Chapter 4
Lena
I spent the two days after Sienna's interruption in a state of low-grade panic that I hid, badly, from everyone except my six-year-old, who was too busy narrating an epic saga involving dinosaurs and a submarine to notice his mother had turned into a nervous wreck.
"You're doing the face again," Nico informed me over breakfast on the second morning, spoon halfway to his mouth, regarding me with the unnerving directness only children seem capable of.
"What face?"
"The worried face. You do it a lot lately." He shrugged, entirely unbothered, already moving on to more pressing matters. "Can I have more juice?"
"You can have more juice." I got up to fetch it, grateful for the excuse to turn my back and school my expression back into something calmer. "I'm fine, by the way. In case you were wondering."
"I wasn't that worried." He grinned at me, gap-toothed, and the sight of it — his father's exact grin, I realized with a fresh pang, the one I'd fallen in love with a decade ago — nearly undid me right there over the orange juice carton.
I dropped him at school an hour later, watched him run off toward his friends without a backward glance the way six-year-olds do, entirely unaware that his whole world was standing at the edge of an enormous change, and I walked home slower than I needed to, trying to figure out how I'd nearly told Hawk everything at my own kitchen table and then let one interruption talk me straight back out of it.
I'd had six years to prepare for this exact moment, and somehow none of that preparation had made it easier.
I'd imagined it a hundred different ways over the years — sometimes as a phone call, sometimes as a letter I'd never send, sometimes as an accidental run-in at the market where the truth would simply spill out of me before I could stop it.
I'd never imagined it playing out exactly like this: interrupted by a flower shop owner with a rosemary plant, the words sitting unsaid in my chest like a stone I couldn't put down.
The walk home took me past the old bluff path, the one that wound up toward the clifftop where Hawk and I used to meet, back before any of this — back when love was simple and reckless and didn't come with six years of consequences attached.
I stopped at the base of the trail for a moment, looking up at it, remembering.
We used to lie up there for hours, tracing constellations neither of us could actually name, making up better ones instead. He used to call it our own private sky, like the same stars that hung over the rest of Cala Sirena belonged to someone else the moment we claimed that patch of them.
I hadn't been up there in six years. I wasn't sure I could go back up there without it undoing me completely.
I kept walking instead, past the trailhead, back down toward the harbor and the ordinary business of the day, because some ghosts you can't visit yet, not until you've settled the more urgent business standing right in front of you.
Juliet found me at the café an hour later, ostensibly for coffee, though I suspected Esme had done some quiet coordinating behind the scenes.
"You look terrible," Juliet said, sliding into the seat across from me with the blunt affection of a woman who'd survived her own share of chaos and had no patience left for pretending otherwise.
"Thank you."
"I mean it kindly. You look like someone who hasn't slept and has been rehearsing a very difficult conversation in the shower.
" She waved down a waiter, ordered for both of us without asking, which was either presumptuous or exactly what I needed, I honestly couldn't tell anymore.
"Esme told me. About Hawk. About the almost-conversation. "
"Is there anyone in this town who doesn't know my business by now?"
"Marco, probably, but only because he's usually too busy braiding Lucia's hair to keep up with gossip.
" Juliet's mouth twitched, softening the words.
"She insisted on the braid this morning.
Very specific instructions. I believe the phrase 'like a princess pirate' was used more than once, and Marco spent forty minutes on YouTube tutorials trying to make it happen. "
"Did it happen?"
"Sort of. It's more 'pirate who lost a fight' than 'princess,' but she declared it acceptable, so.
" Juliet shrugged, smiling despite everything, and I was grateful for the small, ordinary detour before the conversation turned serious again.
"I'm not here to lecture you, Lena. God knows I ran from my own mess for long enough that I don't get to throw stones.
I ran halfway across the country in a wedding dress, if you'll recall. "
"I recall."
