Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
ISABELLA
I manage to keep away from Anthony for the remainder of the day, and by the next morning, I pace my room, needing to get out. Without my laptop, I don't know how Ivy is getting on, nor can I try to contact Maeve to make sure everything is as we plan without letting the Morettis know.
It's obvious they're watching my accounts. Not that I can email even if I want to, since Anthony hurled my laptop over the balcony yesterday morning.
I walk through the gardens, deciding that this morning I will go for a swim.
I need to clear my head, and nothing does that better than the cool Pacific Ocean.
The garden is already warm, the air thick with the scent of frangipani and cut grass, and the sound of the water carries up from the beach like a promise of a moment of peace.
I throw my towel on the sand and look out onto the water.
Anthony is nowhere to be found, and I'm glad for it.
I need to be alone with my thoughts and decide what to do.
I kick off my flip-flops and pull off my shorts and t-shirt, leaving the two-piece bathing suit I found in one of the drawers.
I don't know whose it is, and I don't want to.
Probably one of the Moretti floozies they've brought here over the years.
The thought leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
I wade into the water before diving under to wet myself completely.
I come up gasping at the cool burst against my skin.
It's chilly and refreshing, and for just a moment, with the sun on my face and the ocean moving around me, the knot in my chest loosens.
I push off from the sand and float on my back for several minutes, watching the sky above, enjoying the feel of the waves rolling gently beneath me.
Ivy's face moves through my mind. Her laugh.
The way she reaches for me when she's tired.
I close my eyes and let the water hold me.
It's only when I go to swim back to shore that I realize I’m farther out than I want to be.
Much farther.
The beach looks smaller than it should. The house on the rise above it is smaller still. I tread water and turn a full circle, and the first cold finger of unease moves through me. Pushing away the concern that makes my stomach clench, I dive under and reach for the bottom.
There is no bottom.
I come back up faster than I went down.
The sound of breaking waves makes me turn, and I get caught in a rolling wave before I can react, the water folding over me and driving me under, tumbling me sideways until I don't know which way is up.
I fight toward the light and surface, coughing, salt burning the back of my throat.
Am I out at the reef? Surely not. Surely I haven't drifted that far.
But the waves here are breaking differently. Harder. Angrier. And when I look toward the shore, the distance between us is wrong, all wrong.
I swim hard and surface again, attempting to use the momentum of a breaking wave to push me toward the beach.
It doesn't work. The water rolls me, pulls at my legs, and I come up gasping a second time, arms already beginning to burn.
The panic rises now, quick and overwhelming, the kind that bypasses reason entirely.
I think of Ivy. The thought arrives like a blade, sharp, precise, unbearable.
If something happens to me out here, who tells her? Who holds her?
No.
I force the thought down. I force all of it down because if I let the fear take hold out here, I’m finished.
I try to think straight, treading water, my breath coming in short, hard pulls that I can't quite control.
A rip. That's the only explanation for how far and how fast I've traveled.
I stop fighting toward the shore and begin to swim diagonally across the current instead, the way you're supposed to, the way I know to do.
Except knowing and doing are entirely different things when the ocean has you and the shore keeps getting no closer, and your arms begin to feel like they belong to someone else.
I go under again.
This time it takes longer to find the surface.
When I do, I’m already turning, already searching the beach with salt-stung eyes, already doing the thing I swear I will not do.
I look for him.
And Anthony is already in the water.
He's moving fast, impossibly fast, flat on the surfboard and driving through the water with long, powerful strokes, cutting through the waves with a precision that tells me he's done this before.
I lose him for a moment behind a wave, and my heart seizes, and then he's there, closer, the board slicing through the water toward me.
"Grab it." His voice cuts across the noise of the ocean. "Isabella. Grab the board. Now."
I don't argue. I reach for it, and Anthony pulls me up before him, lying over me.
The pull of the rip fights us the whole way in.
I feel it dragging at the board even as I hold on, feel Anthony working against it from behind, his weight and strength driving the board diagonally across the current, the way I had been trying to do alone.
A wave breaks over us, and I lose my grip for a single terrifying second before his hand closes around my wrist and he hauls me up again.
"I've got you." His voice is right behind me. Low and certain. "Don't let go."
I don't let go.
The sand meets my knees, and then I'm on all fours in the shallows, coughing, the ocean still dragging at me as though reluctant to give me back. My arms are shaking. My whole body is shaking. I press my palms into the wet sand and breathe and cough, and breathe again.
Anthony drops the board and crouches beside me. His face, when I look up at it, is not the face he normally wears around me. The control is gone. There is something raw underneath it that he hasn't had time to put away yet.
"What the hell were you thinking?" His voice is rough. "You were in a rip, Isabella. You were out past the reef —"
"I know." I push myself upright on unsteady legs.
"You could have —"
"I know." I step back from him. My hands are still trembling, and I press them against my thighs so he won't see it.
"You don't swim out alone on a beach you don't know. You don't —"
"Don't." The word comes out harder than I intend. I step back again, and he reaches out to steady me, and I push his hand away. "Don't touch me."
He stills.
"Leave me alone, Anthony."
"Isabella —"
"I said leave me alone." My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate it, hate that he can hear it, hate that fear is still sitting so close to the surface that it's leaking out of me in ways I can't control.
I think of Ivy. I think of how close, how impossibly, carelessly close, I had just come.
What if he hadn't been on the beach? What if he hadn't seen?
The thought opens something up inside my chest that I absolutely cannot afford to consider right now. Not here. Not in front of him.
"What is wrong with you?" He says it plainly, not cruelly. Genuinely asking. And somehow that’s worse.
I turn on him. "What's wrong with me?"
"You're shaking. You're —"
"You don't get to touch me." The words come out quiet and precise. "You don't get to worry about me. Not anymore." A beat. And then the rest of it, the thing I’ve been carrying for five years, the thing I had not intended to say, not today, not ever, not to him. "Not after what you did."
The silence that follows is absolute.
Anthony's face changes. The roughness, the urgency, all of it gives way to something I haven't seen in him before. Something uncertain. He opens his mouth and closes it again. His eyes move over my face like he's looking for a translation.
I don't give him one.
I turn and walk back up the beach, my legs still unsteady beneath me, the sand warm under my bare feet, and I don’t look back.
He doesn't call after me. Doesn't follow. He just stands there on the beach, and I leave him there. Behind me.
Where he belongs.