The expression arrives without strategy. Without assessment. Without the analytical framework I've been using to process every emotional response since I was thirty-four years old.
I smile because a woman I'm falling in love with rearranged my clubs to provoke me and is sitting on my porch looking innocent, and the annoyance is completely indistinguishable from joy, and I don't need to separate them.
I go outside. I sit in the rocking chair beside hers. She hands me the coffee cup. I drink from it.
The marsh stretches ahead, green and gold and smelling of salt. The morning light is clear. Neither of us speaks.
Keoni said three weeks. This is day twenty-two.
Tomorrow is day twenty-three.
The day after that, we fly to Scotland.
I drink her coffee. She steals it back. The morning continues.
I'm still smiling when I go inside to fix my clubs.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tala
Scotland smells different from every other place I've played golf.
It smells ancient. Peat and brine and cold stone and a particular quality of wet grass that has nothing to do with irrigation — this grass has been wet since before anyone thought to build a golf course on it. The air is heavier than Singapore but cooler, sharper, carrying a mineral edge that stings the inside of my nose when I breathe deeply.
We arrive two days before the tournament. The course at St Andrews is a links layout — no trees, no defined boundaries between holes, just undulating ground covered in fescue that moves like water when the wind crosses it. The terrain rolls in waves, and the bunkers are carved so deep that standing in one feels like standing in a grave.
It's the most alien golf course I've ever seen.
It's also the most beautiful.
Nerys has been quiet since we landed. Not withdrawn — quiet in a way that suggests she's processing something the way her body processes changes in weather: involuntarily, through systems that predate conscious thought. She holds her course notebook but doesn't open it. She walks the holes beside me during our initial reconnaissance, pointing out features, naming hazards, describing wind patterns — but her voice carries an undertone I haven't heard before.
Her hands shake during the walk.
Not the yips. I know the difference now. The yips are specific — they affect fine motor control, the ability to execute a precise movement under pressure. What's happening to Nerys's hands on the seventh fairway at St Andrews is something broader. A tremor that lives in the wrists and radiates upward through the forearms. Not neurological. Emotional. Her body remembering a version of this landscape that came before the collapse, before the divorce, before everything she lost.
The last time she was here, she was still a champion.
I don't mention the tremor. I walk beside her and I listen to her describe the fourteenth hole's wind exposure and I pretend I don't see her flex her fingers at her sides, trying to press the shaking out.
•
On the second morning, a storm arrives.
Not a passing squall — a full Scottish coastal storm that comes off the North Sea like a wall. Rain hammers the hotel windows horizontally. The wind reaches forty miles per hour. The tournament committee cancels all practice rounds and issues a terse advisory about remaining indoors.
Nerys stands at the hotel window watching the storm with an expression that is neither apprehension nor excitement. It's recognition. She looks like a woman greeting something she's known for a long time.
"I rented a cottage," she says.
"What?"
"Outside town. Near the coast. A stone cottage my father used to rent during the summer months when he brought me here as a teenager." She doesn't turn from the window. "I'd like to take you there. If you're willing."
I am willing. I don't know what I'm willing for — a cottage visit, an emotional excavation, another revelation from a woman who parcels out her history like prize money, in careful increments calculated to balance vulnerability against stability.
I say yes.
