32. Then
I figured Harrison came from money, but I didn't know he came from this kind of money. His parents’ house, with its multi-million-dollar views of the Pacific and the cliffs, is the equivalent of three regular homes.
It has a pool and two kitchens, two laundry rooms, and so many bedrooms that, though there are thirty of us, no one needs to sleep on the floor.
I haven’t seen Luke since the night of Danny’s proposal three months ago, when he watched me say, “Yes” in stunned silence. He was gone the next morning, before I woke.
I think he understood that I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t take one more thing away from them when they’d just lost so much, and he appears to have moved on just fine—he won a shortboard contest in La Jolla and finally secured enough major sponsors to go on the tour, though he nearly lost all of them when he got into a fistfight at the next competition.
I’m happy for him, but when I close my eyes, I still picture the plan we made: LA, living together, him coming in to see me at work every morning after a day of surfing, curling up next to me at night.
We’d have been broke, the place would have been a dump, and I still can’t imagine anything better.
I spend a lot of time telling myself to stop imagining it, but this weekend is just going to make it harder.
The guys are on the deck discussing the storm coming in when Luke arrives. “There’s the hero of the hour!” Caleb booms, clapping him on the shoulder. “Nice work, man.”
Luke smiles and thanks him, but then his gaze lands on me with something bleak in his eyes that wasn’t there before.
I was wrong, then, when I said he was doing just fine.
He was reckless when he won at La Jolla.
I wonder, now, if that’s my fault. I glance away, but not fast enough.
Grady is watching, already angry. I still can’t believe Danny invited him after the way he acted at the funeral, but he’s always been better at forgiveness than I have, and as he pointed out—we couldn’t invite Libby without asking Grady too.
“How are the waves?” Luke asks.
“There’s no way, bro,” says Liam, nodding toward the churning ocean.
It’s a small strip of beach, set between two cliffs, each of them littered with jagged rocks at the base.
The break is far out, and the wind is pushing the waves hard to the south.
Simply trying get out there would mean getting thrown into the rocks.
“Maybe it’ll calm down a little tomorrow, but right now that’s a death wish,” Liam adds.
Luke continues to survey it, though, and my stomach drops. He is desperate to get away from me. I already knew I shouldn’t have come, but now, watching him, I’m certain this weekend was a big fucking mistake.
We all get settled into our rooms. Danny and I are given a master bedroom with a king-sized bed in honor of our upcoming wedding. We exchange an awkward glance as Harrison sends us in.
Currently, I share a bedroom with Donna, in the two-bedroom apartment we moved into after the church kicked them out of the house.
I’ll switch over to Danny’s room when I become Mrs. Allen mere weeks from now, though I can’t begin to imagine what our nights will be like, with his mom sleeping across the hall.
The situation is temporary anyway—a stopgap until we leave this fall.
The church has agreed to let Donna set up an orphanage in Nicaragua.
There have been objections to it, people lobbying the church not to send “hard-earned American dollars elsewhere”, and deep in my evil little heart I’m hoping they succeed.
Because what am I qualified to do in Nicaragua?
Nothing. So I’ll have to cook, clean, and do the laundry all day for the kids, and at night I’ll have to sit with Danny and Donna, pretending I’m grateful to God for letting me do it.
“The room is amazing,” Danny says to Harrison when we get back upstairs. “Way bigger than anything Juliet and I will ever have.”
Luke pales. Swallowing hard, he walks back to the sliding doors. “You ever try jumping off that?” he asks Harrison, nodding at the cliff to the south.
Harrison laughs. “No. I actually enjoy my life. I’d like it to continue.”
A muscle flickers in Luke’s cheek. “If you jump with your board at just the right moment and angle it right, I bet you could get past all that and paddle out.”
“Luke,” I say before I can stop myself. “ No .”
There’s way more anxiety and desperation in my voice than I want to betray, but everyone is too busy agreeing with me to notice. I step toward him but catch myself before I go farther.
“She’s right, man,” says Beck. “Think about it…Even if you survive the jump and even if you manage to paddle out and don’t get swept into the rocks, how do you get back in? You’re still facing the same problem you were on the way out.”
Luke swallows. “I think if you rode in through the center of the channel and timed it right, you’d be fine.”
“That’s a really big if ,” says Danny.
