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No matter what I wanted, the truth was, I didn’t deserve her. I’d had that beautiful woman warming my bed for years, and I didn’t cherish her.
She was lost to me, and after what I witnessed last night, I didn’t think there was any amount of groveling that would work well enough to put me back in her good graces, to get her to see that I understood just how foolish I was to let a woman like her go.
Even if I knew that there was no hope for me to undo all the damage I’d done, I still had to face the day. I had to check on her, and I needed to know that she was okay.
So, I exited the bed, noted her dress from last night was thrown on the chair in the corner of the room, and walked out of the bedroom.
There was no sign of her in the kitchen or the living room, so I crossed over to my bedroom. She wasn’t there, either, but there was evidence that she’d come into the bathroom and used the shower this morning.
It wasn’t a bad place to start, so I did the same. But I was quick about it.
Twenty minutes later, I was ready to go, but had not a clue where I might find her. I thought about the resort and tried to recall a specific place that would be open this early that she might go to. A shop, a restaurant, or possibly the pool.
But then a thought popped into my head, and I had a feeling I knew precisely where I would find her. Grabbing the key for the villa, I moved to the door and left.
Ten minutes later, I learned I was right.
At the early morning hour, I wasn’t surprised to see that it was my wife sitting on the sand on a mostly empty beach with her bucket for collecting shells positioned in front of her.
For a few minutes, I stood there and watched her. She stared out at the ocean, never once losing focus. Not even when a runner jogged by with his dog.
Needing to know the state of things between us, and wanting desperately to make sure she was okay, I made my approach. When I sat down beside her, Kiera didn’t look at me. Her eyes remained focused on the ocean waves and the rising sun while I took in the sight of her tear-stained cheeks.
Evidently, no matter how much she’d cried last night, there was still so much pain inside her. Guilt and agony ate away at me, something squeezing painfully in my chest. How could I have done this to her?
Knowing it wouldn’t benefit either one of us if I lost it, too, I took in a deep breath and composed myself. I leaned forward, looked in her bucket, and saw two shells. One that looked like many of the ones she’d collected over the years, and another that was the complete opposite. Its color was striking, but it was just a piece of a shell.
“Only two shells?” I asked, hoping she’d show me some grace at my attempt to break the ice.
“They’re all broken,” she said, following a moment of silence.
“What?”
“The shells,” Kiera clarified, her gaze still trained on the water. “I walked up and down this beach for at least an hour, and I only found a single unbroken shell. The rest are all destroyed. Just bits and pieces of their former selves. It’s heartbreaking that I used to find dozens of them, whole and unharmed, years ago. Now, I struggled to find just one like that.”
Kiera still hadn’t looked at me, but I couldn’t let that deter me from doing or saying what needed to be said.
“They’re like us,” I declared.
That did it. She turned her head in my direction, her red-rimmed eyes focused on mine. “What?”
“The broken shells,” I started. “They’re like us. Years ago, they were perfect and whole. Now, after having weathered so many years, most of them are broken.” I reached inside the bucket, took out the broken one, and lifted it between us. “It doesn’t make what they used to be any less beautiful, and it doesn’t mean that they can’t be transformed into something even better than they were before.”
It felt like hours passed as I waited for Kiera to respond. She simply stared at me for a long time without saying a word, and her face revealed nothing about the thoughts swirling in her mind.
Finally, she asked, “You think there’s that kind of hope for us? To somehow find a way to be better than before, when everything we were together was already perfect?”
God, I fucking hoped so.
But I had to admit there was a lot of validity to what she said. It seemed impossible that we could go from being all that we were to something better. I wasn’t sure what better than that could look like. I wasn’t sure it existed.
“I don’t know, Kiera,” I answered honestly.
She gave me a nod, looked away, and pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth to bite down on it. Her arms were wrapped around her shins, her knees bent up to the point she could have rested her chin on them if she wanted to. The wetness was forming in her eyes, and I prayed she wasn’t going to break down. I didn’t think I could see her like that again; once had been enough.
Long minutes passed, neither of us saying a word, and the fear I felt all week long began to rear its ugly head once more. Was this going to be it for us?
Eventually, as a single tear rolled down her cheek, Kiera rasped, “I wanted to love you until the day I died, Johnny. While I think I always will in some way, it’ll never be the way I had dreamed it would. And that makes me sad.” As though she hadn’t already ripped my heart to shreds, Kiera looked at me again, resting her cheek on her knees, and whispered, “I hate that I can’t love you for the rest of my life the way I always wanted.”
