I believe him.
That might be the most surprising thing of all.
20
ADELAIDE
Send me more beach shots, you horrible person, Chris texts.
I grin and snap a photo of the ocean from the deck, then send it straight back.
Stop gloating, he replies almost immediately.
I laugh and type,How are you? And how’s Hannah?
Magnificent. Amazing. Everything. I’m being very normal about it, he sends.
Wow. You are smitten, I type.
True. But what about you?
That makes me pause.I’m good and happy. Hawaii really agrees with me. Might stay a while longer.
There’s a short pause before he replies,Who is he?
Am I that easy to read?
He sends back, .Are you going to tell me who the lucky guy is?
I bite back a smile.Well… there could be more than one.
His response is immediate.I need to meet and approve. You know that, right?
I laugh out loud and type back,Of course you do.
Jokes aside, are you okay, Addi? Really?
My chest tightens.Yeah. I really am. Better than I’ve been in a while.
There’s a pause, then he sends,Good. That’s all I needed to hear.
I send him back a heart and toss my phone onto the couch. Then my sight is back on the guys out at sea, where three figures are riding waves, staying out there for hours because they love it and because the tournament is close.
I lean on the railing and stare out at the three of them. On the deck outside the closed French doors is the rooster, named Colonel Mustard by Luca. The bird pauses and glances up at me.
“Not coming in today, Colonel,” I tell him.
He resumes pecking, and I should go swim, every inch of me demanding that I go out there in the surf wearing my smallest bikini ever, which happens to still be in the laundry basket where I left it this morning. I pad down the hallway and pass under the long skylight that runs along the ceiling, sun pouring straight down through it and turning the whole corridor gold.
The walls of the hallway are lined with photos. Those big, framed colored prints—surf shots mostly, the guys in various stages of dominating a wave, one of them at a luau with their arms around each other’s shoulders and laughing.
I’ve walked past these photos every day for over a week that I’ve been living here. Today the sunlight catches one of them at a specific angle, and the frame’s slightly off-center on the wall.
I stop. It’s a photo of a wave, a huge blue-green face curling in on itself, mid-break, with the sun behind it turning the crest to glass.
I reach up to straighten it. When my fingers catch the edge of the frame, I nudge it, expecting the small, satisfying movement of wood against painted drywall.
It doesn’t move.