Luke glances at me, and before he even says a word, I already know exactly what he’s thinking and what he feels: that he wants to surf, and that he’s angry about so many things, and that if it doesn’t work out…it just doesn’t fucking work out.
“I can do it,” he says.
“Please,” I whisper.
He looks at me for one long moment. Too long. “It’s good, Jules.”
A simple thing, those words. Only I know what he’s really saying: that he understands the risks, and that I’ve made my decisions and now he’s making his.
He grabs his wetsuit out of his bag and goes to change.
“Someone needs to stop him,” Libby says. “This is stupid, even for him.”
The guys glance at each other.
“It is stupid,” Liam finally says, “but if anyone could pull it off, he could.”
Panic tightens my chest, but the rest of the crowd shrugs in reluctant agreement, and when Luke emerges, there’s a weird combination of anxiety and excitement in the air.
They all do things someone else has suggested is ill-advised, and Luke is a far better surfer than any of them.
He surfed Mavericks, after all. Telling him he can’t make this is like telling an Olympic athlete he can’t break a record—none of them feel qualified to say what he can or cannot do.
“Wish me luck,” he says before taking one last look at me and disappearing downstairs.
My stomach drops to my feet.
We gather on the deck, and a minute later we see him walking out to the beach with his best board, the one he used to win at La Jolla—yellow, white, and black striped—like he thinks it will make him invulnerable.
It won’t. That fucking board could snap in half the second he hits the water if he lands wrong.
“This is crazy,” Libby says firmly. “He probably won’t even survive the jump. Make him wait until tomorrow. The weather will be better, and he can surf then.”
“The weather’s not going to be better tomorrow,” says Beck.
“That’s not the point!” I cry. “Make him stop!”
Don’t they see he’s acting like someone with nothing left to lose?
“Juliet, even if we wanted to stop him, we couldn’t,” says Beck. There’s sympathy in his gaze, sympathy that wasn’t there when he addressed Libby just a moment ago. It’s almost as if he knows exactly what’s going on here.
It’s Mavericks all over again but worse this time.
Luke isn’t doing something he knows other people have succeeded at.
He has no clue what could happen. And I didn’t try to stop him at Mavericks, but I still remember those moments when I thought he was gone.
I still remember how deeply I regretted not trying to talk him out of it.
“No,” I say, dropping Danny’s hand and taking off at a run.
Danny shouts at me to stop, but I ignore him, running down the stairs and chasing Luke across the sand.
I know we’ve got an audience and I just don’t care. Nothing matters to me as much as convincing him to stop.
The gravel slides under foot as I scramble up the cliff behind him. He’s halfway there by the time I catch him.
He glances over his shoulder at me, his face stern. “Go back, Juliet.”
“I’m begging you.” I gasp for air from running out here and climbing. “Don’t do this.”
Something flickers in his eyes. I’m not sure if it’s pity or concern, and I don’t care as long as it means he’s listening to what I’m saying.
It disappears as fast as it arrived, and his eyes grow cold again…it’s how he steels himself against me.
“The difference between us is that you’re scared of death and I’m not.” He turns to start climbing again. “If I was, I’d never get out of bed in the morning.”
He easily scrambles up the last rocks to reach the top only using one hand, while I struggle to follow.
“There is a world of difference,” I huff, “between a calculated risk and what you are doing right now. This isn’t a calculated risk. This is suicide.”
He reaches down to pull me up over the last big rock, and for a moment we’re standing close, his hand still on my arm, but then he releases me as if by force, walking forward to the cliff’s edge.
I look down. Far, far below us the water churns, charcoal gray and ominous.
He’ll have to jump ridiculously far to make it, and the odds of it happening, without him either getting hit by the board or breaking it in the process are slim to none.
He walks back to me. His face is too serious, too determined, for me to hope he’s changed his mind.
“I haven’t loved many things in this world,” he says, “but I loved you from the minute I saw you, and whether it’s today or seventy years from now, I’ll love you with my dying breath.”
And then, without hesitating or calculating, he runs toward the edge of the cliff.
I want to scream but the sound is locked in my throat. I want to run to the edge to see if he made it, but my limbs won’t work. I’ll love you with my dying breath. I didn’t even get a chance to say it back.
I’m frozen, too terrified to look. If he’s gone, if he’s badly hurt, I don’t know how I’ll even…