Roman Holiday: The Complete Adventure (2-Book Bundle: The Adventure Begins and The Adventure Continues) (52 page)

They walked by the pool in silence. Ashley reached out a hand to stroke the smooth skin of the palm tree.

“Hang on a second.”

She needed to stop, just for a moment, and be here.

She needed to hunker down in the spot where she’d spent the better part of two days, so that she could look out at Sunnyvale and see it.

Really see it.

And when she did that—when she slid her back down the tree trunk, letting her shirt ruck
up, until she settled into the mulch and felt the cool metal of the padlock against her fingertips—the view was familiar.

But she had changed.

The swimming pool sat vacant. The puddle where the Key deer had stopped to drink had vanished, leaving behind a brown stain and a series of rings to mark the stages of its evaporation.

The eight unoccupied rental units had bleached under the bright sunlight, their colors reminiscent of a set of cheap pastel chalks left out in the rain by some careless child. Crumbling now around the edges, soft and degraded, they wanted only the press of a fingertip to demonstrate the extent of their decay.

Tufts of grass pushed insolently through the webbed lines of cracked cement around the pool.

Ashley looked at all of it, and she thought,
This is what Roman saw
.

He would have seen that grass and thought about how, over time, it would break up the pavement. How the deer would turn the pool into a seasonal lagoon, nudging aside bits of detritus with their soft noses to get at the fresh water stored beneath. How human scavengers would follow. They’d find this place and strip the wiring for copper, break the windows, steal any fixtures that remained.

Roman would have seen all that, but Ashley hadn’t.

And now, even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to stop Sunnyvale’s deterioration. She lacked the resources and the determination.

She lacked any kind of vision, but Roman’s was perfectly clear.

The real miracle was that he’d seen this place for what it was, had known there was nothing worth saving at Sunnyvale—nothing but ghosts and memories, which couldn’t be packed away in boxes—and he’d gone along with her anyway.

She loved him for that. For being a man who would always have a space blanket in his car to offer the shivering refugee who’d padlocked herself to his tree.

For being Roman, who understood love better than she did, even though he’d never had it.

“Is this where you did it?” her father asked.

“Yeah.”

“What did you think you’d achieve?”

She looked up, but she couldn’t read his expression. His head blocked the sun, his face cast in shadow.

“I think I was trying to stop time.”

Tomorrow or the next day, the concrete would be broken up and scraped away by scarred steel blades, the earth beneath leveled and filled, smoothed over and left fallow, waiting for whatever would be built here next.

And that was okay.

It was sad, but it was okay.

Her father’s chin lifted as he gazed up toward the palm fronds. “I used to try to climb this tree.”

“I guess not all your memories from here are bad.”

“I fell out of it and broke my arm.”

The snort of her laughter caught her by surprise, and a slow smile spread over his face.

“I guess it would seem funny,” he said. “To you.”

She let her head settle back against the tree and looked at the sky, swallowing because she was right at the tipping point between laughter and hysteria.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”

He held out a hand, and she took it, allowing him to draw her back to her feet.

They found Mitzi, Gus, and Noah on the beach, gathered around a bonfire. Noah raised one arm aloft and held it there to acknowledge their arrival.

Ashley hugged Mitzi first, then Gus. Noah extended a hand, but Ashley ducked it in favor of a hug and a kiss on his cheek.

“What’s up with the fire?” she asked.

“We’ve been keeping vigil,” Mitzi said.

“It seemed wrong to leave,” Gus explained. “Even though it’s over.” He looked at Ashley. “It is over, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But it was good of you guys to do this.” She meant not only the fire, but also the occupation, the vigil, all the help Mitzi had given her.

“So that’s it?” Mitzi asked. “You’re going to give up just because your dad says you have to?”

“It’s not like that. It’s not mine to decide about. It’s Roman’s.”

“You have him by the balls, though. You could make him do the right thing.”

Ashley glanced from Mitzi’s flashing eyes to Gus’s uncertain smile, then to Noah, who dipped his head and shook it once, slowly, back and forth.

