Chapter 1
Pulling my red tennis bag off the luggage carousel, I felt a twinge in my neck.
I could still feel the last round of training in my bones.
That, or I was paying the price for having forgotten my travel pillow at home and spending the San Francisco-to-Honolulu flight asleep with my head on my arm.
I tossed the bag over my shoulder, reached for my roller bag, and made my way out of the baggage claim.
Kay and I had agreed that she’d pick me up.
I glanced through the crowd, but my godmother was nowhere to be seen.
Weird. At almost six foot two, Kay Diamond was pretty hard to miss.
On top of it, she was Miss Punctuality. After scanning arrivals one more time, I dropped my bag and dug my smartphone out of my backpack.
No new messages, no missed calls. Even weirder.
I was just about to put it back when I remembered that I hadn’t activated my eSIM and didn’t have any mobile data.
I quickly logged on to the airport’s Wi-Fi.
Within seconds, messages began trickling in.
My parents wishing me a pleasant flight in our WhatsApp group.
My trainer, Milan, sending me a picture of his twins who’d just been born a couple of days ago.
My family’s PR guru, Helena, forwarding me an interview request from Stern magazine. And a message from Kay:
Sorry, Lou! Not going to make it to the airport on time. Gabe’s picking you up. Keep your eyes peeled for a big dude. ??
Furrowing my brow, I read the message again. Screwing up the times just wasn’t Kay. And who was this Gabe guy? One of her employees? I’d never heard of him.
“Louisa?”
I looked up from my phone and into the face of a very tall Native Hawaiian man. He had to be around Kay’s age, late forties, early fifties. He reminded me of Jason Momoa, and he was wearing a yellow T-shirt with some washed-out logo or other, shorts, and flip-flops.
“Hi, I’m Gabe.” With the cheerful smile of a morning person, he raised his hand. “Kay asked me to pick you up.”
“Is she okay?” I asked, a note of unease in my voice.
“Great. Something simply came up.” He smiled comfortably and reached for my bag, revealing a large, geometric forearm tattoo. “By the time we reach Pūpūkea, she’ll be back.”
Pūpūkea. My home for the next six weeks. Sending me to Kay’s tennis school to prepare for my comeback rather than having me hang around Munich had been my mother’s idea.
“You need a change of scenery,” she’d said, seeing me come home from training frustrated yet another time.
I just couldn’t find my form. My injury hadn’t just hurt me physically.
My ego had taken a hit too. I still struggled with the fact that I’d missed my chance of becoming No.
1. Of finally stepping into my mother’s shoes.
Sabine Herzog. The Duchess, as the international sports press used to call her.
At the height of her fame, she was at the top of the women’s world rankings for a total of 175 weeks.
“I can’t afford to take a vacation, Mom. The US Open is in two months, and I’m playing at the level of a donkey with a racket in its hand.”
“That’s not true at all,” she’d replied, half grinning, half scolding me. “And I wasn’t thinking about vacation at all. At least, not in the traditional sense.”
And now, two weeks later, I was trailing behind some guy whistling happily to himself through the arrivals hall of Honolulu International Airport, past tourists being greeted with Aloha and colorful leis.
Exiting the doors, I was hit by a wave of warm, humid air, but a light ocean breeze made it more tolerable.
The airport was on the water, which on a little island like Oahu was probably true of just about everything.
Gabe was driving a Jeep Wrangler that, beneath a fine layer of dust, salt crystals, and evidence of the odd gull here and there, was actually red.
I caught a quick glimpse of a license plate emblazoned with ALOHA STATE before Gabe opened the back and put my things inside.
As he cleared off the passenger seat, I saw a wooden charm carved into a shell dangling from the rearview mirror on a tattered leather strap.
A hand with the thumb and pinky stretched out.
“Sorry,” he mumbled while tossing an empty plastic bottle onto the back seat. “I hadn’t been expecting any passengers.”
Kay really must have told him at the last minute, which led me back to wondering about what had been so important.
“No problem.” I got in and buckled up. The song on the radio faded and the DJ wished everyone a good start to the week.
Right, though Monday was just getting started here in Hawaii, it was already coming to an end back in Germany.
