29
JAZZ
Hawaii was exactly as we left it, like a postcard that somehow never changed no matter how many tourists passed through it.
I still couldn’t figure out how to forgive Han, but I was glad to be home. And my heart softened a little as I hung up my Patagonia coat in the second bedroom’s closet.
There was no talk of me joining him in his room like before. But the next day, when I came back from my first Dawn Patrol in months, I found a dress bag with a post-it note attached hanging off one of the kitchen island’s chairs. The post-it read, “For our birthday date.”
So that was how I found myself in the back of an Infiniti QX80 with Han the night of my birthday, getting ferried around by Yaron, his creepily silent driver, like old times. Except now, there was no backseat hand-holding or glances caught by the other.
Instead, I sat as far away from him as I could, feeling petty…and guilty.
No matter how many articles I’d read about how it wasn’t up to me to be the therapist in a relationship on the plane ride back to Hawaii, I couldn’t shake what Phantom had told me.
And try as I did not to that night, I ended up glancing over at him…
Only to find him doing the same thing—before we both quickly looked away.
Maybe if he said something, if he explained himself, I could…I didn’t know…find it in my heart to forgive him. Or something. Just so long as we got annulment papers drawn up as soon as I paid him back.
But he didn’t say anything, and Hawaii rush hour traffic was still Hawaii rush hour traffic. So we ended up stewing in the miserable silence for nearly an hour.
Yaron let us out at the Honolulu Harbor, so apparently, we were eating at one of the restaurants on the waterfront.
For the first time since the day he forced me to marry him, Han took my hand and guided me…
Wait, not toward the bright restaurant lights. But in the opposite direction, toward the dark warehouses.
I refused to break my vow of forever silence to ask him where we were going, but I wondered, and I totally forgot to snatch back my hand as we walked until we arrived at a tall warehouse, much like the one we’d escaped in Delaware.
“Your present is right through here,” Han explained, opening a side door for me.
Though it had looked dark from the outside, inside I found an old friend standing underneath a single hanging light. “Chen! Hey…” I started to say to the former driver I still considered a friend.
But I trailed off when I saw the three men tied to chairs—the three men who’d obviously taken a severe beating. Their faces were so bruised and swollen, I didn’t recognize them at first. However, when I did, my heart dropped to the warehouse’s concrete floor.
It was my sister’s dirty cop in-laws, the Lacerdas!
So you would think receiving my beaten and tortured in-laws as a birthday present would be the craziest thing that happened to me that week. But no….
The non-too-gentle questioning Chen and a couple of other STs put the Lacerdas through revealed that they weren’t the ones who’d been threatening Mika all along.
And did I swear up and down that I was never talking to Han again?
Well, I broke my vow of silence on my birthday—first to ask Han to take me to Rashid’s after I began to suspect Mika might be in real danger—and realizing he was the only person I knew with enough tech-savvy to track her down right away. Anyway, what happened next was too crazy a story to tell here.
But I ended up seeking Han how out a couple of days later when I got off the phone with Mika, who had somehow pulled off a happy ending with her Broken Billionaire boss.
I found Han out on the lanai, finally making use of the pool he hadn’t touched the entire time we lived here together before the Delaware trip. But it looked like he’d learned to appreciate it now. For a few moments, I completely forgot why I came outside, I was so caught up in watching him cut through the water like a shark, his strokes relentless and precise as he clocked lap after lap.
However, he abruptly stopped at the wall and stilled when he saw me standing by the side of the pool. Like a predator who’d spotted a doe.
And something I’d been keeping tamped down for the last three months rose up like a thing unchained inside of me as he climbed out of the pool, water dripping off his re-tanned skin.
How was he already so cut again? He must have been working out like a beast back in Delaware. Maybe that was what he did instead of….
