Page 137 of Just One Look
Choices
“You didn’t have to stay,”Elizabeth told Lauren a half-hour later, in Luka’s bathroom.
“Oh, I think I did,” Lauren said, brushing on the foundation that Elizabeth normally skipped. “Seems like the least I can do, after I left you with him. You need confidence tonight, and I’m going to help.”
Elizabeth took Lauren’s wrist, stilling the soft brush that was dusting her into perfection. “You had to leave him. I know that. You have nothing to feel bad about.”
“I wish I’d kept reaching out to you, all the same,” Lauren said, starting up again with the foundation.
“If you had,” Elizabeth said, “I’d just have pushed you away. Because I felt guilty, obviously.” She sighed. “I wish life made more sense. I wishpeoplemade more sense.”
“People are messy,” Lauren said. “The good and the bad all muddled up together, so it’s hard to suss out your own motivations, let alone anybody else’s. Never mind. Heaps of people in the world to love. If you don’t have a family that works? Make your own family. The friends that will stick by you, the ones you can trust. And the man you can trust, too.”
Elizabeth’s eyes met Lauren’s in the bathroom mirror. “You mean Luka.”
Lauren was using blush on her now, and not just on her cheeks. On her eyelids, too. “I do mean Luka.”
“I thought you’d hate me,” Elizabeth said. “Once you knew. It’s felt so wrong.”
“It’s what I said,” Lauren told her. “People are complicated. Luka didn’t leave Piper. Piper left him. For her own reasons, and they were real to her. It’s a long time ago, though, and I don’t think there’s much about the two of you that has anything to do with Piper.”
“Is it terrible,” Elizabeth asked, “that now, when I’ve torpedoed any chance of a relationship with her, I want one? I lost all that chance to have a sister. I never even saw her, not really, and I think I missed something good. She’s not just a pretty girl. She’s a sunny person, and a kind one. She always was. Maybe I thought then that optimists were stupid.” She tried to smile. “I know better now. People need a reason to go on when things are hard. They need faith that the future can be better.”
“After surgery, you mean,” Lauren said.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “And maybe always, because the alternative is being bitter, and I don’t want to be bitter.”
Lauren’s hand stilled, and then she finished with the blush and said, “I’m doing your mascara now. Don’t talk for a wee minute. I’ll talk instead. Piper’s hurting. You said it yourself. When you don’t have enough love inside, you don’t have enough to send out, either. That’s where she is right now, but she’s too sweet and sunny a soul not to find happiness again, and the wheel keeps turning, doesn’t it? Life doesn’t stay the same. Give her some time for the wheel to turn. You’re both women with love to give. I reckon that eventually, you’ll be able to give it to each other.”
“Not if she was hanging onto some fantasy that she was going to get back with Luka,” Elizabeth said.
“Thought I said not to talk,” Lauren said. “I’m making you beautiful here.” Elizabeth smiled, but Lauren went on, “Because you won’t give him up? Wait. Don’t answer that. Let me get the second coat on.”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said, when she was allowed to speak again. “Right now, it seems I don’t know much.”
Hours later, though, sitting in a dimly lit, white-tablecloth waterfront restaurant in her pale-pink floral dress that somehow managed to be structured and floaty at the same time and her sexy-girl champagne-colored shoes, eating squid-ink-and-crayfish linguine with green-lipped mussels so fresh, you could swear you were tasting the sea, the scent of the perfume Luka had helped her choose wafting up to her as she looked at him in a charcoal jacket and a white dress shirt in a cotton so fine it was almost silky, through both of which she could still see the bulk of his arm muscles, his shoulders, and the whole solid, steady presence he was, hearing him answer a question about rugby strategy with the kind of cool competence that made your knees weak, and imagining the banked fires behind it …
Well, yeah. That was sensory overload. She thought,Yes, because I won’t give him up. Because I won’t give any of this up.And then he glanced at her and smiled, and her heart turned over.
Eventually, they were finished with dinner and on to dessert, which in her case was tiny, tender cinnamon donuts drizzled with dark chocolate and accompanied by salted caramel ice cream, because why the hell not, and she was also finishing a glass of Greywacke Chardonnay so rich, it was like lemon meringue pie and toasted hazelnuts had had a baby. Nils said, “Now that I’ve forced Luka to talk shop, it’s time to do a little of my own,” and the mood shifted.
“Oh?” Elizabeth asked. What, they were going to discuss a case? Here? It was all right with her, but non-surgeons tended to get queasy around the topic of brain surgery. Especially when they’d eaten a very large steak with truffle butter and a mountain of charred greens, plus a truly impressive number of oysters. On the other hand, Luka wasn’t really the queasy type, so maybe he’d just be bored. And Nils’s wife Candy, despite her blonde fluffiness, was probably used to it.
Nils said, “How are you settling in? Any concerns?”
“Fine,” she said. “No concerns.” Depending how you felt about weeping rivers of tears in a man’s lap while your former stepmother and her captain-of-industry new husband watched, after your father had decimated everything you were and left you a quivering wreck, and then had quite possibly burned your only filial relationship to the ground. If you called it fine to be shaking, still, from the aftershocks of an earthquake that had rocked your foundations—then, yes, she was fine.
“Fine,” Nils said. “Hmm. One could almost think you were Norwegian.” He smiled. Wintry, but real.
“I enjoy it,” she said. “The hospital. The surgeries. It’s not really very different, except that you don’t have to worry about a patient’s insurance not covering the surgery they need, or having them not come in to be checked out in time because they can’t afford it, until it’s too late for me to help. I don’t miss that one bit. Or gunshot wounds. On lack of gunshot wounds, you have the U.S. beat. And since you can so rarely truly repair the kind of gunshot wounds a neurosurgeon gets, I don’t even miss the challenge.”
“Hmm,” Nils said. “And the place?”
“What, Auckland?”
“Auckland,” he said. “New Zealand.”
“You moved here yourself from somewhere else, didn’t you?” she asked. “What didyouthink?”
