Page 22 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
“Maybe because mine was the opposite,” I said. “You say I don’t tell you? I’m telling you now. She was the opposite.”
She looked like she was going to say something, ask something, so I quickly asked instead, “What does your name mean? Sinclair?”
“What? Uh…nothing, I don’t think. Why? It means St. Clair, that’s all. I used to think it meant ‘without fault,’ or ‘free from sin.’ Nice idea, but it doesn’t. I thought, that’s good, because I can’t live up to that name, and then I realized it didn’t matter. Nobody’s without fault.”
“D’you know what mine means?” I asked. “Te Mana?”
“No. Not exactly.”
She was right—why were we talking about names? Maybe because I wanted her to want mine, and I needed to tell her what I’d be trying to give her. I said, “Itdoesmean something—almost what you said. It means honor. Courage. Prestige. The kind that’s the most precious thing in life, because you can’t take it. You can’t grab it or steal it or buy it or trick your way into it. You can only earn it by the way you walk through the world, by the way you treat others, by the way you stand up under pressure and pain, and the way you stand up for others. To have mana…it’s the most important thing for a Maori. It’s the best thing. For any kind of Kiwi, for that matter. It’s a name that…”
“A name you thinkyoucan’t live up to,” she finished when I trailed off. “An impossible goal. But don’t you see, Hemi? It’s not about reaching the goal. Nobody will ever get there, not all the way. It’s about trying. It’s about the struggle. If honor is what matters…surely the honor is in the struggle. It’s in keeping on when it’s hardest, in being knocked down and getting back up again, then putting your hand out to help the person next to you get to his feet, too, instead of leaving him behind. The honor is in the trying, and the caring. And that’s you.” Her hand was gripping mine so tightly, and all her passion, all her light were there for me to see, naked and unashamed.
I’d always thought Hope shone from within, like she had a flame inside her, a candle burning bright. But it wasn’t a candle. It was a lantern. It was a beacon.
“You think you can’t do it,” she said. “You don’t realize that you already have. You alreadyarethat man. You can show me who you are, because there’s nothing in you that I don’t love. I love you for your struggle, don’t you see? I love you because I know how hard it is for you, and you still try. And that’s why ‘need to know’ doesn’t work.Please, Hemi. Let me see your struggle. I need to see it, and I want to. It’s beautiful, and so are you.”
My throat was so tight, I could barely speak. “I need to change your name,” I said.
“What?” she asked. “Why…”
“Because the person with the honor,” I said, “the person who’s struggled, and who’s overcome? The person who needs to be named Te Mana? It’s you.”
She gasped once, and then she was in my arms. I couldn’t have said if she’d gone there, or if I’d pulled her in. It didn’t matter anyway. We sat there in the middle of a café in Chancery Lane, surrounded by lawyers, and I held her, tried to rein in my emotions, and failed completely.
Did it occur to me to tell her about the niggle with the license? Possibly. Did I do it? No. It would be sorted by tomorrow, and whatever she said, shedidn’tneed to know. Should we have talked more about children, and my parents, and a few other things? Probably.
Maybe I was struggling toward mana. Maybe. But I wasn’t there.
Ah, well.
Hope
People were staring at us, I realized, in their discreet, polite, I’m-not-actually-staring New Zealand way. Well, we probably made an odd couple, Hemi twice my size and as dark as I was fair, not to mention my jeans and sweater and Hemi’s custom-made black suit. And then there was the fact that we were embracing passionately in a lawyers’ café in the middle of the city. And in the middle of the workday.
“You pop the question, mate?” an older man asked from the closest table. When I looked startled, he said, “Ring,” and pointed to his wedding finger.
“Nah,” Hemi said. “Already did that. But I keep having to convince her again that the right answer is ‘yes.’”
I kept my head on his chest—not that he was letting me go anyway—and started to believe it might work, “need to know” and all. “If you didn’t keep messing up so badly,” I murmured into the warm white cotton of his dress shirt, “you wouldn’t have to do all that convincing.”
“Could be,” he said. “But then, I enjoy convincing you.” He stood up, picked up the bag with some lingerie that I might actually end up wearing after all, put out a hand, and drew me to my feet. “Let’s go collect Karen so we can go home and get this party started.”
He was as quiet on the drive through four o’clock traffic to Penrose as he had been on the drive up, but the silence felt different now: contented and settled, rather than full of spiky edges and treacherous undercurrents. And when we walked into Violet’s studio again, she looked us over with obvious satisfaction and said, “Got it sorted, then, did you?”
“Yeh.” Hemi’s face had settled back into its usual inscrutable lines, but at least it wasn’t hard anymore. “Though I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
“Nah, mate,” Violet said calmly, “you need to be thanking me. Somebody has to shove a window open now and then. It’s got to get stuffy in that head of yours, the way you keep everything bottled up. And I wouldn’t even want to guess about your heart.”
“No worries,” Hemi said. “Hope doesn’t bother with the windows. She goes straight to breaking down the door.”
“Well, awesome,” Karen said, “because I am wearing this dress on Saturday, even if I have to wear it to the beach.”
“No,” Hemi said. “At the marae.” He told Violet, “You’re invited, by the way.”
“You just want a last-minute stylist,” she said, and he actually laughed. “But I might do, at that. Just because I love a Maori wedding, and to witness the breaking down in process. That sounds like it’d be worth seeing.” She eyed me with interest. “I wouldn’t have thought it. The way you look…”
“People look all kinds of ways,” I said. “Including small people. It doesn’t mean a thing.” All right, that was rude, but when you’re little and blonde, you get that a lot.
