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And as I doze off against him just as night begins to fall—naked, damp, sandy—I realize that I wound up with a better version of the fairy tale than I ever could have dreamed of as a child. One with my twins and him, and a future that now appears endlessly bright.
It took two decades, but I wouldn’t change a single thing.
ONSUNDAY AFTERNOON WE LEAVE, both of us rosy-cheeked and sated and suspiciously free of tan lines, and I’m so relaxed that I’m melting as I curl up beside him in the car...until Jeremy calls.
My hands fumble in my panic as I hitspeakeron the phone.
“Mommy?” asks Sophie. “The password isn’t working. To buy stuff on the iPad.”
Caleb and I exchange a glance, and I groan in relief. “Sophie, I already told you no more games and no more gems this week.”
“I know,” she says. “Daddy made me call.”
I stiffen. So does Caleb. I’m not even sure what’s triggered us here, but…something’s amiss.
“Hemadeyou call?” I repeat.
“He said the passcode wouldn’t work and I should ask you.”
When I hang up, Caleb slaps a hand over his face. “Jesus, I’m an idiot. How did it not occur to me you’d be sharing your password with them?”
“Is that how he’s been tracking me?”
“He’s been able to see anything that goes to the cloud from via your Apple ID if you don’t have multi-factor authentication set up—your location, your texts. All he had to do was download it onto a new phone.”
We call Harrison, and once he’s done gloating over the fact that we’re back together, we tell him about the phone issue and he gives us the reply I expected: there’s nothing to be done unless we canproveJeremy was tracking me, which we probably can’t.
“But,” he adds, “you’ve won the battle that matters.”
“We have?” I ask.
“You’re together, right? As long as you’ve got that, you can wait for everything else to sort itself out.”
Caleb’s fingers twine with mine, and he gives me a small smile.
Yeah, Harrison’s right.
This won’t be my last fight with Jeremy. There will be plenty more ahead.
But we’ve won the battle that matters, and whatever happens in the future—I won’t be facing it alone.
40
LUCIE
The air is mild, the skies are cloudless—a perfect day to learn to surf, if we can just get out of the house.
“You’ve got enough sunscreen, right?” Caleb asks, leaning over to peek into my tote. He worries about the twins as if they’re newborns. “And snacks? There won’t be much there. Goldfish and apples aren’t gonna cut it if the kids want to stay.”
I laugh. “For the third time, yes. They’ll be fine. I promise. Isn’t it a forty-minute drive? We’d better get going.”
“Henry can’t find his flip-flops,” Sophie announces, heading toward the door. “But that’s on him.”
Caleb and I exchange a grin over her head. I’ve got no idea where she gets this stuff.
“I think we should install tracking devices in the soles of your shoes, bud,” Caleb says, ruffling my son’s hair.
“Can we?” Henry asks. “Can we do that instead of surfing?” The idea of balancing on a board atop a moving wall of water terrifies him. I get that—it terrifies me too.
