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“No,” Brea assured her. “It’s called prevention. Lots of women try to stay looking as young as possible, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Here, that doesn’t exist. The women just age with no cosmetic help whatsoever.
“Oh, the women here think I’m so strange. Look at me— I’m a mysterious white woman living alone in a little house. And my Thai is abysmal, so I can only have conversations with people who speak English or other expats— most of whom have run away from something. Like me.”
Oriana thought she might burst into tears. Just the way Brea spoke of her reality was heartbreaking in its honesty. But Brea had always been this way— very self-aware in ways Oriana had never been.
Perhaps due to shock, Oriana again lost track of herself and had nothing to say. Brea’s smile waned, and she shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t have a spare bed,” Brea said finally. “But if you want to nap in my bedroom, it’s yours.”
“Oh. No.” Although Oriana was exhausted, she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to sleep again. “But I’m sort of hungry. Have you eaten dinner yet?”
Brea explained there was a little restaurant just down the beach that tourists generally didn’t know about as it wasn’t listed on Google. “I think they try to keep it that way,” Brea said as she led Oriana back outside and toward the sands.
Oriana and Brea walked about two feet apart, headed toward a relative shack, from which aromatic scents of umami and sizzling vegetables and meats flowed.
“That’s better than any advertisement,” Oriana breathed with her eyes closed.
“The food here is to die for,” Brea agreed.
It was clear that they were both avoiding the real topic at hand: why Oriana had just flown halfway around the world. But as they sat at a picnic table overlooking the water, Oriana struggled to comprehend her reasoning. The woman she saw before her, the woman with open, honest eyes and long, flowing salt and pepper hair, clearly had nothing to do with this blackmailer.
Oriana and Brea both ordered Pad Thai and glasses of coconut water. As they sat quietly, they listened to the sound of the noodles sizzling in the skillet as the chef flipped them around. Oriana sipped her coconut water and exhaled all the air from her lungs.
“How’s Reese?” Brea asked. “And Alexa and Joel?”
Gosh, Alexa and Joel had been just little things the last time Oriana and Brea had seen one another.
“Reese is the same,” Oriana said quietly. “He’s gotten into app development, which is a field I don’t know anything about.”
“But Reese was always getting into fields we knew nothing about,” Brea remembered. “He’s a genius.”
“He seems to sense where the technological wave is headed next,” Oriana said with a smile.
“I still haven’t gotten a smartphone,” Brea said. “And I don’t think I would have gotten one if I’d stayed home. I mean, unless Reese had talked me into it, of course.”
Oriana laughed, imagining this alternate timeline and trying not to feel too glum about it. “I hate my smartphone sometimes. I want to throw it out the window and go back to the old ways. Remember when we had to call each other on the party line?”
“What I remember better is eavesdropping on your neighbors,” Brea said mischievously. “When your mom caught us, she was so angry!”
“At least until we told her the gossip we’d heard,” Oriana remembered, blushing at the memory. Oh gosh. She missed her mother.
“And Alexa? Joel?”
Oriana explained that Alexa had a toddler, Benny, who’d just gone into cancer remission. Brea looked stricken, tugging her hair.
“A little boy like that should never go through so much pain,” she breathed.
Oriana nodded, her heart in her throat. “We were just so happy when the doctor told us he was going to be all right.”
“I can’t even imagine. What a relief.”
Before Oriana could say anything more, the chef dropped off their Pad Thai and silverware. Immediately, Brea stirred it with a fork to portion out all the toppings. Oriana did the same, imitating her. She wanted to look like she fit in, too.
The food was ridiculously delicious. Each bite was transcendent, a mixture of salt, umami, and peanut flavorings that came together in the wonderful texture of the noodles.
“You can’t get Thai food like this in the States,” Oriana said.
“I imagine not,” Brea said. “We’re in Thailand, after all. It doesn’t get much better than this.”
