Margaret sat up on the peacock throne chair, her elderly spine as erect as if someone had slipped a rod of cold steel down the back of her lace dress.
“I take back what I said about you being bright,” she shot back, her eyes blazing. “You’re a fool if you don’t think I had regrets. Recriminations? My God, I loved Palmer—I adored the ground that man walked on. I thought I was going to wither up and die when he left me.”
For just a fleeting moment, as Lani observed her grandmother with surprise, she was able to see the young woman who’d obviously experienced many of the same unsettling feelings that Lani herself was currently suffering.
“But you didn’t.”
“No. As you already pointed out, I had my work. And of course, I had your father.”
She reached out and covered Lani’s hand with her own beringed one. Blue veins crisscrossed the back of Margaret’s hand, but her still-soft skin was the color of gardenias, free of the age spots so many of her contemporaries suffered. As Lani lifted her gaze to her grandmother’s face, she thought how the former Hollywood sex goddess was still a remarkably beautiful woman.
“Don’t let the mistakes of the past stop you from loving, darling,” she said with a sudden, almost desperate urgency. “I’m old enough to have known a great many men. Donovan is one of the good ones. I know it in my heart. And unlike Palmer, he isn’t married.”
“Donovan is different,” Lani agreed quietly. “He’s like no one I’ve ever known, and when I’m with him, I feel like a different person… No,” she said, “that’s not it. I do still feel like myself. Just better. More fulfilled.”
Comprehension dawned in Margaret’s eyes. “You’re in love with him.”
“No. I don’t know. It’s so fast… But maybe I am,” Lani admitted.
Avoiding her grandmother’s sharp gaze, Lani shifted her attention outside the glass walls, toward a scarlet cardinal that was perched on a twisted branch of a pandanus tree, seeking shelter from the slanting silver drops.
“Would that be so bad, Lani?” Margaret asked gently. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
“You really want to know?” Lani’s eyes were burning with tears she refused to shed. “What if Donovan falls in love with me?”
“I can think of worse fates.”
“What if he wants to get married?”
“I’ll dance at your wedding,” Margaret said without missing a beat.
She didn’t understand, Lani thought miserably. “Can you see me living in Portland? Or following my husband around from posting to posting? Doing whatever it is FBI agents’ wives do? I’ve lived off island. While it was fun for a time, looking back, I realized that like seemingly everyone else there, I was playing a role that wasn’t a good fit for me. Like if you’d been cast in the Faye Dunaway role in Bonnie and Clyde .”
“If I’d been younger, I would have rocked that screenplay.”
“I’ve not a single doubt.” But it would have been an entirely different movie. And that was Lani’s point.
“I enjoyed many parts of my work,” she allowed. “I liked researching and writing questions. It was like changing to a new major every day. I liked taking care of the Beauty contestants. But at the end of the day, I was never truly happy. Nowhere near the way I am here. I don’t want to ever do that again. Not even for Donovan.”
Margaret didn’t argue. “Then he’ll simply have to move here, dear,” she said calmly.
Would that it was that easy. Lani was well aware that all of them, herself included, lived in a fantasy land of their own making. Her grandmother, along with her mother, brother, and yes, even her father, had created this special world by their artistic efforts. Citizenship in the magic realm had been Lani’s birthright.
But Donovan was only a visitor here. When his vacation was over, he’d be returning to the harsh world of reality. Alone.
“Well,” she said as she got up to leave, “we’ll never know what Donovan would do, will we? Because I’d couldn’t ask him to give up something he’s worked his entire life to achieve. So it’s a moot point.”
She bent down and kissed her grandmother’s weathered cheek. “Thanks for the tea, Tutu. It was delicious, as usual.”
Margaret beamed. “Wasn’t it? If you weren’t already destined to be with your detective, I’d spend whatever time I have left fixing you up with Kai. He’s going to do wonders with our tea farm and will need a special woman with your imagination to be a partner in the project.”
“It’s going to be wonderful.”
As she drove back to Nate’s beach house, Lani also considered how it was that a woman in her nineties could remain so focused on her future, while Lani, herself, was wearing blinders, limiting herself only to the present.
But if that’s all she could have…