On Sunday morning, the final day of the booking, I packed my things slowly. The suitcase felt heavier because it now held the bracelet Julian had left at reception after our conversation. I had asked Amara to return it to him, but he refused to collect it, and the staff eventually delivered it in a sealed package with a note saying it could be shipped to his address if I preferred. I requested the shipping service and paid the postage myself, a small price to avoid carrying his attempted apology home.
Before leaving, I stood on the villa terrace and looked at the second chair. I had stopped noticing its emptiness until that moment. The view was still beautiful, but I knew the next time I imagined a trip by the sea, I would pay attention to the person I was traveling with rather than trusting a photograph of the destination to guarantee happiness. I took my suitcase down the path to the pier and thanked Amara for helping make a difficult week bearable.
"You looked after yourself," she said. "We just honored your reservation."
It was the right goodbye. No promise of a fresh beginning, no suggestion that island air could cure betrayal. Just a reminder that I had made choices under pressure and had survived the feelings that followed. When the boat pulled away from Morrow Cay, I watched the villas shrink into pale shapes among the palms until I could no longer tell which one had been mine.
Atlanta greeted me with humid air, traffic and the dull impatience of airport shuttles. Nina was waiting outside arrivals in an old green sedan with a crack in the passenger-side dashboard. I saw her through the glass doors and nearly began crying before I reached the curb. She stepped forward, took my suitcase without asking and held me so firmly that I forgot how determined I had been to look composed.
"I can carry it," I murmured into her shoulder.
"I know," she replied. "I'm carrying it because I want to."
She drove without turning on the radio. We passed the neighborhoods I had known all my adult life, the grocery store where Julian and I shopped on Sundays, the park where he had asked me to marry him and the corner where we had taken engagement photographs last autumn. I had expected the city to feel familiar enough to comfort me. Instead, almost every intersection carried a memory I was not ready to examine.
"Do you want to go home first?" Nina asked.
"I think so. I need to see what the apartment feels like."