Chapter 35
Now
After the kayaking excursion, we head to a traditional “cowboy luau,” where we listen to ukulele music and eat our body weight in kālua pork, huli-huli chicken, fresh tuna poke, and Spam musubi under the shade of hundred-year-old palm trees.
I try to focus on the performers on the stage, on the gasps of glee and delight from my niece and nephews as the dancers swing fire around their heads and move their hips in inconceivable ways, but my thoughts stay stuck on Liam.
Or more precisely his hand on my thigh under the table.
The heat of his skin burns through the smooth material of my dress, and for a brief moment it’s easy to imagine there was no fight.
No breakup. No earth-shattering heartache.
That this is how it’s always been and will always be with us.
It’s not, I tell myself. But at least through dessert, I’ll allow myself to pretend.
I’m picking at my purple ube pie when Grammy turns to me. “So, Roslyn, will you and Liam find out the gender? Or are you planning to be surprised?”
I nearly choke on my pie. “Grammy, I’m not even pregnant. We haven’t talked about it.”
“You should,” she says, her eyes catching the glow of a nearby tiki torch. “Babies require a lot of planning. You’ll need to start thinking about the nursery. And a registry.”
“We have lots of time to think about that,” I tell her.
“And once you’re no longer writing, you’ll have even more time to plan.”
Now I really do choke. “What?” I ask.
“You’ll have to pick out a color for the nursery and—”
“No, not the nursery,” I interrupt. “What you said about my writing. I’m not giving that up. It’s really important to me.”
Her brows draw together with confusion. “But, dear, you can’t do both. Babies are a lot of work. Besides, it’s not like you need the extra income,” she adds, glancing at Liam.
“Your grandmother is right,” Gramps says, turning in his seat to face me. “It’ll be best to put the writing on hold for a while.”
Indignation burns in my chest at their presumptuousness. Would they be saying this if I were a doctor? Suggesting I quit my practice to stay home with a baby? But it’s not worth the upset, so I go back to my pie, expecting that to be the end of it until I feel Liam’s grip on my thigh tighten.
“Roslyn’s writing career is very important, to both of us,” Liam says. “And when the time comes, we’ll figure out a way for Roslyn to do whatever she wants.” He pauses, his eyes finding mine before he says, “Whether she decides to continue working or not, I support her no matter what.”
“Yes, but—” Gramps starts to say, but Liam cuts him off.
“Thank you for your input, Gramps,” he says tightly. “But this is a decision Roslyn and I will be making on our own.”
A hush falls over the table. Eyes bulge.
Brows raise. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought a ghost had just floated by.
I wait for Gramps to give Liam one of his signature disappointed grimaces, the way he usually does when someone dares to disagree with him.
Instead, he just looks surprised. And honestly, same.
After a beat of awkward silence, Liam turns to me. “Want to go for a walk?” he whispers.
My gaze drifts upward, where the clouds have started to congeal, forming one long stretch of darkness on the horizon. It’s probably going to rain soon. But I don’t want to be at this table anymore, and judging by the look on his face, neither does Liam, so I stand up and take his hand.
Together, we excuse ourselves, then wander down a narrow sandy path to the public beach. It’s mostly deserted save for a few lone photographers trying to capture what’s left of the sunset, now obscured by the clouds shifting across the horizon, where a storm seems to be gathering.
When we reach the sand, we both bend down to remove our shoes.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “That was…” I struggle for the words. Amazing? Overdue? Hot? “I appreciate it,” I say instead.
His hand flexes by his side as though unsure what to do with it. “I told you I was going to do better.”
I study the hard lines of his face, trying to determine what he means.
If it’s another apology. Or a promise.
Or maybe this is a goodbye of sorts. One final calm before the storm—figuratively and literally.
I look from the whitecaps rushing the shoreline to the long stretch of sand disappearing into a jagged formation of black volcanic rocks in the distance.
If it is goodbye, this isn’t a bad place to do it.
“Thank you,” I say after a beat.
He turns to me, his eyes pinning mine. “You already said that.”
