Chapter 29
Athena
“Sometimes, letting go doesn’t mean surrender. It’s about making room for something new to grow.”
—Eloisa Hobby
The question that had driven her here was deceptively simple. Did she actually love golf, or had she just loved being good at it?
After finding her sister’s journal entry, after realizing just how thoroughly their father had shaped every aspect of her life, Athena needed to know.
Not the kind of knowing that comes from lying awake at 3 a.m. cataloging every wrong turn, but real knowing.
The kind that only comes from picking up a club and seeing what happens when you strip away thirty-one years of parental expectations.
Three weeks ago, she would already have mapped out every shot, calculated wind resistance, and recited her father’s mantras about precision and excellence in preparation for this weekend’s tournament.
She’d have broken down the entire course into a series of mathematical equations, factoring in everything from the dew point to the angle of the morning shadows.
Her first swing was, objectively speaking, terrible. The kind of awkward, jerky motion that would have earned her a fifteen-minute lecture on proper follow-through and the importance of maintaining the Dempsey legacy.
The ball skittered sideways, coming to rest in what her father would have deemed “amateur territory,” which ranked somewhere between “utter disgrace” and “why do you hate success?” on the Benjamin Dempsey Scale of Disappointment.
Athena stared at the ball, waiting for the familiar surge of perfectionist panic. It didn’t come. Instead, she felt something that took her a moment to identify.
Relief.
Because this horrible shot? This was hers. Not Benjamin’s carefully crafted prodigy, not the golf world’s reigning queen, but just Athena, making a mess of things on her own terms.
A breeze ruffled the grass, carrying with it the sound of laughter. Not the polite, golf-appropriate chuckles that usually echoed across country club courses—real laughter, the kind that bubbled from somewhere genuine and unrestrained.
Athena looked up.
Down the fairway, a man knelt beside a young girl as he showed her how to hold a club.
The girl’s tongue poked out in concentration, mimicking her father’s stance. The sight hit Athena like a perfectly executed drive to the solar plexus. She’d forgotten golf could look like this—joyful and utterly free of scorecards.
Her own childhood memories of the game came with a soundtrack of corrections, each swing annotated with her father’s running commentary on angle, stance, grip pressure.
The word fun had been systematically eliminated from her golfing vocabulary around the same time she’d learned to spell “championship.”
She took another shot, this one marginally better, and the ball rolled to a stop not far from the pair.
“Daddy! Look at the pretty lady. She has sparkly shoes.”
Athena glanced down at her golf shoes—practical, titanium-reinforced that just happened to have the tiniest hints of glitter in the leather.
An impulse purchase she’d justified as “adding flair to her professional image,” though really, she’d bought them because they made her think of the light catching in her mother’s chandelier earrings.
The father looked up, offering an apologetic wave. “Sorry! Chloe has never met a stranger she didn’t want to befriend. Especially ones with good taste in footwear.”
There was something endearingly rumpled about him, like an absent-minded professor. The gold band that might have been on his left hand was absent, though the barely visible tan line on his ring finger suggested its removal wasn’t recent.
Athena smiled. “I’ve been on the island for three weeks and I haven’t seen you two around. Where have you been hiding out?”
“Oh, we’re from Everly. We just came over for the day. There’s a kids’ golf clinic this afternoon and we wanted to get a head start.”
Athena turned her attention to the girl. “Those are some impressive practice swings, Chloe.”
The child beamed, brandishing her club like a magic wand capable of transforming the manicured fairway into something enchanted. “Wanna see? Daddy says I’m getting really good at the whoosh part!”
“The whoosh part is crucial,” Athena agreed, drawn in by Chloe’s enthusiasm.
“I’m Dave,” he offered with an easy smile and stepped back to give his daughter room to demonstrate.
Chloe’s swing was a full-body experience, the kind that would have sent Benjamin into apoplexy. Her club traced a wobbly circle in the air as she spun. The ball remained untouched, but Chloe threw her arms up in triumph anyway, as if she’d just won the Masters.
“Perfect form,” Dave said, and the simple truth in his voice made Athena’s throat tight. He meant it. His daughter had just turned a golf swing into a pirouette, and he was genuinely delighted.
The concept felt foreign, like trying to translate a language she’d only ever seen written down. In the Dempsey household, “perfect” had been a moving target, always just slightly out of reach, no matter how many trophies lined the shelves.
“Can you show me how you do it?” Chloe asked, turning those huge, hope-filled eyes on Athena.
“Daddy says watching good players helps you learn, and you look like you’re really good because your shoes are fancy.
” She delivered this with the absolute certainty of someone who still believed in both tooth fairies and the direct correlation between sparkly footwear and athletic ability.
Athena’s spontaneous laugh surprised her. “Solid logic.”
