Chapter Thirty-Two
The beach was quiet and relatively empty, with most of the hotel guests out on excursions around the island. I spotted a lounge chair with an umbrella already set up and eased into it, letting the ocean breeze wash over me as I popped open my laptop.
I cracked my knuckles and dug in for some cybersleuthing. I needed to know how much of Leo had been real. The photos from our time in Greece were still on my phone, so that part at least was solid. But everything else from the past few months had vanished without a trace.
I typed his name into Google, and a handful of hits popped up.
I clicked the first one. His LinkedIn profile.
The picture was a professional headshot, but it was definitely Leo.
His résumé backed up what he’d told me when we first met: He was a consultant working at the firm McKinsey, based in Johannesburg.
Next, I opened his Instagram account. I scrolled, faster at first, then slower, until I landed on what I was looking for, the photos from this past summer. Us in Mykonos: swimming, hiking, camping. Our bright-white smiles made brighter by sunburned noses and deep tans.
Then I tapped through his most recent pictures. One was even dated yesterday, the location tagged as Marrakech, Morocco. Leo stood in the desert beside a camel, a brilliant sunset of red and orange blazing behind him. He looked so happy . . . and impossibly far away.
There was no trace of Belize. No hint of a time he’d lived in New York City with me. Just image after image of Leo roaming the globe solo, like he had no one to miss.
My heart sank as I realized this was all the proof I needed to know I hadn’t met him in Paris.
That part of the story had never been real.
I’d stuck to my guns and beliefs, and our lives kept moving on, separately.
Time had ticked by, and now he probably just thought of me as nothing more than the girl he met on a summer holiday.
The one who broke his heart by not showing up to meet him.
The ache of knowing what might have been was almost enough to swallow me whole, but what could I do about it now? Whatever fairy dust had been sprinkled on us had only given me a glimpse of a possible life. But that magic was gone.
And so was Leo.
The realization struck me hard and lethal, like a blade between my ribs.
I closed his Instagram and opened my emails. With all the madness of the past few days, I hadn’t had the chance to check in and was worried I may have missed something important from my agent or Ravi.
Most were the usual messages from fans of the show, looking for love advice or sharing a funny dating anecdote.
Two were from Ravi, asking for my outline for next week’s episode so he could start his preproduction prep, and one was from my editor at Simon & Schuster with the latest round of notes on my book, Love Is Dead, Let’s Have Brunch.
I clicked open the file she’d sent and was immediately met by a terrifying tangle of red lines and suggestions in the margins of my manuscript.
There were so many comments I couldn’t tell where my words started and the edits began.
Already overwhelmed, I immediately closed it.
Maybe I’d tackle edits later, when I wasn’t still a little fuzzy from the glass of Kai’s famous rum punch I’d polished off on the boat ride back to the resort.
Instead, I opened a blank document to begin an outline for Tuesday’s show.
My original angle was all about the absurdity of destination weddings.
A true takedown of the entire practice of asking people to give up their own vacation time (not to mention hundreds, if not thousands of dollars) to celebrate a union that probably wouldn’t even last as long as the trip.
The idea of forcing friends and family, most of whom probably didn’t even like each other, to spend days in super close proximity, participating in activities and pretending to be thrilled about it, was the kind of material that usually killed on Love Is a Four-Letter Word.
But the words weren’t coming as easily as they should have been. It was hard to summon full outrage after such an oddly cathartic boat trip with Dad. Just as I was about to set my fingers down on the keyboard, Izzy’s voice called out to me from across the sand.
“El, hey, we’ve been looking all over for you! We need a fourth for mah-jongg. Your mom and Shira want to play. You in?”
Mom and I hadn’t really spoken since our spat at karaoke, and I assumed my not-so-subtle toast had gotten her horns completely twisted. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with either her passive-aggressive silence or the risk of another blowup if one of us said the wrong thing.
“I just sat down to do some work. Maybe later?” I yelled back.
Izzy readjusted her bag over her shoulder and headed in the direction of my lounge chair, like a woman on a mission.
“C’mon, El, after the lackluster toast you gave last night, you need to try to smooth things out with her before later.
I know it sometimes feels like you’re the parent and she’s the child. ”
I looked up at her. “Sometimes?”