“I know…I just…” I stop, digging my toes into the sand. “I mean for earlier and yesterday. For talking with me about my mom, for being so present, for…” But my voice cracks and I look away. It feels like we’ve come to a kind of bridge. One I’m not sure how to cross.
I didn’t want to have this conversation. I didn’t want to ask why he wasn’t there for me after my mom died. Why my grief was too much. Why I was too much. I told myself it was better to keep things simple, easy, so that when the vacation ends, it wouldn’t be so painful to let go.
But now, after the last few days, after everything we’ve said and still haven’t said, I know that’s not true. Nothing about this is simple, and I realize I need to know. Maybe it will bring me closure, or maybe it won’t, but I need to hear it. He at least owes me that.
“Liam,” I say, trying to manage the shake in my voice, “I know we agreed that we would only do this until the ship docks, so maybe it doesn’t matter…
” He steps toward me, his gaze weighing me down, the scent of sweet cologne heavy in the air, and I have to force the next words out.
“Why couldn’t you talk to me about the hard stuff when we were together?
Why couldn’t you talk with me about my mom until this week? ”
I watch as the question reverberates across his face.
“I—” He scrapes a hand through his windswept hair. “I didn’t know how.”
“It felt like you never even tried. Why not?”
His eyes drop to the sand then back to me. “It might be too late to tell you this…”
Maybe it is too late. Or maybe I’m just terrified to hear why he was never open with me, why he couldn’t sit with me in my pain. Why I hadn’t been enough to make him stay, to fight for us. But I need to know, even if it will hurt.
“It’s not,” I say over the crash of the surf in the distance. “It’s not too late.”
His gaze roams past me, out to sea. When he finally speaks, his voice comes out rough, like the words are stripped from somewhere deep inside.
“My family used to go to Cornwall in the summers. We’d stay at this little cottage by the seaside where we’d watch the surf for hours.”
He gestures to the long stretch of sand separating us from the endless line of ocean.
“I remember I used to love going there. My father would read on the deck, and my mum made this amazing Sunday roast with all the fixings. It was the only place where my parents seemed genuinely happy. Like maybe they weren’t just pretending.
” His voice breaks and he looks away. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I’ve been in fucking therapy for months, and this is still really hard for me to talk about. ”
The raw emotion in his voice hits me with a force that nearly knocks me over, and I realize I’m scared.
Not just to finally hear the truth, but because I know that any piece of himself he offers won’t be something I’ll be able to keep.
That when the vacation ends, so will this thing between us.
But then I think about how he stood up for me.
How he’s gone to therapy and opened up about his mom.
How he’s been brave with me. And I think maybe I can be brave too.
So I take his hand, letting him know I’m here and I’m listening.
“Don’t apologize,” I tell him. “I’m here, okay?”
He swallows twice.
“On the outside, my family looked perfect. Perfect house. Perfect kids. Perfect marriage. But behind closed doors, my father was controlling and cruel. Problems weren’t dealt with in the open—instead, everything was brushed aside, ignored, like it had never happened.
I learned to hide my emotions, to pack them away.
If my father couldn’t see how I felt, then he couldn’t use it against me the way he did my mum. ”
His expression darkens, and it’s like watching a solar eclipse pass over his face, features turning sharp and shadowy.
“I was eight years old the first time I saw my father with another woman. He knew I’d seen him, so he pulled me aside and said it was going to be our secret. The first of many.
“One night when I was about fifteen, I heard my parents fighting through the walls. I don’t know what it was about, but the next day my dad left, and I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of relief.
Like, finally, he was gone, and we would be okay.
But my mum wasn’t okay. She stopped eating, stopped taking care of herself.
It felt like a part of her was just gone, and I didn’t know what to do.
I tried to be there for her, to show her we were going to be okay without him.
That we didn’t need my dad. But everything I did only pushed her further away.
” He flinches like the memory still torments him. “I felt helpless.”
I hear the ache in his voice, the pain of childhood wounds that are still raw and bloody, and I want to wrap my arms around him, bury my face in his chest. I want to take his pain and pour it into the cracks of my own skin, anything to make him hurt a little less.
“Eventually, my father came back and Mum pretended like it never happened, and I was expected to do the same,” he says. “So I did. Mostly because I was afraid that things would get bad again.