She stepped up to demonstrate but then paused. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t sure how to swing a golf club. Every motion she’d ever made on a course had been calibrated, engineered for maximum scoring efficiency. How did you swing a club just for fun?
Chloe solved her dilemma by grabbing her hand. “Like this!” She tugged Athena’s arm in a circle that defied several laws of physics and probably a few of golf etiquette. “You gotta feel the whoosh in your belly!”
So Athena Dempsey, top of the LPGA leaderboard for the past five years, felt the whoosh in her belly. She let her hips wiggle and when her ball sailed in a completely respectable arc toward the green, Chloe’s victory dance felt more satisfying than any trophy.
“That was amazing!” Chloe bounced on her toes, her club swaying dangerously close to Dave’s shins.
“Did you see how far it went? It was like whoosh and then zoom and then—” She paused.
“Oooh.” She breathed with the reverence only children can muster for shiny things.
“It’s so pretty! Is that a tiny golf club? ”
Huh? Athena followed Chloe’s gaze and looked down at the bracelet around her wrist. The one Benjamin presented to her the day she won her first junior tournament.
“Every champion needs her symbol,” he’d said, fastening it around her wrist with a photographer-ready smile.
She’d worn it religiously ever since, treating it as a good luck charm, a marker of belonging to the elite world Benjamin crafted for her.
Now it just felt heavy, like carrying around a tiny gold-plated piece of all the expectations he placed on her shoulders.
“Here,” Athena said, the word escaping before her brain could catch up with her heart. Her fingers worked at the clasp, muscle memory fighting against her sudden need to be free. “You should have it.”
Chloe’s eyes went saucer wide, the kind of pure wonder that adults spend their whole lives trying to recapture.
“Really?” She looked up at her father, seeking permission in that universal child-to-parent way that made Athena’s heart twist. Had she ever looked at Benjamin like that?
With pure trust, unmarred by the fear of disappointing him? She must have, once. Surely.
Dave started to protest—the polite parent deflection of an overly generous offer—but Athena shook her head. “I insist.”
The clasp opened and the bracelet slid free. The tan line beneath it looked like an accusation, a visible marker of everything she was trying to leave behind. “Every future champion needs a symbol, right?”
She managed to keep her voice steady on the word champion, though it tasted different now. Less like a crown and more like a costume she’d worn for too long, one that had started to chafe at the edges.
Chloe accepted the bracelet with the solemnity of a knighthood ceremony, cradling it in her small palms like it might dissolve if she breathed too hard.
Dave helped her put it on, careful and patient. The sight of the bracelet on Chloe’s wrist switched something inside Athena.
“What do we say, Chloe?” Dave prompted gently.
“Thank you!” Chloe launched herself at Athena’s legs, wrapping her in a fierce hug that smelled of strawberry shampoo and pure joy. “I’m gonna practice extra hard now! Can I show you my special victory dance?”
Athena found herself nodding, throat too tight for words. She watched Chloe spin and jump, the bracelet catching sunlight with each movement. No longer a symbol of perfection but a child’s treasure, transformed by simple delight.
“That’s really kind of you,” Dave said, watching his daughter with the sort of gentle pride that made Athena’s heart ache. “She’ll remember this forever.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
“Things have been rough for us since . . .” He bit off his sentence, shook his head. “Well, that doesn’t matter. No need to burden you with my difficulties.”
Athena lifted her shoulders. “I don’t mind if it’s something you need to get off your chest.”
He glanced at his daughter, who was examining the bracelet in the sunlight. “We lost her mom three years ago and it’s been a bit of a struggle getting back to normal.”
“That must be so tough. I can’t imagine.”
He bobbed his head. “We’re getting to a good place. This upcoming tournament for Demetra, well, it’s bringing everything full circle.”
Athena cocked her head. “You knew Demetra?”
“She was my wife’s—Keely’s—hospice nurse. Honestly, Demi was a saint. I don’t know what we would have done without her.”
“That’s good to know,” Athena whispered.
“Good to know?” Dave looked confused. “What do you mean?”
Athena’s stomach dropped. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. One of those automatic responses you make when someone shares something meaningful. Except her response made no sense to someone who didn’t know the whole story.
“Oh,” he said, and realization dawned in his eyes, that slow-motion moment when coincidence crystallizes into connection.
The same microexpression she’d seen on a dozen faces since arriving on the island, as people put together her features with her mother’s, her presence with the upcoming tournament, her last name with . . . everything.
“You’re one of Demetra’s daughters.”
“Yeah.” She nodded, her throat tightening, and suddenly she wanted to be anywhere but here with this nice man and his sweet child. “You have a good day. I’m just gonna . . . um . . . go.”
Then, before she burst into tears, Athena hopped into her golf cart and drove away.