that you were coming from a place of overwhelming grief, I really did, but I wanted . . . no, I needed to go home and take that internship so I could set myself up for the future. I understood what you had to do, but you didn’t even try to understand what I needed to do. You wanted to be happy. But everyone experiences happiness in different ways, James. Hard work and stability are more important to me than happiness. So is having a safety net.”
“It wasn’t just what I wanted, Hannah.” He paused and drew a deep breath because the last thing he wanted was for this week to end like the last one they were together. “I promised Jason that I’d spend New Year’s in Barbados, a place he’d always wanted to go, but could never get away from work to do it.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Yeah, because at the end, he realized some things. That he’d worked too hard and too long and had never lived his life.”
She looked stunned. “You never said . . .”
“It’d been his choice, of course. But in the end, he knew he’d made mistakes. He had regrets, because he’d never done any of the things he would’ve put on a bucket list, including falling in love and having kids. He was always working and looking ahead, never in the moment.” He swallowed hard. “He made me promise I wouldn’t do that, that I’d live doing something that made me happy.”
“I . . . didn’t know that.”
“I know,” he said. “I told myself you never gave me the chance to tell you about it, but honestly?” He shrugged. “I guess I really just wanted you to choose me because you wanted to be with me, not because I guilted you into it with a promise I’d made to Jason.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “I wasn’t capable of making that decision,” she whispered. “Or even of traveling with you, because I knew the truth—that if I talked to you about it, I’d have walked away from the internship, no looking back. And I couldn’t live a Peter Pan life, James. I had to grow up.”
And there it was. He nodded. “Because one of us had to, right?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You did, but that’s okay.” He rose to his feet. “We each did what we had to do. No regrets, right?”
Some emotion crossed her face, but she cleared her expression and gave him a tight nod.
From a lower deck, Sally called out for James.
“Coming,” he called back, eyes on Hannah. Waiting for her to say . . . shit, he had no idea. But she said nothing, and he nodded, then walked away.
Chapter 12
Watching James walk away, Hannah felt her heart break in two all over again. He’d loved her . . .
“Smalls.”
She kept her back to her dad. “It’s not a good time,” she managed to say.
“I just got a message from your mom.”
She closed her eyes, concentrating on the warm breeze caressing her face and the squawk of happy birds.
“WTF didn’t you tell me?” Harry asked.
She let out a mirthless laugh and dropped her head back to look up at the perfectly gorgeous blue sky. Where was a moody storm when she needed one? “Still not using that right, Dad.”
“Your mom’s divorcing me?”
Oh shit. She turned to face him and wanted to cry all over again at the look of utter devastation on his face.
“So it’s true?”
“I meant to tell you,” she whispered.
“So why didn’t you?”
“I . . .” There was no excuse. None. “I was trying to find the right time.”
He gaped at her, hurt and disbelief in every line of his body. “The right time would’ve been the minute you boarded this boat. But you were too busy with that contraption that’s always glued to your ear.”
Yeah, and that contraption was going off as she stood there. The hearing was coming up in a few hours, but she kept her hand out of her pocket and her eyes on her dad. “You know that the only reason I got the time off from work to be here with you for Christmas was by promising my boss I’d work remotely to have her back on this case.”
“I didn’t want you on this boat for Christmas.” He pointed at her. “I wanted you for Christmas. I wanted to spend time like we used to, doing the things we both love. I’ve missed you, and I rarely