He’d never held back his fists or his kicks or his words. “You’re the reason she was living alone in this cabin so far from town. Even if you didn’t push her, you’re the reason she lay at the bottom of the ladder for three long days before I found her.”
Anahera had been studying then; she shouldn’t even have been back in Golden Cove that day, but, homesick, she’d decided to surprise her mother. As always when she first stepped through the door, a part of her had been braced to discover that her father had finally beaten her mother to death.
What she’d found had been far worse.
Haeata crumpled at the bottom of a fallen ladder, the glass front of a framed picture of her and Anahera smashed on the ground beside her, and her dried blood a dark stain against the wood.
All those dreams of happiness gone. Just like that.
Later, the authorities had told her that her mother’s heart had given out, but they hadn’t been able to meet her eyes when she asked if it had been before the fall or after. They’d wanted her to believe Haeata had died quickly and without suffering, but it was equally possible that she’d lain there too hurt to summon help but conscious and in pain.
Her mother’s heart hadn’t always been weak. It had been destroyed by stress, by fear, by the constant anguish of living with a man who treated her worse than he would a stray kurī. “I’d like it if you got off my property.” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “And don’t come back or I’ll have you charged with trespassing.”
A twisting flash on her father’s face, his hand fisting by his side.
“Yes,” she said softly in English, “leopards never do change their spots.”
Angry red rising under the darkness of his skin, Jason jumped back behind the wheel of his truck and reversed out of the drive in a grinding screech of rubber against stone.
Only after she was certain he was gone did Anahera turn back to the ruins and allow her tears to fall. Those tears were for her mother, for all the dreams that Haeata hadn’t been able to realize, for all the pain she’d suffered in her forty-one years of life. And for all the dazzling hopes she’d had for her daughter.
“Auē, aroha mai, māmā, aroha mai,” Anahera said, the words of apology a rasp and the smell of burned wood in her throat. “I’m so sorry I came so close to giving up on life. I promise you I won’t do it again. I’ll fly again, get out of this damn town.” Rubbing away her tears, she went to the cliff edge and watched wave after wave crash onto the sand in a natural symphony as haunting as those she’d heard in the great performance chambers of Europe.
At the sound of footsteps on gravel, she turned expecting Will. He might’ve been out cold when she left, but she knew he wasn’t a man who slept much. But it wasn’t Will walking toward her. “Vincent,” she said, trying not to think about those bonfires on the beach and how eagerly he’d crouched by the kindling. “What are you doing here?” At the same time, she realized she hadn’t heard the sound of a vehicle.
“Decided to get in a run before a set of virtual meetings.”
His clothes seemed to bear that out: running pants in black that hugged his legs and a fitted long-sleeved dark gray hoodie with black stripes down the sides, his hands gloved against the cold. Mud coated his shoes and splattered his running pants halfway up his calves.
“Took the bush track down from my place,” he said, catching her glance. “I heard about the cabin, wanted to see how bad it was.” He pushed back the hood to reveal the golden strands of his hair, his tawny eyes returning to her after a quick look at the ruins. “I’m sorry. I know how much it meant to you.”
“I’m just glad I wasn’t in it at the time.” Using the excuse of turning to regard the damage, Anahera took several steps away from the edge of the cliff. Paranoia or not, she felt a hell of a lot safer now that she wasn’t anywhere near an edge over which she could be pushed. “Do you remember that summer when my mum and I moved in and we all had a picnic in the yard?”