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I laugh and grab her arm, tugging her down to me and squeezing her in a tight hug. “Are you certain you want to go to the beach?”
Her eyes light up, excited at the prospect of a morning, and possibly an afternoon, spent together. “As certain as pudding after dinner.”
“Then I suppose I’d better call Daniel.”
We’ll go to the beach.
The golden-sanded, cold Alpine-watered, mountainous Swiss beach.
17
I swingin the shade of the great plane tree, rocking back and forth with the cool, coarse sand dragging across my bare feet. The sunshine flickers through the lush leaves, splashing green gems of light across my eyelids. The flicking of the leaves makes a soft, mellow hum that rolls soothingly through the late-morning air.
The wooden tree swing is cool beneath my bare legs. I grip the worn hemp rope as it gently swings from the swaying tree limb, my shadow skittering across the leaf-dappled sand.
The little beach with its shade trees, cool yellow sand, and cold blue water is nearly empty this early in the morning. In June the lake still has a chill that bites your toes and jolts you awake. Daniel and Mila splash in the shallows. I smile as he lifts Mila in the air, water dripping from her bright pink cozzie. He launches her through the air and into the water. She shrieks with delight as she flies and then hits it with a splash. She bursts to the surface a second later and shouts, “Again! Again!” darting back to Daniel. He turns toward me, a lopsided smile on his face, and I wave at them both.
The wind kicks up and I notice the loss of salt and seaweed and spicy tropical flowers. Here it’s fresh water, cool grass, cement, and city mixing with clean mountain air. It’s the scent I know. That tropical scent? The heat and the turquoise ocean?
I look to Daniel. He raises his hand, waving back.
I haven’t been back to an island with a turquoise sea in nine years.
Daniel, Dad, and I were sailing the Greek isles. Sailing was one of Dad’s favorite things, and every year we all went for a family sailing trip that ended at Santorini. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the last trip we’d all take together. My dad would be dead in a few weeks.
But the last night we were on the island, I left the villa and walked along the pebbled beach with its rust-red volcanic formations and towering cliffs. The waves crashed and beat at the pebbles and stormed up on the shore.
I stood there in the moonless night contemplating walking into the sea and not coming back out. The water wrapped around my ankles and tugged me toward the black depths, and I thought, for a moment, that the cool depths would be better than staying alive in the dark and the cold.
The pebbles shifted and I heard footsteps before I saw Daniel. He’d been at university—I hadn’t seen him since Christmas. Somehow my little brother had grown up in the past few months and I hadn’t been there to see it happen.
He stood next to me, a foot between us, and faced the ocean crashing toward us. The roar of it nearly drowned out his words when he asked, “What is it?”
I hadn’t told anyone. Not my friends, not my mum, not anyone. But this was Daniel. And my whole life, whenever I told him something, he always knew exactly what I was talking about without me having to explain. He always understood.
So without looking at him I said, “I’m pregnant.”
He looked at me quickly, but I didn’t turn toward him.
“Does Joel know?”
“Yes.”
And in that one word, in the rawness, in the way it scraped and tore my throat when I said it, he understood.
Joel was my fiancé, if that’s what you’d call it. We’d been dating for two years. He was ten years older. He wore custom suits, drove a red Ferrari, and traveled between Singapore and Geneva for his consulting business. He was the type of person who made you feel wildly sophisticated, who made you feel as if you were someone when you were with him—as if you mattered. I loved him with the desperation of a man dying of thirst in the desert begging for a drop of cool water.
He was that drop, and he would give it or withhold it at will.
“He told me to get rid of it.”
My voice came out monotone and quiet, as if I was speaking from a great distance.
Daniel studied my face. “Is that what you want?”
Yes. No.No.
“He’s married,” I said instead.
