We didn’t go back home after that night together in the hotel.How could we?It felt like our adventure together was just beginning and we had so much more to do before we both had to go back home, back to reality. Noah still had another few weeks off before he started nursing college and I, well, I didn’t have a job to go back to, it seemed. Which was confirmed when I received that email officially firing me. I don’t really blame my boss for that. I had sworn at him in front of the entire company. But strangely enough, I’d also gotten another fifty or so emails from the various staff members who I’d sent cards to over the years, each one of them thanking me for the cards and apologizing that they had never gotten to know me.
But I was glad they hadn’t gotten to know me, because the person I had been when I was there wasn’t really a person to get to know, and wasn’t the real me anyway. Zoe was the person to get to know. She was the real me. She always had been, she’d just needed a little more time to come out. She’d taken a slight detour in life to get to this point, but now that she had arrived, she was living loud and bright and tie-bloody-dyed.
Instead of going back to Joburg, Noah and I chartered a yacht to Mozambique. The idea had come to me when we’d been having dinner at my parents’ house the next day and they’d told me about the cruise they wanted to take when they retired. As soon as we’d left, I got in the car and Googled and booked a holiday for the following week. So what if I was a few years late with the cruise that my parents had encouraged me to take? It might have been late, but as it turned out, it was exactly the right time for me. In fact, everything that had happened to me had happened at just the right time, and in just the right way. Like living my teens and childhood in only a couple of days at the age of almost thirty, and then only having my first real love story now. And that was okay. My life had been put on pause by the accident, and then the illness, and then by me. I’d pressed the pause button out of fear, but now I’d picked the damn remote back up and had pressed play! And I was playing in full HD color right now.
Noah and I spent a week on the yacht, winding our way around the six islands off Mozambique and, on the last night on the yacht, wedidmake love. And it was that, by then. Love. Because we’d fallen in love with each other and I was so glad that we’d waited to do it this way. And when we disembarked the next day and walked off hand in hand, we both knew that this was it for us. There was no him and me anymore,there was us. And we had a whole life spread out in front of us, a life where everything and anything was possible . . .
Two weeks later
“Happy birthday,” Noah said, pulling the chair out for me to sit.
“Thank you.” I sat down and looked around. My eyes immediately went to the photo of myself on the wall. I was smiling, red-eyed and red-lipped and with just the tinest bit of chili saliva on my chin.
“Hello! Happy birthday!” the waiter who’d brought me that chili just a little over a month ago said. God, it was amazing to think about how much my life had changed in such a short time. “Welcome back, welcome back,” he said happily, placing the menus down on the table.
I looked around the restaurant and suddenly noticed something.
“Are we here early?”
“Why?”
“It’s empty. Apart from us. Is this place open?” As I said this, the waiter’s face scrunched up into a strange shape and he pursed his lips together tightly and started shaking his head. He looked over at Noah, who seemed to shoot him some sort of warning look.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing! Nothing going on. No! Nothing wrong here. Nothing! No!” He looked back at me and started squeaking in a high-pitched, nervous-sounding voice.
“Obviously something is wrong. Or you wouldn’t be so red in the face and talking in such a high-pitched voice.”
He pursed his lips together even tighter and his face went red, as if it was about to explode.
“Noah, what is going on?”
“I’m so sorry, señora, I just couldn’t. I know I said I could, but I can’t. I’m no good at it.”
“Good at what? What can’t you do?” I looked between Noah and the waiter.
“What?” I asked, feeling a little desperate now.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Noah said.
“What was?”
“SURPRISE!” the waiter suddenly yelled, and then slapped his hands over his mouth again.
“It’s kind of early for that.” Noah shook his head at the waiter.
“Sorry, I know. I know you said they were all going to come in at exactly seven, but I just couldn’t wait. I’m sorry.”
“Who’s coming in? What?” I looked around, my head snapping back and forth, trying to make sense of this all.
Noah hung his head.
“Noah?”
He finally looked up at me. “I organized you a surprise birthday party with some friends and family. At exactly seven, everyone was going to burst through that door over there and surprise you.”
I looked at the door. “They were?”
