Chapter Thirty-Two
Molly
My mood was so sour flying back that even the luxury and comfort of first class could do nothing to soothe me. I had bought a book at the airport, but after realizing that I’d read the same sentence ten times, I decided to put it away and just wallow.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
I looked up at the statuesque blonde flight attendant who was leaning over me with a pleasant smile on her face. Her eyes were a dark brown, and her hair had been combed into a perfect topknot that displayed her high cheekbones and lovely aristocratic nose. She looked like the kind of woman who never had any guy troubles. She probably used men the same way they used her. Which worked, because she never expected anything more from them. Which also meant she could never get hurt.
I knew I was building a character around her face that probably didn’t exist, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t in the mood to be fair.
“Yes?”
“Can I offer you something to drink?” she asked. “We have a selection of fresh juices.”
“Anything alcoholic?” I asked.
She smiled. “Of course,” she nodded. “We have a lovely selection of reds and whites.”
“Nothing harder?”
I saw one perfectly plucked eyebrow rise slightly. “What would you like, ma’am?”
“Bourbon,” I said instinctively, making the choice that Tristan would have made in my position.
The airhostess smiled and nodded. “And for you, ma’am?” she asked, looking towards the older woman sitting next to me.
“Orange juice,” the woman replied. “With a splash of rum.”
“Of course,” the airhostess nodded, before moving on down the aisle.
The older woman looked at me with interest. “Bourbon, huh?”
She looked a little like my grandmother—big, cuddly, and comforting. But unlike my grandmother, this woman looked hip and fashionable. She was wearing white linen pants and a matching white blouse with a pattern of seashells along the neckline. She was wearing chunky statement pieces around her neck and ears, and her silver hair was cut short.
“Yes,” I nodded shortly.
“That’s a hard drink to have on a flight,” she continued, in a strong Southern accent.
I just smiled politely and refused to engage.
“But when I look at your face, I suppose I understand the need,” the woman continued.
I looked at her with a small frown, unable to ignore that last comment. “What do you mean?”
“You look sad, honey,” she said, with a sympathetic smile. “I assume the bourbon is to…nurse that sadness?”
“I just… I’m sad to be leaving,” I sighed.
The woman raised one eyebrow at me. “But that’s not all you’re sad about?”
I smiled and looked at her pointedly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a laugh. “I know I’m being nosy…my children accuse me of the same thing. It just seems like such a waste.”
“What does?” I asked curiously, knowing I was getting drawn into a conversation despite my best efforts.
The wflight attendant approached and set down our drinks. The moment she was gone again, the older lady turned back to me. “Your generation,” she said. “You’re all so young, and you have your whole lives ahead of you…and still you waste your time being sad about everything. What I wouldn’t give to be in my twenties and thirties again.”
I smiled, and then I extended my hand out to her. “I’m Molly,” I introduced.
“It’s nice to meet you, Molly,” she replied. “I’m Meryl. Now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way, would you mind telling me why you’re so sad?”
“I… I had this really great job,” I admitted.
“In Hawaii?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“Wow, that does sound like a great job.”
I laughed. “I haven’t told you what my job was in the first place.”
“Doesn’t matter, really,” Meryl countered. “A job in Hawaii is already ten times better than any job anywhere else.”
I smiled and nodded. “There might be some truth to that,” I agreed. “In any case, I was forced to quit yesterday, and I suppose I regret it a little.”
“Why’d you quit?” she asked.
“Uh… It’s a long story.”
Meryl smiled pointedly. “It’s a long flight back home.”
I sighed but conceded. “The job was great, and the people I was working with were wonderful. It’s just…my boss…”
“He was an asshole, was he?” Meryl assumed.
“No,” I said sadly, thinking about Tristan and our day together on his private island. “He was a pretty good boss, actually. But…”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she cut in. “You fell in love with him?”
I laughed. “Oh, I was already extremely in love with him,” I admitted. “I first met him when I was fourteen. And I’ve been in love with him ever since. He was my brother’s best friend.”
“Ah,” Meryl nodded. “Is he married? Is that the problem?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He’s not married. He’s just…unavailable.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t think he’s a one-woman kind of guy,” I admitted. It was painful to say, but once it was out of my mouth, it seemed to lose the power to hurt me.
“Ah…and did you know this beforehand?”
I sipped my drink. “I did,” I nodded. “But I thought… I thought…”
“You thought you could change him,” Meryl said without skipping a beat.
“You don’t understand,” I said, feeling the need to defend my feelings. “I always felt like we had this connection, except when we met I was fourteen, and he was eighteen, so it was one-sided at the time. As I got older, I sensed something changing between us, but I still wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not.
“But then, six years ago at this family Christmas party, we kissed. And it was amazing and perfect and everything I imagined it would be. Except, he pretended that it never happened.
