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“I guess you’re getting ready to return to Savannah,” Bethany said.
“Yep,” Aria replied, her voice hard, although she hadn’t even bothered to look at flights yet. The money she had left from loans and such could hardly get her back, let alone pay for her rent for the rest of the year. When she returned, she would have to hustle to find a job anywhere or grovel for her father’s cash.
“Your father is so angry,” Bethany said softly, rubbing her cheeks.
“He’s always angry about something,” Aria muttered.
Bethany sighed. Aria sensed she knew Aria was right but wasn’t willing to say it. “He contacted his lawyer this morning to get the ball rolling on suing Whitney.”
Aria bristled and glared at her mother. “There’s so much Dad doesn’t understand about Whitney.” Aria felt protective over the woman on the boat, a woman who’d lived her life with such freedom.
Bethany frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I was researching her the other day, and you know, her dad died the day of the accident. I mean, how would you have felt if you’d learned someone you loved died when you were out on the water?”
Bethany’s eyes glowed with compassion. “I don’t think that will change your father’s mind.”
“It should,” Aria shot back. She then wiped her hands on her thighs and jumped up, scanning the horizon. “Is he around?”
“He’s at the hotel bar,” Bethany said sadly. “But don’t go to him, now. He’s in a mood.”
“So am I.” Aria walked across the sand, back toward the hotel, where she entered the lobby and walked toward her father. When she got right up behind him, she cleared her throat and said, “I have a proposition for you.”
Kenny’s back was very stiff. After a moment, he turned and met Aria’s gaze, looking at her like a businessman looked at a client rather than a father at a daughter. “Yes?”
Aria sat on a stool two away from him and knocked on the counter to order a gin and tonic. Kenny stayed with his beer.
“I don’t want you to sue Whitney,” Aria said.
“Why do you think you have any say in that?”
“I know that I don’t. But I’m willing to make a trade,” Aria said.
“Go on.”
“I will never ask you for money again,” Aria said. “We can put it in writing, and I’ll be, well, not even your daughter.”
Kenny’s eyes shimmered.
“That’s worth a lot to you,” Aria said. “You won’t have to worry about me anymore. I’ll just be— elsewhere. And I’ll never call you for help. I’ll never ask you to put cash in my account. I won’t be a privileged Baldwin anymore. I’ll just be…” She shrugged and dropped her chin, wondering who she would be after all this. “And let’s be honest. It’s not like you’ve ever thought of me as one of your own, anyway.”
Kenny sucked in his cheeks, clearly enraged. “All I can do is think about it.”
Aria turned and locked eyes with him. “I need your word, right now, that you won’t sue Whitney. That you won’t make that woman’s life a living hell.” She raised her hand to shake his, and slowly, he slid his hand into hers and lifted it up and down. At this moment, Aria felt older and wiser than she ever had. Finally, it seemed she was up to figuring out who she was and what she wanted.
But that night, as she packed her suitcase and poised at her computer to purchase a flight, she found herself routing a ticket to Boston rather than Savannah. The trip to the Caribbean had changed her, as had her breakup with her fiancé and her understanding that the other architecture students in Savannah didn’t respect her work. She needed a break, a time of introspection— she needed to breathe some cold and clean air.
There was no telling what Cole Steel would think upon her arrival. There was nothing that told her he even liked her as a friend, save for those big, honest eyes that seemed to pierce all the way through her. Unlike any man she’d met in Savannah or in all of Texas, Cole Steel was the kind of guy she wanted to fall deeply in love with and make it last an eternity. If Cole wasn’t her future, she needed him to help her understand how the world worked. She needed him to take her out onto the open waters between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket and let her scream to the sky above. Never, in all her life, had she felt good enough, right enough, smart enough, or pretty enough— not to be a Baldwin, anyway. And if she was going to be in the midst of a horrific identity crisis, she needed to do it where nobody knew her name, except for Cole.
ChapterThree
Carmella could hardly believe her luck. In her mid-forties, she’d given birth to her first child, a gorgeous girl named Georgia, and for a little while at least, fallen into idealistic motherly bliss. She slept when the baby slept, nursed as she watched the snow fall outside, and laughed herself silly with her husband, Cody, about the joys of their life together.
But now that it was January and Georgia was a few months old, something had changed. The main thing, of course, was that Georgia no longer liked to sleep. She cried all through the night, the morning, and the afternoon— her little face all scrunched up and her feet kicking exuberantly. It broke Carmella’s heart to hear her daughter scream like this. She did everything she could to calm her down, read every single baby blog, talked to her sister, Elsa, and even called a sleeping specialist. Everyone told her that this was probably just a phase, one that Carmella wouldn’t remember later on.
It had gotten so bad that she and Cody had begun to trade off sleep schedules to ensure that neither of them entered a state of psychosis. This led Carmella to miss Cody so much, to miss the warmth of his body beside hers at night, and she often cried when Georgia cried now, laughing to herself as she said, “Cry when the baby cries! Sleep when the baby sleeps!” There were so many “sayings” in motherhood, all of which made her feel like she wasn’t doing a great job.
It was mid-January, the middle of the afternoon, when the doorbell rang. A rarity, Georgia was asleep in the next room, and Carmella walked to the door to find her older sister, Elsa, smiling at her. Carmella fell forward and hugged her sister like she was the last person on earth.
