Eric opened my door for me, took our luggage, and then took some sunflowers out of the backseat. I hadn’t even noticed them there.
“You told me she likes yellow, right?”
I remember thinking it was so thoughtful. I remember thinking it was proof of what I already knew, what I had already uncovered: I loved him.
I loved him far before she ever met him. It might have mattered, had she not loved him. But it wouldn’t have changed things.
“Thank you,” I say.
“I love you, Katy,” Eric says here, now. “Always have, always will. I didn’t come here to tell you that I want you back. I don’t. I want you…” He winces. “Forward.”
“You want me forward?”
He nods. “I want whatever is next for us.”
I think about the house in Culver City, the garden we never made. What is our life, alone? What does it look like when it’s just us?
“How do we know it will be different?” I ask him.
He thinks about this. He wipes his hand across his forehead. “It’s up to us. We have to make it different,” he says. “You have to want to find out.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I tell him.
“Me neither.”
He looks out over the town. He sees the ocean, takes it in for the first time. “This place is incredible,” he says.
I nod. “It really is.”
“We should have come here,” he says. “On our honeymoon, we should have come here.”
I think about our four days in Hawaii. The mai tais on the beach, the tiki torches, the luau filled with tourists and cameras.
I look at him. His brown hair, fogged glasses. The freckles on his face. All the tiny, microscopic familiarity.
“We’re here now,” I say.
He smiles. There is beauty in his smile, the beauty of the familiar.
“Yes,” he says. “We are.”
* * *
As we finish up breakfast, Monica emerges onto the balcony. She has on loose linen pants and a white T-shirt, her hair slicked back into a low ponytail.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Eric. He is tucked into eggs and potatoes, downing coffee. He waves me off.
I stand up and make my way over to her.
“Katy!” she says. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” I say. “How was Rome?”
“Wonderful,” she tells me. “Always too hot, too crowded, but somehow just right. I like to leave and I like to return.”
“Not a bad way to live,” I say.
She smiles. “I see you’ve had someone join you?”
She gestures to Eric, who in the thirty seconds since I’ve been gone has struck up a conversation with a man and woman at a neighboring table. But it does not make me annoyed today. It makes me feel affection, warmth—it makes me feel touched by the soft hand of grace. He laughs at something one of them says. I see his easy joy, his easy smile. The way in which he is comfortable in the company of anyone. All at once, he reminds me of her.
Eric notices Monica and me looking at him. He waves at us, and we wave back. He smiles his goofy grin at me, readjusts his glasses on his face.
“My husband,” I say. Yes. My husband.
Monica raises her eyebrows at me. “He came here?”
“He did.”
“That’s a long way,” Monica says.
I look to her. She’s smiling a knowing smile at me. A familiar one. And then I notice her necklace. An iron chain hangs around her neck, supporting a turquoise pendant. All at once, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I have goose bumps everywhere.
“Nika?” I ask her.
Monica startles. “No one has called me that in a long time,” she says. She squints further. “How did you know?”
My heart beats wildly. I can barely believe it. “Do you remember a man named Adam Westbrooke?” I ask her.
She laughs. “Of course,” she says. “He was always a friend to the Poseidon. He used to come every year, first alone, and then many years later with his wife.”
“What happened to him?”
“They live in Chicago, I believe. He never had children; he didn’t meet Samantha until he was well into his fifties, lovely woman. He still emails sometimes. Life gets busy.”
“So he never bought the hotel?”
“Oh my goodness,” she says. “Do you know him? That was a long time ago. No. He never did. We got by on a few lucky investments and never needed a partner.”
Monica eyes me. “Why are you asking me this?”