Chapter 32 - Zalea | Varazze
THIRTY-TWO
ZALEA | VARAZZE
Gabriel’s rental car crawls into the hotel parking lot, and my stomach flips the way it always does when he’s near.
Zale is the first one out of the car, stretching his arms over his head with a huge grin, while Gabriel steps out slower.
One look at him and I can tell something changed between our phone call and the drive here.
I jog toward them, my hair whipping behind me. “You made it,” I say.
Zale points at Gabriel. “We probably could have got here sooner but he decided to drive like an old man today.”
“I had no choice. You screamed as soon as we merged lanes,” Gabriel counters smoothly.
“I did not scream.”
“My eardrums say otherwise.”
I laugh at their bickering, noticing it’s not as hostile as it was just this morning. We check Zale into his own room at the hotel, and after he tosses his bag inside, he and Gabriel change into their swim trunks, and we head back toward the beach.
“The surf here looks insane,” I tell them as we walk down the stone steps toward the sand.
The ocean endlessly stretches out in front of us and Zale stops dead in his tracks as he stares at it.
“Oh, I’m definitely getting into that.”
Gabriel crosses his arms. “You didn’t bring a board.”
“Easy fix.” Zale grins, heading straight for a group of surfers gathered near the shoreline.
“Oh no,” I murmur.
We stand back and watch as Zale approaches them, chest puffed out confidently as he says something in English. They stare at him blankly so he tries again, slower and louder this time. A girl with dark curls responds in Italian and Zale freezes.
I’m positive he’ll turn around and come back to us feeling defeated, but instead he smiles wider and begins to gesture to the waves before pointing to himself, miming paddling and pretending to wipe out, throwing his arms up and falling backward into the sand as they burst out laughing.
The curly-haired girl nudges one of her friends and says something in Italian as she grins at him. Leave it to my brother to make a group of strangers laugh. He was always the class clown.
Gabriel shakes his head beside me, but I catch the twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“I think he’s flirting,” he whispers.
“He can’t be,” I argue. “He doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“Well whatever he’s doing looks like it’s working.”
After a few more minutes of wild gestures, and the group attempting to speak broken English, one of the guys calls out to someone further up the beach and a spare board gets lifted into the air.
Zale turns back toward us, the biggest grin spreading across his face.
He jogs over carrying the board like he just secured a gold medal.
“Boom,” he says proudly. “We’re in.”
“How the hell did you manage that?” I demand.
“I guess Italians just can’t resist my charm.”
Behind him, the curly-haired girl waves and holds up two more boards for me and Gabriel.
“Unbelievable,” Gabriel mumbles.
Within minutes, we’re each holding borrowed boards and heading toward the water with the group Zale befriended cheering us on.
I paddle hard, feeling the swell lift me as I pop up on my board, the wave stealing the breath from my lungs. The board cuts cleanly down the face of the wave, spray misting against my skin, and for a few perfect seconds the world goes silent and it’s just me and the ocean.
This is the feeling I missed—surfing without competition, feeling like one with the ocean.
I’ve been surfing for training and competitions, but I can’t remember the last time I surfed just for me.
When I kick out and dive beneath the next set, laughter bubbles up from my chest. I surface in time to see Zale wipe out, arms flailing.
Gabriel catches the next wave and I’m reminded just how powerful he looks on a board. He rides it cleanly all the way through, and even from the water I can see the passion in his expression. I hope he still feels it too, that feeling of pure ecstasy when he surfs.
After nearly an hour of surfing, we drag ourselves back to shore, breathless and completely soaked.
The group gathers around us, excited as they fire off sentences none of us understand.
Gabriel and I collapse onto the sand, boards beside us, while my brother flirts his way through another broken conversation with the curly-haired girl.
“Why am I so surprised that he’s somehow making friends out here,” I laugh, watching him with the group.
“I don’t know, but he’s exhausting,” Gabriel mutters.
Zale turns, as if he knows we’re talking about him, and runs up to us excitedly.
“Okay,” he announces. “I’m pretty sure they just invited us to a bonfire later tonight and I think I accidentally agreed to something involving karaoke.”
I blink. “The bonfire I can say yes to, but you’re on your own when it comes to the karaoke.”
“That is fine with me,” he grins before running back to the group.
Gabriel huffs out a laugh beside me. “Guess we should head back to the hotel and change so we can get something to eat before this bonfire.”
