She was nearly forty, and she’d never been in a serious relationship. This onefeltserious, but they lived on separate continents. And beyond the more practical hurdles, Akemi wondered if she was too old to change.
Was there room in her life for a man? For a true partner?
She wasn’t sure.
There was a cord connecting them still, and not only because she was carrying his child. The daily texts felt both necessary and insufficient. She so wanted to sit with him, to just be in the same place as him.
She craved his presence, and that was a new experience for her.
“Ready!” Claire sang, jogging into the kitchen. “What are you doing? Where’s your bathing suit?”
“Sorry.” Akemi wrinkled her nose and grinned at her niece. “Five minutes.”
She piled into the car with Anne and her kids, and they drove up to Hilo.
Past the vast green lawns and sheltered pools where crowds congregated, down a dirt road and then a long walk past the parking lot, there was a tiny beach where Akemi and her sisters had spent countless hours growing up.
She took snippets of video along the way, because even getting there was gorgeous. A narrow trail took them between the ocean and the freshwater pools that seeped up through the rock, twisting between outcroppings of volcanic rock and around fallen trees.
They had to wade through fresh water at one point, cold and crystal clear, before climbing a small hill of lava rock to reach the hidden beach.
Tall ironwood trees sheltered the lagoon, making it easy to drift between sunshine and shade as needed. Pete splashed into the deepest part of the lagoon while Claire and Anne strung up a pair of hammocks in the shade.
Akemi went straight to a tiny island out in the middle of the water. She laid her beach towel on the warm black lava rock and sprawled out like a sea star, letting the sunshine soak into her skin. There was a faint movement low in her belly as her baby stretched and turned.
The late morning sun was delicious, and Akemi drifted into a pleasant state somewhere between sleeping and waking. She floated free from worry or rumination, into the kind of peace that she only ever found when she dozed in the sun by the sea.
A chipper voice startled her from her meditation.
“Where to next?”
Akemi opened her eyes to see Claire emerge like a mermaid from the lagoon, her dark red hair streaming water. She pulled herself up onto the sun-warmed rocks beside her aunt, looking at her expectantly.
Akemi blinked, still in a sun-soaked daze.
“Today?” she asked groggily. “Or…?”
“For you. Where’s your next job? Where are you flying to?”
“Oh.” Akemi rubbed her eyes and tried to remember. “Albania, I think.”
“You don’t even know which country you’re going to?”
“I’m going to North Macedonia too, but I think Albania’s first.”
She had landed these deals the year before. It was exciting at the time, pitching ideas to local tourism boards and finding ways to stay in Europe for free past the ninety-day Schengen limit.
Now, though… it just felt like work.
“Maybe Italy after that,” she said drowsily, though there were no tickets booked.
That’s news to me, the more analytical part of her mind said tartly.
Akemi just rolled over onto one side, letting the sun soak into her back.
Claire drifted back across the lagoon to join her mother in the shade. The quiet, peaceful sound of their conversation floated across the water, and Akemi let the pleasant sound of familiar voices wash over her without listening to the words.
Content and present, she drifted back into a sun-soaked siesta.