It’s over
, his head shake seemed to say.
Let it be over
.

“I think Roman will do the right thing,” Ashley said.

Mitzi made a disbelieving noise. “He’s a developer. He’ll do whatever makes him the most money. What about Susan? Are we going to forget about her?”

“I could never forget about her. I just … understand her differently now.”

“I don’t get it.” Mitzi’s voice carried a note of sadness Ashley hadn’t anticipated, although she should have. Mitzi, too, had missed her chance to mourn Susan. That was why she’d embraced Ashley’s cause with such zeal, why she had taken over Sunnyvale in Ashley’s absence.

She’d lost her best friend.

“What happened to you?” Mitzi asked.

I grew up
, Ashley wanted to say.
I bent until I couldn’t bend anymore
.

I bent until I broke, and I realized that I never should have been so afraid of breaking. I needed to break so I could finally start to heal
.

“I fell in love,” she said.

Mitzi made a face. “Figures.”

Ashley took her elbow and pulled her closer. She laid her head on Mitzi’s shoulder, pressing her cheek into the soft material of her gray sweatshirt. “Be happy for me,” she said.

“We
are
talking about the heartless dickbag developer, right?”

It was a harsh question, but her voice had softened, and Ashley heard the humor in it. “His name is Roman.”

“He’s not a heartless dickbag,” Noah said.

“See?” Ashley asked. “Noah likes him.”

Mitzi tousled her hair. “Love makes fools of us all, I guess.”

“Speaking of which, where’s Kirk?”

“Back home. Texting me every three minutes to ask when I’ll be there.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s about time?”

She sighed dramatically. “I suppose.”

Ashley turned to Noah. “I know your guys aren’t here now, but are you ready to finish? Tomorrow or whenever?”

“We cleaned out the buildings yesterday, and the power and water are shut off.”

“So all that’s left is knocking them down.”

“Yeah. Although I thought … Where’s Carmen?”

“She’s coming back with Roman.”

Last night, Roman had told her as much in a voice mail. He’d also said he missed her. And he loved her.

She’d played his message three times, feeling like a cube of sugar melting in the rain.

“How long’s that gonna take?” Noah asked.

Twenty-six hours of driving, and Roman had said he needed to stop somewhere today. “A few days, I guess.”

Noah scuffed a rainbow into the sand with his work boot. “I can get the crew out here in the morning.”

“On a Saturday?”

“I’ll make it worth their while.”

“Okay. But I’d like to look around first, one last time.” She glanced from her father to Mitzi, then to Gus and Noah. “Do any of you guys want to come with me?”

“I will,” Mitzi said.

There was a moment’s silence, and then Ashley’s father said, “I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’ve never been inside,” Gus said.

“You’ve been in the office,” Ashley replied.

“Yeah, I mean the rest of it. The other buildings.”

“Really? You were never inside Grandma’s apartment, even?”

A flaming blush spread over his fair cheeks as he glanced toward the office. “No.”

Every day, when Gus drove past on his scrap-collecting round, he would stop with his arm thrown out the truck window, and Susan would emerge from the office with a candy bar or a bag of chips for him.

She would stand by the truck for a few minutes, and they would talk about how their days were going.

Gus was a strange bird. Too strange for most people to know how to talk to him.

But Susan Bowman had always had ten minutes for him, and he’d loved her.

It all kept coming back to love.

If Ashley had been on a quest, this was how it ended, here on this beach. In defeat, she supposed, or at least in concession. But the endpoint was never what mattered on a quest—it was the journey. What you learned along the way.

Ashley had been learning about her grandmother. She’d been learning about love.

For a woman who was so far from perfect, Susan had sure had a lot of love in her life. Love that was imperfect, maybe—but what did that matter?

Weird love was still love.

Imperfect friends were still friends.

Ashley had been so focused on whether or not her grandmother loved her
enough
—whether she’d ever been loved the right way, as if there
were
a right way—that she’d lost sight of what she did have.