“She’s really been working on herself. But you’d have to let her in, just even a little bit, to see it. Sure, it doesn’t make up for every misstep. Not even close. But it shows she’s trying, and sometimes, trying is the first step toward something better.”
Izzy always had a way of cutting through my bullshit with surgical precision.
When I was ten and had come home from a particularly rough day at school where some girl had called my shoes “tragic,” Izzy was the one who took me to get ice cream and told me how she’d once worn neon leg warmers to a first date in 1986 and still managed to get a second one.
When I got my period at a sleepover and cried in the bathroom for an hour when I got home, she was the one who slipped me a chocolate bar under the door and told me it was just the beginning of becoming a woman and a lifelong grudge against white shorts.
She wasn’t just my mom’s best friend. She’d been there. Really there. Like a second mother, sometimes even like a first. So yeah, maybe she had every right to call me out when I acted like a brat. Especially when it came to Mom. Especially now.
I glanced at the blank screen of my laptop, the cursor the only thing on the white page, taunting me as it blinked.
Closing my computer, I shoved it in my tote and stood up with a dramatic grunt of surrender, sand clinging to the backs of my calves as I hurried to catch up with Izzy across the patio.
“Ugh, fine,” I hollered. “But if bamboo tiles start flying at my head, I’m blaming you.”
Izzy barked out a chuckle and playfully rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m sure you’d deserve it.”
Izzy shuffled the tiles on the table, the click of the plastic squares punctuating the silence.
When she finished, we racked them into four neat walls, and Shira dealt us each our thirteen to begin the Charleston, a series of tile exchanges meant to improve your position in the game.
Sometimes that’s exactly what happened and things began to shift in your favor, but other times, especially when you couldn’t see the hand at the start, you’d end up worse off than before.
Part luck, part skill, part piecing together a puzzle with missing edges, that’s what made the game of mah-jongg so challenging. Ultimately, you had to accept the tiles you were given and somehow try to make the best of it.
We sat at a weathered teak table under a generous straw umbrella, just a few steps from the beach, where the tide lazily lapped against the sand and retreated in soft, rhythmic sighs.
Izzy barefoot, one leg tucked under her as she studied her mah-jongg card.
Shira, humming to herself, adjusted her sunglasses as she inspected her hand, the picture of vacation ease.
And then there was my mother.
She carefully aligned her rack with her perfectly manicured fingers stiff with precision. She didn’t speak right away, but I could feel the uneasiness between us still lingering in the air.
“You remember the rules?” she asked without looking at me, her tone light but edged.
Reaching for my tiles, I gave her a half-hearted smile. “I’m good.”
A beat passed, taut and crackling with static energy.
“I’m East, I’ll start,” Izzy said brightly, breaking the tension with the practiced calm of someone who’d refereed one too many of our squabbles. She reached over to the wall, picked up a tile, and then quickly tossed it into the center of the table face up. “Three Dot.”
“Call,” I said, picking up Izzy’s discarded tile.
“You do know if you call for it, then you have to show the meld. And there’s no going back once you show your hand,” Mom said, like I should’ve known better than to commit so early into the game.
I mean, if anyone should know that . . .
I set my pieces face up on the rack. “I am fully aware, thank you.”
It was Mom’s turn next. She reached for a tile, studied it like it held all the answers to the universe, then after what felt like forever, finally tossed it away.
If only she put that much thought into all her life decisions . . .
The game dragged on like that for a while, Mom and me making passive-aggressive digs at one another all while Izzy and Shira did their best to keep things light and easygoing.
“Uh, guys? I think I’m ready to call mah-jongg,” Mom said after picking up the tile she’d apparently been waiting for all game.
“Let’s see, Sonja,” Shira said, sliding closer to her chair.
Mom spread her tiles out and pointed to the line on the card she’d completed.
Izzy leaned over to inspect the hand more closely. “Look at that, you nailed it. What does everyone think? Shall we play another round?”
“You know what?” I said slowly, evenly. “I think I’m getting a bit warm. Maybe I’ll go for a dip in the pool.”
Mom tilted her head, tight-lipped. “Well, that tracks.”
I looked up sharply. “Excuse me?”
Shira stiffened. Izzy froze, mid-reach.