I nod, staring up at the sky. “Good idea.”
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” I say after we’ve finished eating. “When you first got out of the car earlier, you looked a bit off. Did something happen on the drive?”
Gabriel studies me from across the table, as if deciding how much he wants to share. I lift my wine glass and take a sip, waiting.
“I…” He swallows. “I asked your brother a few questions about…Gabriella.”
The sound of her name still feels like a knife twisting in my chest, except I’m better at hiding the pain now, or maybe I’ve just grown used to the ache over the years. I clear my throat as I put my glass back down on the table.
“What did you ask?”
“Besides her name…” He drags a hand over his jaw. “I asked what she was like. Zale wouldn’t answer much more after that.”
I nod slowly. “Losing her was hard on him too. He was really excited to be an uncle.”
He lets out a shaky breath. “I didn’t know.”
“I know.”
When he looks up, grief is written all over his face. It makes my chest ache in a completely different way now.
“When he said her name…I threw up.”
A small, surprised laugh slips out of me before I can stop it, and the corner of his mouth almost lifts.
“Yeah. Not my finest moment.”
Silence settles between us for a brief moment as he closes his eyes. “I didn’t deserve that,” he whispers.
“Deserve what?”
“For her to be named after me. For her to have anything of mine.”
“Stop,” I say immediately. “Don’t do that. Don’t twist this into you being some villain.”
“Zalea—”
“No.” I shake my head. “You didn’t know, Gabriel. You didn’t know that I didn’t go through with the abortion.”
He opens his mouth to argue but I don’t give him a chance to speak.
“If I had told you I was keeping her, and you still chose the tour…if you had known and decided to still leave, to not come home…” my throat tightens. “That would have been a different story.”
The words hang between us as he goes completely still.
“But I didn’t tell you,” I say more quietly. “You thought I had the abortion, and you thought it was over. I was angry and scared and hurt, and I made that decision without you. So don't sit there and tell me you didn’t deserve to have your daughter named after you.”
He doesn’t interrupt me this time, so I keep going.
“I named her Gabriella because I loved you,” I say. “Because she was made out of love. Messy, immature, imperfect love—but love all the same.”
Gabriel swallows and his eyes shine as he listens.
“I didn’t name her that to punish you,” I continue, softer now. “I named her that because when I looked at her, she felt like both of us. And I wanted her to carry a piece of you, whether you were there or not.”
His fingers tremble around the stem of his glass before he sets it down and hides his hands in his lap.
“I would have come home,” he says, roughly. “I swear to you, Zalea. If I had known you were keeping her, I would’ve gotten on the first plane.”
“I know you would have.”
And that's the complicated part, because in a way I’m just as much to blame.
“You’re not undeserving,” I say firmly. “You were young, and scared, and so was I. We both made mistakes.”
He shakes his head slightly. “You carried her.”
“And you would have carried her with me,” I counter. “If I had let you.”
He goes quiet, and I see something shift inside him. An understanding that he isn’t completely to blame.
“I don’t want you hating yourself every time her name comes up,” I tell him. “She was ours, whether you were physically there or not.”
His eyes close briefly again as his lip trembles. “I don’t know how to forgive myself,” he admits.
“You can start by not punishing yourself for something you didn’t even know about,” I say gently.
I reach across the table, holding out my hand for him and he hesitates only a second before threading his fingers through mine.
“I’ll try,” he whispers.
By the time we make it back to the beach, the sky has turned indigo and the bonfire is already roaring, flames licking high into the warm night sky.
“There you are,” Zale shouts, his arm around the curly-haired girl—who’s name I learned is Alessia— as he beams at us.
The group shifts to make space for us and someone hands me a plastic cup that smells like cheap prosecco and citrus before they jump back to their conversations. Gabriel reaches over and takes it from me.
“No drinking alcohol,” he says. “My research says it’s horrible for hormone balancing.”
I snort. “So what are you going to do with all those bottles of wine you ordered when we were in Tuscany? They’re supposed to be delivered on Monday.”
“Oh yeah,” he says. “I forgot about those.”
I raise a brow. “Do you not monitor your bank account? How do you forget about a purchase that big?”
He shrugs. “It’s not that big in comparison to my regular purchases.”
“Right,” I mutter. “One of these days, someone is going to steal your card and spend all your money,”