Meet Me in Hawaii by Georgia Toffolo (best affordable ebook reader TXT) 📗

And so here she was, batting away memories, replying to yet one more email, drowning in the…the suffocation of her life, the same suffocation she’d fled ten years ago.

‘And you think Henry Hawkesbury was a spoilt brat?’ she asked herself out loud. ‘Get over yourself Zoe Tayler. Blake Hawkesbury just died, Lily is in mourning, Rolf’s got pneumonia, and you’re complaining? You’re alive, you’ve got a job people dream about, you’re in paradise—stop bitching about having to write an email.’

Quickly, she typed:

I just heard Blake Hawkesbury died. Lily’s Mum’s away at the moment so I hope you’ll check on her—you know how close to him she was.

And then she switched to autopilot, and kept typing. She’d been typing versions of the same email for so long she could just about write it in her sleep. Soothe, placate, deflect.

She reread her message, checking for typos, hit send, then returned to her interrupted article.

But stubbornly, the words wouldn’t come. As she sat there watching the cursor blink, it struck her that when she’d checked for typos in that email she hadn’t absorbed one word of the actual content.

She went back to the email she’d sent, read it again, and knew why the content hadn’t pulled her in: it was tepid, it was practised, it was nothing. Even the reference to staying in her room all day writing her story on Malie’s godfather’s surf school was a glib throwaway, nothing but a facile reassurance that they could go—to—bed—please!

Strictly speaking she would be working in her room all day. She was going to finish that article, then she was going to write a brief on the surf school for a documentary maker she’d met on a trip last year, then she was going to tackle the research on Poerava she ordinarily would have done a week before flying in. But she had oh-so-carefully ‘forgotten’ to mention the cocktail party she’d be attending in the evening—an omission that suddenly troubled her.

She started to rub her hands up and down her thighs, then stopped herself. She didn’t need to remind herself why her parents worried; they never stopped telling her they worried. And at almost twenty-eight years old she didn’t need to confess every single thing she did or feel guilty about skipping an occasional detail that might cause them unnecessary anxiety.

Especially since she knew nothing was going to happen to her at the cocktail party. Nothing interesting, anyway. She’d been to so many of those parties she could describe exactly how the evening would unfold. She’d dress up and do her hair and make-up. She’d drink champagne, eat canapes, meet the resort manager if he/she was there, be schmoozed by the public relations executive who’d arranged her travel. She’d talk to as many people as she could, gathering information on the resort and the area’s most interesting attractions, and at the end of the evening she’d return to her room with Cristina and go immediately to bed to rest up for the always-busy first day of action.

Boring.

So boring maybe she should just skip it. After her recent travel-fest no one could blame her for preferring a quiet night in. Even when you were being flown Business Class (as she invariably was), air travel was exhausting, especially when you had to navigate airports in a wheelchair. And then, of course, she had jetlag to contend with, which could kick in at any moment, not to mention—

‘Oh. My. God! Listen to yourself! Sermonising on the evils of travel! Who even are you?’

She sat up straighter. She wasn’t going to lie to herself by pretending she was too tired to go to a two-and-a-half-hour party when what she was actually suffering from was a guilty conscience over not telling her parents she was going out. Nor was she going to send a follow-up email mentioning the party. That would be tantamount to asking for permission to attend when she—did—not—need—permission! She also didn’t need another email shot back at her listing the dangers that lurked in the unfamiliar dark.

What she was going to do was remind herself—visually, since she couldn’t trust the tortured inside of her head—that she was living the life she’d always dreamed of.

She pushed away from the desk and wheeled herself onto the large sundeck of her bungalow, gazing at the endlessness of blue.

Blue was her favourite colour, and it didn’t get more beautiful than this, laid out in shades shifting seamlessly from crystal to powder to electric to azure to sapphire, all the way out to the horizon where the lagoon collided with a vivid cerulean sky. Her bungalow seemed to be suspended between two worlds—and in a way that was exactly what it was, perched on stilts over water, not earth. There were glass panels in the floor inside that allowed you to see the colourful fish darting freely below, but Zoe preferred this outdoor vantage point. In her soul she was soaring, skimming across the lagoon, rising into the air, flying straight up to the heavens.

This was why she’d fought so hard to not return home to Hawke’s Cove with her parents. This beauty, this freedom.

It had been worth every trade-off she’d negotiated—the apartment that had been bought for her off the plan and before construction so modifications could be made for her wheelchair, the physiotherapist who came twice a week, the cleaning service, the detailed itineraries provided to her parents whenever she was travelling, Cristina’s assistance, the regular phone calls when she was at home, the barrage of emails when she was working, a hundred other inconsequential intrusions.

It had been a fight for her life…at the cost of her parents’ hope for a cure.

‘Fight your big battles to the death, but don’t sweat the scrappy skirmishes if you want to win the long war,’ she said again, looking out across the lagoon.

Once more she heard Finn saying those words. But now she could see him, too. His crooked smile with the tiny chip in his front tooth as he’d tucked a