Seeing him for the first time (even though I was skinny and recovering from illness) had been the best reunion of my life.
He’d cried.
I’d done my best not to.
But feeling his arms clench around me, after I’d given up hope of seeing him alive, was the only good thing about being in Sydney.
For days, he couldn’t stop staring at us, blinking with disbelief, demanding tale after tale of how we’d survived. We spoke until dawn one day, explaining the crash, my relationship with Estelle, and how free I finally felt from the guilt that’d hounded me.
Once the poignant reuniting was over, he helped us stalk the property market, searching for a new house to move into.
It was unbelievably good to see him again. But it made me sad that he was still just as lonely as he’d been when I’d disappeared. Just as heartbroken.
I caught him watching Estelle and me a few times with reminiscent adoration in his eyes.
However, he did find solace in Estelle (they got along as if she was his daughter rather than me his son), and he adored Coconut.
His trip came and went, and it was the hardest bloody thing to say goodbye.
Seeing him put ideas into my head that had no right to be there. Ideas that manifested to obsession. That kept me up at night. That offered hope while Estelle and I struggled with Coco to re-establish ourselves back in this unwanted world.
We’d been given free rent for exactly three months. Estelle thought it was overly generous and insisted on paying for utilities. Me...I thought it wasn’t enough after they’d tried to separate us.
A week ago, Estelle and I had a Skype conversation with Akin’s family and we sat in respectful silence for the dead pilot. We answered their questions about his resting place, and they granted peace by assuring us they didn’t hold us responsible. Akin had flown in worse weather and survived. It was just one of those things.
The newspapers continued to hound us for interviews and the paperwork required to reinstate everything was boring and frustrating. The lawyer was insistent on going through Estelle’s singing assets and advised her to arrange a pre-nup.
Needless to say, she stormed out of his office.
I wouldn’t care if she did ask me to sign a pre-nup. I had no intention of taking her money. But I also had no intention of ever letting her go, so that problem was void.
It didn’t help that every day Coco was stressed. She hated concrete and metal and plastic. She hated shoes and underwear and screeched if, God forbid, we ever tried to wash her blonde ringlets with strawberry-scented shampoo.
It had to be coconut or nothing else.
She refused to swim in the apartment’s tiny communal pool, and rightfully so after her skin erupted with a rash from chlorine. However, the moment we put her in the ocean (even though it was so much colder than our island), she transformed into the happiest child imaginable.
She’d build sandcastles and collect shells and roll around until she was covered in golden grains. She was at home on the beach because that was where she was born. She was birthed to the sea. She belonged to the sea.
How would she ever adapt to the bullying world of cities?
How would she cope with schools and being different?
Would she forever be a free spirit or would she eventually grow up, don a suit, and become some big-wig corporate CEO?
Try as I might, I couldn’t visualize my daughter in an office with a demanding laptop. I saw her as a marine biologist, hair as white as Estelle’s as she tagged dolphins and tracked whales.
She was a daughter of the wild not a child of skyscrapers.
But that didn’t matter because this was our home now.
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MAY
We tried to fit in. We really did.
We went out with Madi and some of her friends.
We did our best to introduce Coco to new things, even though she wailed with frustration.
We still hadn’t found a house, but strangely, we didn’t care.
Coco preferred to spend every waking minute on the beach and sometimes insisted we camp out beneath the moon.
It wasn’t as warm as Fiji, so we carried the blankets from our beds and slept on yoga mats on the sand. Beneath the splattering stars, listening to my daughter’s relaxed sigh, I couldn’t deny I was more at home here than I could ever be beneath a white ceiling and ugly chandelier.
The only thing that ruined our happiness were the dawn surfers sneering at us as if we were homeless and early beach-goers carting umbrellas and boom boxes.
It ruined the fantasy.
The fantasy that we weren’t truly here but there.
Days passed and we did the same thing.
We explored a little more of the city.
We forced ourselves to acclimatise, to go on trains, to attend open houses even though in my heart, I knew we’d never be able to sign such a commitment.
We were lost.
Only this time, our hearts were lost not our bodies.
Despite our problems, Estelle and I grew closer.
So close in fact, I left one night while she was bathing Coco, and headed to the jewellery shop in the local mall a ten-minute walk from our block.
I withdrew some money from the account my father had reopened with the meagre funds I’d earned from working in prison.
I spent all of it.
I bought her a ring.
And I went back to the apartment and got down on one knee and proposed.
Again.
Chapter Eighty
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E S T E L L E
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Being surprised doesn’t mean awe or wow or even shock.