In her experience, daughters rarely forgave their mothers anything.
“We have food back in the room if you’re hungry,” she told the kids.
“Pete’s always hungry.” Claire pushed her brother’s arm playfully and dove back into the pool. He jumped in after her, splashing into the water with a wave that swamped her right as she came up for air.
Anne smiled at their antics, but anxiety churned deep in her chest as she watched her kids play.
She had shielded both of them from the full truth of what was happening, and she worried that at some point over the past few months, her well-intentioned protection had crossed a line into the unforgivable. She was hiding things from them that they had every right to know… a new reality that would upend their entire lives.
They knew that their parents had separated. That was true of plenty of families in their circle, and their father had spent so little time at home in recent years that this extended absence was a minor change.
What they didn’t know was that their father had completely washed his hands of them. He’d signed away his custodial rights and walked away without a backwards glance. Leaving Anne for another woman was one thing, but abandoning his children was a move so cold that she still couldn’t wrap her mind around it, much less figure out how to explain it to the kids.
He’d left them with nothing.
The boutique hotel that Anne had devoted twenty years of her life to was gone, sold to pay his debts.Theirdebts, technically, since they’d been incurred before the divorce. Their family home was on the market too, but they owed so much on it that they would be lucky to break even once the realtors took their share.
The life she’d built in California was now a dumpster fire of debt and divorce.
Anne shoved her despair to one side and focused on the day ahead of her. The sun climbed higher in the sky, gathering strength with each fraction of a degree that it gained. Soon it would be blinding.
“Claire!” She waved her daughter over. “Come put some more sunscreen on.”
The teen rolled her eyes, but she swam over and climbed out of the pool.
“What about Pete?” she asked.
“Your brother tans,” Anne told her. “You don’t.”
Claire sighed dramatically and wrapped a towel around her hair, then used a second towel to scrub the water from her skin.
“Turn around,” Anne said. “I’ll get your back.”
She had tried to convince her daughter to wear a longsleeve swimsuit – best practice for freckle-faced girls in the harsh Kona sunshine – but Claire had refused. So now Anne worked carefully, coating every inch of Claire’s back and shoulders with the thick white cream… and all the while wondering what she had been thinking, dragging her redheaded daughter to the tropics.
But they didn’t have family anywhere else.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“When are we going home?”
Unease prickled beneath Anne’s skin.
“We just got here,” she stalled.
“Yeah, I know. But when’s our return flight?”
“I haven’t booked it yet,” Anne admitted.
Claire gave her a worried glance over her shoulder.
“Most kids would be stoked about a trip to Hawaii,” she said with all the brightness that she could summon up.
“I’m stoked!” Pete yelled from midair. He crashed into the pool, spraying their feet with water.
“I have a life back home,” Claire said.
