Page 168 of Just One Look
The Moon and the Stars
Six weeks on,six days before Christmas, the day before her wedding, and Elizabeth wasn’t in the house with brick walls, packing her suitcase. She’d get to it, but right now, she wasn’t being efficient. She was sitting in the little brick courtyard with its tiny patch of grass, shaded by palms and fern trees, with Luka and Marko and Nyree and Arielle, who was nine months old now and about to walk any day, because every time she got close and fell on her diaper-clad bottom, she laughed, got to her unsteady feet, and tried again. At the moment, she was stacking toys on top of Webster, who was lying on his side at Luka’s feet and snoozing. Webster was currently wearing a doll, some big plastic pop-beads, and a few stacking plastic rings, but he didn’t seem to mind.
And, no, Webster wasn’t Marko and Nyree’s. He was, however, hers and Luka’s. Peter, her house-swap partner, had been offered a faculty position in Atlanta at the end of the fall semester, and he’d taken it. The tiny villa, which had inexplicably grown even more valuable during the past nine months, roaring motorway and all, was empty now, and the Scary Dolls were in a container, wending their way across the Pacific along with the motivational signs. Elizabeth had a feeling that her townhouse, on which Peter and Jessa were paying rent now and negotiating a purchase, would be unrecognizable the next time she saw it, and she didn’t care. As for Webster, he was staying here, because they’d all agreed that was best.
Somebody else was here, too. Piper, sitting with Maddy, who was coloring. Coloring inside the lines, but not looking stressed about it. Also Piper’s new man.
Not a rugby player this time. An entrepreneur, but a quiet one, doing something so high-tech, Elizabeth’s eyes had glazed over when Piper had tried to explain it. A man named Noah, with a homely face and glasses, solidly built and fit and not even five foot nine. He’d never be scoring the try, and he’d never be punching his romantic rival and breaking his nose, but he radiated a kind of quiet, calm strength that made a person feel soothed, and Piper’s edges had already softened. She didn’t just smile now, she laughed, and it came from a real place. And she was becoming, ever so slowly, Elizabeth’s friend.
If you weren’t supposed to be friends with your husband’s ex? If she was your stepsister, you were. Anyway, she and Luka didn’t have to follow those rules, because theydidn’talways color inside the lines. Life was a string of beads, and every bead was different. She wanted to keep adding beads, and she wanted a sister.
Jordan and Clement were here, too, because she’d even managed to get Clement away from the hospital for this thing. Everybody else was drinking mimosas and eating the kind of enormous breakfast that only rugby players would pile onto a plate, and she wasn’t. She was checking her phone.
Luka looked at her, frowned a little, and said, “Wedding business or hospital business?”
“Oh.” She put her phone away. “Actually, I do have to go to the hospital. Just for an hour or so. My ten days off are ironclad, no worries.”
“Except that you have to go in today.” He had that intense look in his eyes. No, he didn’t look happy at all.
“Item One on the list,” she said. “If we’re worried, we agree to ask. And Item Two. For critically important events, we agree that the relationship comes first.”
“Item Two-point-one as well,” he said. “We agree together on which events are critically important. We agreed on the wedding and honeymoon. So far, that’s two rules you’re having trouble with.”
Jordan said, “You have a written list of relationship rules?”
“No,” Luka said. “We have a written list ofmarriagerules.”
“How oddly efficient,” Jordan said. “Who knew that the only person as disciplined and orderly as Elizabeth would turn out to be a rugby player?”
“Rugbycoach,”Elizabeth said. “Strength and conditioning coach. Presumably staying strong and conditioned himself, because it’s what I thought almost the first time I saw him. That he was a fine specimen, surgically speaking. Just one look, and I was gone. Of course, there was my adolescent crush, so … head start.”
Jordan sighed and muttered, “So unfair,” Clement said, “Hey,” and Luka smiled, then sobered and said, “Hospital. Why, exactly?” He was sitting up straight, and he’d gone all the way to Frowning Intensity mode, like a strength and conditioning coach spotting a dangerous lack of pectoral strength in his tighthead prop. “If somebody needs a consult,” he went on, “the consultant isn’t going to be you, because you’re off for those critical events of ours.”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you come with me? If it takes more than half an hour, I give you leave to barge in and tell me we’re leaving right now.”
He said, “Yeh, right.”
“I’m serious,” she said, and stood up. “Come on. Let’s go. I need to get this done, because I’m getting married tomorrow on the Tutukaka Coast, looking out to the Poor Knights Islands and surrounded by everybody I love best in the world, and then I’m going to Fiji. But first, I need to do this.”
* * *
She was nervous,and Luka wasn’t talking, so she thought about details. About her dad, with whom they’d be having dinner tonight in Whangarei after their drive up to Northland, before the night in the tiny guest cottage in their homely wedding venue, a B&B overlooking the coastline she’d loved from the moment she’d seen it, with its green grass and its cliffs, its jutting rocks and foaming seas.
Her dad was paying for the wedding. Shamed into it, as it had turned out, after Angus and Lauren had brought the two of them over to dinner on Waiheke for a celebratory engagement dinner and had gifted them their weeklong Fiji Christmas holiday as a honeymoon.
“I thought of offering the house in Queenstown,” Lauren had said, “but Angus said this was better, and I must say, I agree.”
“Too right you do,” Angus had said. “Nobody wants their honeymoon in somebody else’s spot. It should be your spot. Start of your life together, eh.”
“Except,” Elizabeth had tried to protest the next day, on the phone with both of them as she went through the cafeteria line at the hospital, “this wasyourbooking, and you want to give it to us? Seriously?I’m sorry, but I looked it up. It’s where Oprah goes on vacation! A villa with our own private beach and our own privatepool,in a resort with its own private jet and luxuryyachtand a championship golf course and scuba diving and sailing and kitesurfing and meals brought to us wherever we want them? There are over three hundred staff for eighty guests at that place, they grow their own vegetables and have their own Wagyu cattle to make sure everything meets their very precise requirements, and the website doesn’t even give you the price, it’s so ridiculous. It’s too much. Much too much.Waytoo much.”
“We’ll do it next year,” Angus said. “No worries. But tell your dad, will you? Soothe your guilt with the idea that it’s a bit of a contest, eh, showing him the better man won. I should be past all that, but it seems I’m not. Tell him, and see what he says.”
Her father had offered to pay for the wedding. Once he’d pulled his jaw back up off the floor, that is, after he’d looked up the resort himself and she’d explained to him, very sweetly, exactly who Angus MacDonald was. Of course, half the cost of said wedding, and the onlycloseto expensive part of it, was her dress, but oh, well. Her dad had stewed about that some, too, because he’d look cheap, and she’d let him stew and hadn’t cared.
She wanted a relationship. He was her father, and almost the only family she had, and besides—she was like Piper. She had love inside again, which meant she had love to give, too, or maybe just forgiveness. He’d done the best he could, meager as his best was. She wanted that relationship on new terms, though, and she wanted it at a distance.
He could be her father. He wasn’t going to be her judge. Not anymore.
