Reese stared down at his half-eaten burger. Oriana willed him to eat the rest of it but knew better than to ask him to. If he didn’t feel well enough to eat it, he wouldn’t.
“I wonder if she’s out there, watching all this transpire,” Reese said.
“It must be surreal to see your paintings on the news,” Monica agreed. “But then again, if she painted them, she painted them fifty years ago. Maybe anything you do fifty years ago doesn’t feel like it belongs to your life any longer. I was a kid fifty years ago. I can’t fathom that.”
Oriana was quiet, contemplative. Outside, it had begun to snow again, and it felt as though they would never be free of Colorado, as though they’d never escape the mountains. An ominous feeling came over her. What if Larry was on to them and knew what they knew? What if he was lurking outside, waiting, ready to strike?
But then she remembered that Larry was an eighty-year-old man. He probably struggled to get out of bed every morning, let alone do much else.
Did she really want to destroy the reputation of an eighty-year-old man? Did she really want to haul all this darkness out of the past? She wasn’t sure. Everything felt unsteady.
Then again, the truth didn’t have a “right time” to surface. The truth was the truth, no matter what era, no matter who was involved. The truth was a necessity.
That night, long after Monica had gone to her hotel room for the night, Oriana broached the subject to Reese. Moonlight played across his features. He remained quiet with thought for a long time. “The truth always has a time and a place,” he said, pressing a kiss to her forehead. “It’s up to us to help it come to the surface. I genuinely believe that.”
Chapter Sixteen
It was the first week of February on Oahu Island when Jasmine woke up from a knock on her front door. At first, she thought she’d imagined it. She padded from her bedroom to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, then stretched her arms through the air and considered the day ahead—the hours she had to work at the convenience store and the homework she’d promised to help Jade with. And then, she heard the knock on the door again and shot straight for it, petrified. People didn’t usually knock before seven in the morning. It meant something was wrong.
Standing on Jasmine’s front stoop was her daughter, Jenny. She was red-eyed and underslept, and she looked as though she’d lost a bit of weight, so much so that her jeans hung around her waist. Jenny hadn’t wanted to see Jasmine in weeks and had mostly avoided her, but the sight of her like this, so meek and tired, made Jasmine forget all that. She pulled her daughter into her and hugged her till Jenny stopped shaking. “Come inside for some coffee,” she said, her voice quiet. And then she asked, “Are the kids all right?”
“Alyssa and Jade are on their way to school,” Jenny said glumly. She followed Jasmine into the kitchen and collapsed at the table.
Jasmine set to work, pouring coffee and putting bread in the toaster. Her daughter drank the coffee without looking up at her. Jasmine ached with dread, but reminded herself that everything was okay. Jenny was here, with her. Whatever had happened could be dealt with. In a way, she’d been waiting for this moment for months and months.
Jasmine smeared peanut butter and strawberry jam over two pieces of toast and set them in front of her daughter, remembering how much Jenny had liked that when she’d been young. If she had to guess, Jenny hadn’t had anything like that in years. She’d probably wanted to stay ultra-thin for Walton. Jasmine told herself to stop shaking with rage and fear.
Jenny reached for the first slice of toast and raised it, looking at it as though she’d never seen anything like it before. She set it down. “I can’t believe you opened the door,” she said.
Jasmine couldn’t think of anything to say. She pressed her hand against her chest.
“I mean, I’ve been terrible to you,” Jenny went on. “As things got worse and worse at home, my biggest fear was that you’d figure it out. I knew you knew, somehow. I knew you wanted to get me out of there. But all I wanted to do was fix it.”
Jasmine felt she could see herself in her daughter’s expression. She could see her ancient sorrow, her ancient fear—all of which still lurked somewhere in Jasmine’s own heart, even so many years after she’d left.
“You knew this day would come,” Jenny said. “You should say whatever you need to say. You should tell me, ‘I told you so.’”
Jasmine furrowed her brow. “You really think I’d say that to you?”
Jenny let her eyes flutter to the ground.
“You really think I’d say ‘I told you so’ to my own daughter? Honey, no.” She shook her head vehemently. “You’re the most important person in the world to me.”
What she wanted to say wasWhen you married Walton, I prayed that you weren’t making a mistake, but I knew in my bones you were. But she didn’t want to rub it in.
“What happened?” Jasmine asked.
Jenny’s lower lip trembled. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” Jasmine assured her.
But Jenny was quiet, maybe because she didn’t want to come out and say it. Jasmine stood and searched for her phone on the counter. Within two minutes, she had her boss on the line. “I can’t make it in today,” she explained. “It’s an emergency.”
Jenny’s eyes were vacuous. She seemed to open her mouth to tell Jasmine to stop, to go into work if she had to. But Jasmine shook her head and thanked her boss for being so understanding. When she got off the phone, she said to her daughter, “Let’s go for a walk. There are things you need to know about me. There are things I never told you because I wanted to protect you. But I think it’s finally time you know.”
Jasmine went back to her room to get dressed and put on a pair of tennis shoes. She was slightly dizzy with the task of telling her daughter everything. Raising Jenny in Hawaii had been a gorgeous undertaking, a time of upheaval followed by peace. Walton had destroyed that peace. Like so many men, he’d torn through their lives and reminded them of the nature of old-fashioned relationships:you were meant to bend to the will of your husband.
“Not anymore,” Jasmine muttered, anger boiling in her stomach.
