“Give us time.”
He laughed.
“I went to college. Ann Arbor was the first to offer law degrees to women. But you don’t have to have a degree. You can apprentice. I did both. I’m with a family firm. My father and uncles are all senior partners.”
Hank groaned again.
“I’ve always loved the law, loved the challenge it presents. Law is never the same. Its interpretations are always changing. Sometimes only in the smallest increments, but still, it’s never constant.” She grew quiet, pensive. She looked out at the sea, then dug her toes into the sand and stared at them. “But you know something? Sitting here, the law is the farthest thing from my mind.”
“Why?”
“It seems as if what I was—that other life—was someone else’s life, not mine. And when I look at this”—she nodded toward the sea, then scanned the beach—”I don’t think I would ever want to be anywhere else.”
They sat there, neither saying anything. They didn’t need to. After a few minutes, maybe less, maybe longer, she turned to him.
“Tell me about prison.”
“Sweetheart, that’s one thing you don’t want to know, and I’m not certain I can tell you.”
“Why not?”
He’d known this was coming. He looked at her. “Does it matter?”
“If you think telling me is going to change how I feel about you, you’re wrong, Hank.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Yes, it matters. It matters to me because you matter.”
It took him a long time to find the words, a few minutes of silence for his mind to dredge it all up again. “I’d been living in the islands, moving from one to another, never staying too long on any one island. A few months here, a few there. I’d gone to Papeete for a week to pick up a boat I’d bought. The boat wasn’t there, and Laroche, the man I’d bought it from, was conveniently unavailable. It took me three weeks to find the bastard. I found him and beat the crap out of him when he pretended not to know who I was. I spent a week drunk, among other things.
“I don’t remember much, except that I woke up when the local gendarmerie was dragging me out of my bed and down the stairs. While I’d been drinking and screwing away the last of my money, someone else had put a bullet in Laroche’s head. I had a mockery of a trial a day later, where they told me I was guilty after two people testified that we’d had a fight earlier that week. Hell, I didn’t even have a gun, something my joke of an attorney didn’t mention.”
“What?”
He nodded. “Yeah, the trial was in French. I didn’t know half of what was being said, and no one bothered to translate. They gave me the verdict in English. Life in prison. My attorney said I got off lucky. They wanted to hang me.” He paused, then looked down. “Next thing I knew I was in Leper’s Gate.”
She was quiet for a long time. “How did you break out?”
He told her. Quietly and with detail. When he finished, Smitty was crying.
He put his arm around her. She leaned into him. He just held her, feeling like he had a hard grip on the first real thing in his life that wouldn’t slip through his fingers.
The breeze softly carried the clean, fresh scent of her, washing over him like the sea washed the rocks and the shoreline, touching, holding, seeping in between the small cracks that time and weather and experience had made in granite and limestone.
He held onto the woman who for him was like the sea that surrounded all the land on earth, hemmed it in, cupped it gently, sometimes raged at it, but was always wearing away at it. Until where land and sea met there was peace. And paradise. For him, she was like the sea. And he knew that where she wasn’t, there was nothing.
It was a strange feeling to look at a woman and not see her for what he could get from her. Instead he looked at her and saw her twenty years from now, sitting there as she was now, beside him.
She turned suddenly as if he had spoken his thoughts. The sun glowed a golden pink on her face—the face that cried for him, the same face that made him forget he wasn’t supposed to let himself care about anything or anyone.
She smiled a slow smile at him. An elemental understanding of who and where they were. Now, at this moment.
He reached out and drew a finger along her jaw as slowly as she had smiled. And somewhere, lost back in the vague recesses of his mind, he wondered if she knew the power she had.
He leaned toward her until he could taste her breath. He stayed there, not closing the distance between them. Because with Smitty, he wanted every moment to last. Then he said words he’d never said in forty years. “You know, sweetheart, loving you isn’t going to be very easy.”
“Loving me?”
