“I understand now, Camila. I know that I wasn’t protecting you at all. I was just taking the easy way. And the easy way was doing was Scarlett was demanding me to do, because all it meant was fucking her. But I knownow. I know what that meant to you. It didn’t mean anything to me, but I know what you felt, what you went through. When I was fucking her on our anniversary. I shouldn’t have, Camila. I know now. I should have come clean to you long long ago, and I didn’t. I was a coward Cam. I am sorry.”
Jason was looking at me, pleading with me with his eyes. I stood and listened because I couldn’t make myself stop.
“Please Camila, please forgive me. I came here because somewhere in my heart, I wanted you back. But I’ve realised that maybe I don’t deserve you back after what I did. I’m sorry for everything, Camila, but I’m not sorry for coming back. I will protect you as a friend, as an ex-husband, as whatever name you want to give it. I will protect you Cam. Even if it means livingin your backyard forever, listening to you fucking another man every night.”
He sniffled, and paused before calculating his next words. “I’m sorry that Noah left because of me, Cam. I didn’t want you to be with him. I wanted you to forgive me and love me again, but if you love Noah, I will do everything I can to make sure you both are together again.”
He looked down at the sand, as if he was deliberately avoiding seeing my expression upon hearing Noah’s name.
I stood in the sand, trying very hard not to let him see me cry. I sniffled hard.
I had been askingwhyfor a year. I had asked it in hotel rooms and on beaches and in the dark of my cottage bedroom at three in the morning when the answer wouldn’t come. I had asked it from the ceiling, and from God, and from Luna and Audrey.
Now I was finally getting my answer.
And I didn’t know yet what to do with it.
“Noah was not my boyfriend,” I said finally. “And I know now, that he never could have been. It’s not your fault that he left. I’m glad he did before it was too late.”
That was all I said.
Jason waited. I could see him waiting — for something more, for the words that would give him the thing he’d come here hoping for. For closure, maybe, or the beginning of something.
I had gone without closure for more than a year. Why should he get closure so soon?
After a moment, he got up. Brushed the sand from his knees with quiet dignity, and straightened himself.
“What’s the plan for today?” he asked.
I looked at him. At the man who had knelt in the sand, who had slept upright with a gun so I could sleep in the only bedroom, who had sat for an entire afternoon in front of a traumatized dog’s cage and refused to leave until she ate.
“Happy Hopes,” I said.
CHAPTER 27
JASON
Something had changed.
I couldn’t name it precisely, and I wasn’t going to try. But there was a quality to the morning after our talk at the beach, to the quiet of the cottage while Camila made instant coffee from the small kitchen’s supplies, to the way she handed me a cup without being asked and went back to looking out the window, that was different from the days before it.
Not forgiveness. I wasn’t foolish enough to call it that yet.
But the hostility had changed texture. Become something else. Something that came with a little hope.
I sat with my coffee and thought about kneeling in the sand.
I had rehearsed that moment so many times in the year since the cruise that the real version had surprised me — not in its content but in its effect. I had imagined it as a transaction: I would say the words, she would hear them, and something would resolve. A door would open or close definitively, and either way I would know where I stood.
What happened instead was simpler and more complete than that.
She had heard me. All of it — the apology that had been sitting in my chest for a year, the confession of cowardice I had been afraid to make out loud because saying it would mean accepting it entirely. She had heard every word, and she had not walked away. She had not forgiven me. But she had heard me.
That was enough.
It was more than I had a right to ask for.
Today started out great, and it was only becoming better.