“I was devastated obviously, but I had no choice but to put it behind me. That is until a couple of months ago when I came down to Hawaii to stay at the resort that Tristan had just opened.”
“And that’s when things…rekindled?”
“Eventually, he told me that he had lied about not remembering that kiss… He was just scared to get involved with me.”
“Because?”
“I suppose he was scared of himself, too,” I said. “He was scared he wouldn’t be able to be the man I wanted him to be.”
“What happened that made you quit yesterday?” Meryl asked.
“The realization that I had idealized him in my head all these years,” I said. “He was different.”
“I see,” she nodded. “Can I ask you a complicated question?”
I smiled. “We’ve gone this deep into my personal life; I don’t see why not?”
“Despite the fact that this Tristan is not the man you had fantasized about in your head all these years, do you still love him?”
It was a good question and one that I already knew the answer to. I sighed. “I don’t have to think about that answer,” I said. “I still love him… I think I will always love him. I just don’t know how to stop.”
Meryl smiled in a way that betrayed her own personal connection to my problem. She looked at me with a maternal kindness and patted my hand. “I’m sixty-six, darling,” she said. “And I’ve been married for forty-five of those years. Forty-five years, and I can sit here today and tell you truthfully and confidently that I love my husband.”
“Wow,” I breathed, thinking about the kind of commitment it takes to stay married that long. I thought about my parents, and it seemed to me that every couple that had stayed married longer than twenty years deserved some kind of special honor.
“Tate was twenty-four, and I was twenty-one when we got married. Together we built a business, a house, and we raised three children. When I tell people that they look at me like I’ve led some kind of charmed life. They see my adult children, they see my beautiful grandkids, they see my fine house and my business, and they assume it all came easy.
“Let me tell you something, darling: none of it came easy. Tate and I, we struggled to build every single thing we had. But nothing was as much a struggle as our marriage. Not even my children realized that. Angela’s my oldest. Two years ago she came to me and told me that she and her husband had decided to separate. They were unhappy, it seemed, and they wanted to go their separate ways. When I tried to advise her, do you know what she said to me?
“She told me that I couldn’t afford to advise her because I had a perfect marriage,” Meryl said. She let out a snort of laughter and shook her head. “A perfect marriage… Ha!”
“What did you say to her?”
“I told her that soon after we were married, I left her father,” Meryl told me. “I wanted to file for divorce seven months after our wedding day. I also happened to be four months pregnant with her.”
“Why did you want to divorce him?” I asked.
Meryl laughed. “We were young. I was only twenty-one. I didn’t understand what marriage really meant. I went from my father’s home to my husband’s, and I felt as though I lost my identity twice over. We’d been raised differently, we did things differently, and I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. So I went and stayed with my parents for a few weeks. And eventually, Tate came to take me back to our home.”
“And you went with him?”
“I went with him,” Meryl smiled. “Of course, youth can be impulsive, impetuous and reckless. But as you get older, the problems become harder, more serious.
“The second time I started thinking about divorce was different. I was in my forties, I had been married twenty years, and I had three teenage children. Tate and I had spent our twenties and thirties trying to build something that we could leave to our children. We had been so consumed with raising them, that somewhere along the way, we’d lost track of each other.
“Tate came home one day and made a confession. He had cheated on me with another woman…some girl in the company that was a good deal younger than me.”
“Oh God,” I said, clinging to Meryl’s story, completely absorbed in her life.
“I screamed and kicked and threw things,” she admitted. “I told him to get out. He said he wouldn’t, so I told him that I would leave. He told me I couldn’t because of the kids.”
“What did you do?” I pressed when Meryl fell silent.
“I stayed,” she replied. “For one year after that, we lived like strangers. We slept on opposite corners of the same bed, we exchanged conversation during dinner in front of the kids, and we went along with the routine of our lives… For one year it was hell. But then at the end of that year, we both realized something.”
“What?”
“We had healed a little,” Meryl told me. “We came together, we talked things out, and we decided that despite everything, we still loved one another. And we started fresh, we endured, and because we endured, we fell in love with one another all over again. We became best friends as well as lovers.”
I took a deep breath. “It takes a lot to forgive a man who cheated.”
“It does,” she nodded. “That really depends on the woman. My point though is this: love and marriage...it’s not something that just falls into your lap. If you’re lucky enough to find someone you love, you need to fight like hell to keep that love alive. Because it’s not always going to be perfect, it’s not always going to be easy—it’s work and change and sacrifice.”
I reached for my glass, but then I changed my mind and dropped my hand. “You have a point,” I said. “But that also depends on one very important factor.”
“Which is?”
“Both people need to want to work at the relationship,” I said softly. “If one person just wants to walk away…”
“Then they were never meant for you in the first place,” Meryl said pointedly.
I sighed inwardly. “They were never meant for you in the first