off the ones who are serious about relationships.”
“Oh.” I don’t know if I actually say the word or if my lips just form it. But either way, his message comes in loud and clear: it wasn’t necessarily the company of other women he thwarted, so much as a relationship.
Could I do something like that? Fill the void Micah left with a casual fling? I take a healthy sip of my drink. Sweet rum mixed with a bitter—yet refreshing—elixir of mint leaves. It burns all the way down, but it chases away the thoughts rushing through my head. Of course I couldn’t fill the vacancy with something impermanent, something cheap. I wouldn’t know how.
My phone chimes with a different tone. This one alerts me to an incoming text. I glance at my phone. The text is from Claudette. She sent a picture of my house at the Shadowlands. A redheaded figure is on my doorstep.
I tap the screen to enlarge the photo. Blink to ensure I’m seeing things correctly.
But there’s no mistaking that red hair.
She’s at my house.
Natasha Markham is standing on my doorstep.
Chapter 24
Suddenly the entire world is a tornado rush of colors—the rosy-pink froth spilling across the table from Elizabella’s souvenir cup, the purple monkeys adorning it, the green of palm trees, which I see only when I spin to find a member of the waitstaff, in search of a towel. And the memory of the bright-auburn tresses of a woman I last saw in the rearview mirror of Micah’s old, beat-up Bronco, rumbling off campus after graduation.
Sticky mess in my lap.
“Mommy’s fault, Nini! Mommy’s fault!”
Maybe it was. Did I knock over her cup?
With one hand gripping my phone, and the other yanking my daughter out of the booth, as she’s now swimming up to her elbows in the mess, a cramping sensation wrings in my pelvis and my lower back strains every time I lift her. She’ll have to walk. Out of nowhere, it amplifies into the same stabbing, slashing pain I felt moments before miscarrying the twins.
My knees buckle.
I manage to catch myself with a hand on the back of the booth bench.
Lord.
It’s happening now, the dreaded first period—usually god-awful, messy, and painful—after egg retrieval.
A server wedges himself between me and the table.
My eyes lock on his white towel, now bleeding through with reddish-pink slushy.
“Ladies’ room?”
“Right behind you, ma’am.” He hardly glances over his shoulder at me. “Down the hall.”
I give Elizabella a tug in that direction.
“Mommy! Nini isn’t—”
“She’ll catch up, Ellie-Belle,” I whisper.
“No! Nini’s still at the table. Stranger danger!”
“Mommy has an emergency.”
A blinding pain surges in my abdomen. For a split second, the sensation renders me immobile. Just a breath or so, but it’s a productive one.
Bella ricochets off a wall of man—off Christian Renwick’s long legs—and lands back against me, gripping my hand.