She’d had Sunnyvale and canasta and happy hour.

She’d had a grandmother who loved her enough to leave her a trailer full of memories.

And she’d had friends.

She
still
had friends. Imperfect friends. Weird friends. Really excellent friends.

She had Roman.

It was a lot.

“You should see the place,” Ashley said to Gus. “While it’s still here to see. Do you mind, Noah?”

“Not at all. You’ll need flashlights.” He reached behind him into a backpack on the sand and pulled out two Maglites. “I’ve been using these since we cut off the power.”

He handed one to the senator first. Ashley watched her father take it, her gaze lingering on the grim set of his mouth and the unfamiliar vulnerability in his eyes.

She felt understanding settle over her, soft and comfortable.

This would be the funeral they’d never had.

It would be goodbye.

The flashlight Noah handed her was heavy, its textured metal rough against her palm. She held it loosely in her grip as she began to walk, taking the pavers one at a time until she reached the palm tree.

She ran her hand over the bark and dug in with one fingernail, taking a small, fierce bite out of this place she loved so much.

Tomorrow, Sunnyvale would be gone—but the tree wasn’t going anywhere.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

In a few days, Roman would be back, and she wanted him to know where to find her.

When she came to the door, she held a bundled infant in the crook of her elbow, and Roman had to make a concerted effort to tear his attention away from the baby’s brown skin and dark eyes to look at the woman’s face.

She’d aged.

Of course she’d aged. He hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. But God, how bizarre that she could look so changed—her hair a different color than the last time he’d seen it, her face older, her body broad where she’d been slim and youthful, this baby, she had a baby—and yet she was still so utterly Samantha.

Not in the way she looked, or in who she was, because that was obvious, right? Just because you didn’t see someone didn’t mean they ceased to exist, or to be themselves.

No, what shocked him was that she still felt like Samantha to him.

What left him speechless was the discovery that he retained an entire Sam-shaped chamber in his heart, a lobe in his brain, a painful feeling in his chest that came from her, that
was
her, her presence and absence—

He hadn’t understood.

He hadn’t allowed himself to understand.

Sam was gaping at him, the baby staring with huge eyes, its tiny mouth puckered and smacking. Roman’s stomach did a sick flip.

“Long time no see,” he said.

And just like that, his sister started to cry.

It looked so painful—her lips mashed together, turning white, her cheeks going a blotchy red as her eyes narrowed and filled with tears—that he wanted to stop it, so he did what he’d always done.

“Knock knock,” he said.

“Who’s there?” Her voice cracked, a watery waver.

“Interrupting cow.”

“Interrupting cow wh—”

“Moooo.”

Then she really did cry—harsh sobs that fell on him and broke whatever taboo kept him hovering in the doorway of this house he’d never entered. He wrapped his arms around her as she said his name, “Roman, oh my God, Roman,” and he didn’t know what he said back.

It didn’t matter.

He felt the same way he’d felt, so many years ago, when he looked up from the spot on the forest floor where he’d given up hope, only to see a park ranger walk into the clearing.

The same way he’d felt when he woke up in the hospital and Sam was there, and she squeezed him too tight and embarrassed him with her tears, with the way she said,
We thought you were dead, we thought you were dead
, over and over like a jubilant prayer.

As though he’d come through fire, his skin cracked and weeping, too tender to touch. But it wasn’t his skin. It was his heart.

It was him, alive. Painfully, actually, completely alive.

A little blond girl clad all over in shocking pink came thundering into the foyer. “Mommy!” she shouted, and she wrapped her arms around Samantha’s legs.

Roman’s sister cried like he’d come here to break her heart.

He cried, too. Because it hurt to touch her. She smelled like his sister, she sounded like his sister, and he’d been dead for so long. It hurt.

But even as he swiped at his cheeks, embarrassed by his own tears, and Sam leaned down and picked up the girl—her daughter, that had to be her daughter—Roman was grinning at her. Grinning at all three of them.

It felt good to be alive.