CHAPTER 18
CAMILA
The lavender salts weren’t working.
I had put in twice the recommended amount, lit four candles along the edge of the tub, poured myself a glass of cold Sauvignon Blanc, and lowered myself into the water. I was determined to relax, no matter what.
I was not relaxing.
The water was the right temperature. The candles smelled exactly right. The wine was good. Everything about this bath was objectively correct and none of it was doing anything useful because my brain had absolutely no interest in lavender or candlelight or Sauvignon Blanc.
My brain was outside, in my garden.
Stop it. I took a sip of wine. He’s not your problem.
He’s not your husband. He is a man who lied to you for the entire duration of your marriage, who fucked another woman while you waited for him to take you out on your anniversary dinner.
And God knows since when he was fucking her.
Maybe before you even got married? Don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth.
I took a longer sip.
The candle nearest to me guttered slightly in a draft from somewhere.
I deeply resented seeing him. In fact, I deeply regretted ever meeting him.
I had spent an entire year building something real here, something mine, and he had walked through the door of Dog-Eared at seven in the morning and everything I saw behind the closed doors of stateroom 546 on the morning of our anniversary was suddenly right at the surface again, fresh and raw and infuriating.
I did not want to feel this. I had not given him permission to make me feel this.
I gulped the rest of my wine, reached down, and pulled the stopper.
I changed into my bralette and tights, styled my hair out into loose waves, and put on my favorite lip stain.
I went downstairs.
The living room was dim, the lacy curtains filtering the last of the evening light. I stood to one side of the window and moved the curtain an inch to the left, just enough to see the front path.
Empty.
The garden gate was closed. The front step was clear. The little stone path that led to the street was quiet and unoccupied, the bougainvillea moving in the breeze.
He wasn’t there.
I let out a long, slow breath.
Good. Good. He had come to his senses and gone back to whatever hotel he’d checked into, and tomorrow I would open Dog-Eared and Mr. Kamau would come in for his flat white and Luna would sleep in her sunny spot by the fiction section and everything would be exactly as it had been before seven this morning.
I let the curtain fall.
I was thinking about what to make for dinner — something simple, pasta maybe, when I heard the soft crunch of tires on the pebbled driveway at the side of the house.
I went to the kitchen window.
The truck was enormous and ancient and spectacularly ugly — a pink pickup from some previous decade. It looked like something that had survived several natural disasters.
And Jason was climbing out of it. His frame filled the driver’s side door, and he began unloading the back with systematic focus.
Box after box. The tent. The camping stove. An assortment of equipment I couldn’t fully identify from the kitchen window but which appeared to include a significant number of things that beeped or had antennae.
He carried it all through the side gate and disappeared around the back of the house.
I ran towards the kitchen window, and opened the sliding door to the deck. I stepped out, with rage filling every atom of my body.
“Jason.” I screamed. “What the hell are you doing?”
He looked up from where he was crouching over the tent components, laying them out on the grass. Then he looked past me, up at the sky, where the clouds had been building all evening into something dark and purposeful.
“Trying to get this up before the storm hits,” he said flatly, and went back to doing whatever the hell he was doing.
“Leave. How many times do I need to say it? I don’t want you here. I don’t want to see your stupid face in my garden.”
He stopped and looked up at me properly.
I was standing on the deck in my bralette and tights with my hair down and my lipstick on, and the expression on his face when he looked at me was the one I recognized and didn’t want to.
He looked at me the way he’d always looked at me — like I was the only thing in his field of vision — and I hated that it still registered. I hated that I clocked it at all.
“I cannot leave you, Camila.” He said it simply. “I don’t want anything from you. Not forgiveness, not even acknowledgment that I’m here. You live your life exactly as you have been. I’ll just be your shadow.”
I felt like marching across my garden and punching him in his balls, but I stopped myself.
“You being my shadow and following me around like a stalker is the last thing I want.” The anger in my voice was clean and loud.
“I’d rather have your cartel girlfriend visit.
Maybe she can bring more videos of you both dirty- fucking.
I can hook her phone up to my TV, watch the whole thing in high definition. ”
He went very still. He stood up, crossed his arms, and looked like someone had actually punched him in the balls.
“She was never my girlfriend,” he said quietly. “She was never anything. I was blackmailed, Camila. But I know I should have told you the first day it started. I know there’s nothing I can say to make you believe it.”
“Then don’t say it. I don’t want your sob story. I don’t want anything from you.”
Thunder moved through the sky to the east — distant, low, a warning.
“I’m staying,” Jason said.
I looked at him for a long moment, this man in my garden in the gathering dark with his ridiculous camping equipment and his impossible determination.
“I’m going to make your life very difficult,” I said. “If you insist on being here, I will make absolutely sure it’s not comfortable for you.”
Something changed in his expression, not quite a smile, more the shadow of one. “I’ll take whatever you give me.”
He went back to the tent.
The first drop of rain hit the deck railing beside me with a sharp, definitive sound.
I went inside.