Eleven hours’ time difference, I reminded myself and thought of my mother, who was probably sitting in her pajamas on our couch, a glass of wine in hand, watching Virgin River for the umpteenth time.
Following the end of her career, she had, for the most part, left the public eye.
As opposed to my father, who was busy traveling the world for ESPN, commenting on the biggest matches.
He’d still be in Wimbledon until the beginning of next week.
If I hadn’t hurt myself, I’d have been on the grass there myself, playing for one of the world’s most sought-after tennis trophies.
I felt a pang in my chest mixed with a dash of FOMO and was happy when Gabe began to chat.
“How was the flight?”
“Fine. I slept most of the way.”
As if on cue, once again I felt the twinge in my neck. I slowly rolled my head and heard a crack.
“You flew through San Francisco, right?” he asked, sliding a pair of Ray-Ban Clubmasters over his eyes.
For a second, I was taken aback by how informed he was.
“Kay told me,” he explained as we eased out of the parking garage.
“Do you work for her?”
“Oh…no.” He laughed as if that was the most far-fetched thing in the world. “We’re friends. But you and I are going to be seeing each other pretty often over the next little while. She’s asked me to take over your physio.”
“You’re a physiotherapist?” My surprise was impossible to hide. Maybe because Gabe in his flip-flops looked more like a guy who’d be working a beach chair than a treatment table.
He nodded. “I’ve got a studio in Haleiwa.” He seemed to catch that that didn’t mean much to me. “It’s about ten minutes away from Pūpūkea. Great waves there, in case you surf.”
I shook my head. “You?” I asked, taking the risk of making myself seem ridiculous. Locals here were probably born with a surfboard in their hands.
“Not anymore, no,” he mumbled, and for a fraction of a second it was as if the ease had left his voice. Maybe I was imagining things, for he immediately asked if I was hungry.
“We could stop on the way and get you some breakfast.”
“A coffee would be great.”
“You got it,” he said, another one of those relaxed smiles breaking across his face.
For the next fifteen minutes we didn’t talk much.
The traffic around the airport was heavy, and Gabe had to concentrate.
Bit by bit, the skyline of Honolulu disappeared in the rearview mirror, and the landscape opened up like a storybook.
Suddenly I saw a line of gigantic mountains of such a dense green—it was like they’d been covered with green velvet—towering into the sky.
Waterfalls cascaded down the rock faces in swirling threads, and lush rainforest stretched out on either side of the road, steaming in the morning light.
Fascinated, I pushed my nose to the window.
“First time on Oahu?”
I nodded, and he smiled knowingly.
“Most beautiful place on earth.”
After driving inland for a while, Gabe stopped on the side of the road at a rainbow-colored food truck advertising coffee and doughnuts. He exchanged a few words with the owner and returned with two paper cups and a paper bag. The scent of chocolate filled the Jeep.
“Dig in!” He handed me the bag.
“Thanks, but coffee is fine for the moment,” I replied, smiling politely.
My stomach wouldn’t have had anything against a bit of fat and sugar, but my nutrition plan did not provide for cheating on my first day.
And so I contented myself with a gulp of coffee.
It was hot and strong, just how I liked it.
“How’re your folks?” Gabe asked as we drove on. “I met them briefly the last time they were here,” he added, noting the surprised look on my face. “My wife, Julie, was a huge fan of your mom. She even had a pair of her shoes. The ones with the crown.”
The trademark of the Adidas Duchess, a white tennis shoe with three gold stripes and a glittering crown that Adidas, taking their cue from my mom’s nickname, had brought onto the market following her second Wimbledon win.
It took me a second to realize he’d used the past tense and that there had been a sad undertone to his voice. Something in my stomach tightened.
“I’m sorry about your wife,” I said quietly.
“Oh, Julie isn’t… She’s just…gone.”
The last words were barely audible, but the pain that had caused them was all too loud.
I tried to remember how long it had been since my parents’ vacation here to visit Kay in her adopted country.
Two years? Gabe couldn’t have been divorced for all that long yet.
I mean, he still referred to the woman as his wife.