Chapter 45
The First Time I Saw Him
When I step on board, there is a creak, the teak deck sliding beneath my feet.
I slip off my shoes, feel the wood against my toes.
It doesn’t matter that it’s late in the evening—that the boat is mostly dark.
I know the shape of this entire boat by heart.
I know where I’m going. My first thought is Bailey.
I’m going straight to her. Let me see her.
Let me have eyes on her face and her skin and her arms to know she is fine. To let her know that I am.
I head down to the three small cabins, and find her sleeping in the farthest one.
I find her sleeping on the bed, cuddled into the fetal position. There’s a keyboard on the floor, an open notebook beside it, papers strewn about. Her clothes and her towel are crowded in a messy bunch, surrounding her work.
I kneel down on the floor, so we are face-to-face. And I touch the side of her face, my sweet girl. A flicker of recognition crossing her face, a half-smile.
“You’re home,” she says.
“I’m home,” I say.
I hold my hand against her cheek, brushing my forehead against her forehead, her smile growing a little bigger. But really, she is still more asleep than awake. Her eyes not even opening completely.
Tomorrow, after she’s had some rest (after we both have), I’ll wake her to watch the sunrise with me. We’ll take two hot mugs of coffee out to the top deck and watch a sunrise that, she will tell me, may just rival our favorite sunrise in Santa Monica.
And we’ll have to get into all of it—all the rest of it. Her grandfather and the cost of this. Though I won’t call it a cost. I’ll call it a blessing. Because that, at this point, is who Nicholas gets to be.
But for now, I just watch her. My sleeping girl. Her face in the soft light, that flicker of a smile, my hand on her face, holding her there as she falls into a deeper sleep. A deeper rest than she’s had in a long time.
I don’t know how long I sit like that—a moment, or several. I’m there long enough to allow myself to believe it. Bailey gets to be okay. For good now.
Then I head back up the stairs, back up to the teak deck.
I head to the edge of the deck—the edge closest to the sea. The tears filling my eyes as I let myself take it in.
The sea stretched out wide before me, the Mediterranean glowing.
Quite literally, glowing: The water and the light and the high moon turning a shade of purple that the world has never shown me before.
A first sign (as if I need a sign) that I’m exactly where I need to be.
Which is when I feel him come up behind me.
Owen, a few feet behind me.
My hand is on the boat’s railing. My eyes still on the water.
In a moment, he will speak. Soft, but strong.
He’ll make a joke about how he’s hoping it’s true that I can operate this boat because we have a long way to go, the three of us.
And Bailey is already giving out orders.
Of course she is. She has all sorts of ideas for this overdue time together.
She wants to go to the Amalfi Coast, to a small town that her grandfather told her about called Sant’Agata sui Due Golfi—where you can eat lemons whole and walk in the hills and forget it for a while. The cost of what it took to bring us there. She’s very focused on those lemons, Owen will joke.
And it will make me laugh. It will make me laugh in a way that will also make me sad—just at the moment when I’m supposed to be happy. Isn’t that how it goes? All of it bubbling up. Call it anger. Or hope. Or longing. Isn’t it really a longing that we name in other ways?
A longing for everything we’ll have to walk through together to get back to the place we left each other, as if there is getting back to it. Everything we’ll have to walk through to get somewhere better.
What will somewhere better look like? It will become clearer once we’re back in California, stepping gingerly together back into real life.
A more permanent life. A safe life. There is a large piece of land with a vineyard and farmhouse and a beautiful old barn, not too far from downtown Los Alamos—not too far from Bailey in Venice.
Paperwork is waiting to be signed. Owen has become quite a winemaker, and he would love to continue.
He’d love to continue in the vein he’s been taught.
Small batch wines. Biodynamic. Fruit forward.
He’d love to do something with those five acres of vineyard.
And, more than anything, he’d love to transform it together—the beautiful old barn that will be my dream workshop.
If I want that too. Only, of course, if I want that too.
Or I can be mad. I can be mad at him forever, now that I have the luxury to be mad. I can be mad forever, or I can allow myself to feel it, what I’m naturally starting to feel, the letting go coming in hot and quick.
What else is there to do? We let it go. If we are lucky enough, we get to do that. We get to believe that we deserve it.
But first there is this.
The moment you’ve imagined.
The moment you haven’t let yourself imagine.
This purple light and our kid sleeping safely and the two of us. Always now, until we have to let go, the two of us.
So I do it. The only thing I want to do. I turn toward him.
“Hannah,” he says.