I can’t look at him. I can’t look anymore. My eyes burn, and my throat, when I swallow, feels as if I gulped Tabasco sauce. It’s hot, and sore, and burns all the way down.

“See you,” I say.

His upper lip lifts. “See ya, girl.”

And before one more emotion hits, before one more hope or want or need curls inside me, I go, setting off for the airline ticket counter.

I don’t turn back, I don’t, not until I know I won’t be able to see him. That’s when I finally turn around, and I’m right. He’s gone. His truck is gone.

I stand in the open-air terminal with people pushing past on all sides, and they keep hurrying this way and that, and the policemen in the street blow their whistles, gesturing traffic past.

Life goes on.

Life just goes on.

It’s almost ten in Seattle when we land, and it’s raining. The airplane windows are splattered with raindrops, and the tarmac glistens in the dark, wet, shiny asphalt stretching in every direction.

It takes over half an hour for the baggage to appear, and by the time I get my luggage and locate my car, it’s quarter to eleven.

Eleven-twenty when I reach home.

One by the time I make it to bed.

I can’t sleep, not for a long time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m alone in the cold house. I don’t know if it’s because in Hawaii it’s only ten o’clock or that I still feel as though I’m humming from flying, but I lie in my bed, feel small and alone, and I don’t think I can do this divorce thing after all.

It’s lonely.

It’s scary.

It’s so not what I want life to be like after all.

Lying in bed, I hear the rain fall, the quiet steady downpour on the roof, in the trees, against the window, pings bouncing in and out of the gutters. After nearly fifteen years in Seattle, the rain is both a comfort and a friend. I know the sound of rain well, know the fullness it gives a night, the way it ushers in midnight and fades at daybreak. There are mornings when it’s still raining as I drive the kids to school, but most mornings we wake to puddles but dry skies.

Snuggling deeper beneath my duvet, I force myself to keep my eyes closed and to think about rain. Not sun. Or the ocean, or the stunningly sweet scent of plumeria, or the cool, gritty feel of sand between my toes.

I’m home, I tell myself. This is where I belong.

Chapter Nine

Nine