"So believe me when I say I understand the impulse to keep running instead of just saying the hard thing out loud." She reached across the table, covered my hand with hers. "But I also know what it cost me, all those years of running. And I know what it saved me, the day I finally stopped."
"It's not the same, Juliet. You were running from a wedding.
I'm—" My throat tightened, the words catching somewhere I couldn't quite dislodge them.
"I've kept a child from his father for six years.
That's not cold feet. That's an entire childhood he doesn't know I've made decisions about without him. "
"You made those decisions to keep Nico safe. That matters."
"Does it? Does it matter if the danger's gone and all that's left is the fact that I chose, every single day for six years, not to tell him?
" I pulled my hand back, pressing both palms flat against the table like it might steady the ground under me.
"I keep trying to find the version of this where I'm not the villain of Hawk's story, Juliet, and I can't find it.
Every angle I look at it from, I'm the woman who kept his son a secret. "
"You're also the woman who kept that son safe, fed, loved, and thriving, entirely on your own, for six years, with a man's entire absent history hanging over your head the whole time.
" Juliet's voice sharpened, the gentleness giving way to something fiercer.
"That's not villainy. That's survival. There's a difference, even if it doesn't always feel like one from the inside. "
The waiter arrived with coffee and a plate of pastries Juliet clearly hadn't intended to eat alone, and we sat with the conversation a moment, letting it settle.
"I almost told him," I said finally. "Two days ago. At my kitchen table. I had the words right there, and then Sienna walked in with a rosemary plant, and I just — I let the door close. I let myself off the hook."
"So open it again."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple, actually. Excruciatingly hard, but simple.
" Juliet broke off a piece of pastry, considering me with the particular focus of a woman who'd once negotiated her own way out of an impossible situation and come out the other side happier than she'd ever imagined.
"You go to him. You say the words. You don't wait for the right moment, because Lena, I promise you, there is no right moment for a conversation like this.
There's just the moment you finally decide to stop waiting for one. "
"What if he hates me for it?"
"Then he hates you for it, and you deal with that, because it's still better than him finding out some other way — a slip of the tongue, a chance encounter, Nico saying something innocent that does the math for him in a grocery store.
" Juliet's face softened again, some of the sharpness giving way to real sympathy.
"You don't want him to find out that way, Lena.
Trust me. Finding out the hard way leaves a mark that doesn't heal clean, even once everything else does. "
I thought about her own history, the wedding she'd run from, the way Marco had found her half-broken on a beach and built something steadier with her out of the wreckage.
If anyone understood the difference between a hard truth delivered with care and one that arrived like a blindside, it was Juliet.
"How did you know when you were ready? To stop running, I mean. To let Marco actually know you."
"I didn't." Juliet laughed, a little rueful. "There wasn't a moment where I felt ready. I just got tired of being afraid, and being tired won out over being afraid, and it turned out that was enough to carry me through the actual conversation."
"That's not exactly reassuring."
"It's not supposed to be reassuring. It's supposed to be honest." She squeezed my hand. "You don't have to feel ready, Lena. You just have to be more tired of the secret than you are afraid of the truth. Sounds like you might already be there."
"Tomorrow," I said, surprising myself with the certainty in my own voice. "I'll go to him tomorrow. I'll tell him everything."
"Good." Juliet squeezed my hand once more, decisive, satisfied. "Want me to watch Nico while you do it?"
"You'd do that?"
"Lena, I would drive that child to the moon and back if it meant you finally got to have this conversation without an audience." She smiled, warm and a little wry. "Lucia adores him. It'll be a playdate. Nobody has to know it's cover for the most important conversation of your life."
I laughed — actually laughed, the first real one in days — and some of the weight in my chest eased, just slightly, just enough to breathe around.
I walked home that afternoon rehearsing the words again, different combinations, different openings, trying to find the version that hurt least and knowing, somewhere underneath the rehearsal, that there wasn't one.
There was just the truth, plain and unavoidable, and a man who deserved to hear it from me before one more day passed.