Page 51 of The Last Sunrise

As I arrive at the Garcia shipyard, it’s nearly deserted. I find Amara and Prisha holding cardboard signs that saySTOP SETCORP’S GREED!NO MORE RESORTS!LESS TOURISTS, MORE LIFE!YOUR PARADISE IS MY NIGHTMARE! Cars honk as they pass, and the small group chants together.

What the hell am I doing here?

Will my presence actually help?

Or will I just be a spoiled brat joining their protest to make myself feel better about what my mom’s doing to these people?

I begin to regret coming just as I spot Julián from across the street. My chest aches at the sight of him, my body and mind miss him in a desperate way. I’m going to tell him that I will do anything I can to stop this, to save his family. I’ll give him every dime that my mother has been pouring into my bank account since before I knew what it meant.

I rush across the street, dodging a motorbike and two cars, only to have his expression stop me dead in my tracks. The look on his face burns into me; the pure disgust, the visceral hatred cuts me in half.

I begin my desperate plea from a few yards away. “Julián, please listen to me. Just hear me out. I had—”

As I reach him, he continues his death glare at me. His face red with anger and his eyes wide and bright, but his voice flat as the pavement under our feet. “What are you doing here?”

I look around, taking in the small group of people gathered. Families, I assume, who work for his fishery. Nearly all of them, including Amara and Prisha, are watching us.

“I want to help. I want to try to—”

He cuts me off. “And how are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t just let this—”

“Stop with your savior complex. There’s nothing you can do, and you know that. You’re here to make yourself feel better, when you might as well be by her side, signing people’s livelihoods away.” He says the very thing I’ve dreaded to hear.

I reach for his hand that isn’t holding the sign, and he steps back from me like I’m poison.

“Even if you could stop this, which you can’t, you think I can look at you and not see her? How am I supposed to look at this coast and not be reminded every time I see that hotel where my family used to be?” He waves around at the protest. “I can’t look past what that hotel will do to my island, no matter how I felt about you, or our summer fling. Your life will be the same after this, but with even more money, and mine will never be the same. How can I accept that? When you live off her and your trust fund grows off of my familia? You’re part of the problem, not the solution.”

A summer fling.His voice echoes and his words repeat in my mind as he waits, daring me to respond.

“You know this isn’t a fling,” I manage to say through the dizziness growing in my head. My heightened state of emotion is making me shaky, foggy.

He takes another step away from me, lifting his arms in the air at his sides. “You’re right. It isn’t. Itwas.”

My hands wrap around my torso as if he has physically attacked me. I wish he had. I’m utterly speechless, only finding the strength to breathe in and out, and barely that. I can’t defend myself, or defend her, or make things right. I’m just a girl who fell in love with a boy who will hate her until she dies, not knowing just how soon that may be. My mother was right, I am naïve and I’m clueless; Julián was right, I’m just as bad as her. I’m her flesh and blood, and I will profit from his family’s pain.

Julián turns away from me, his back to me and his attention completely on the protest and passing cars. Watching him smile at a group of men, shaking their hands. Slowly they seem to realize who I am, and one by one they glare at me, nodding and shooing at me for me to leave. He doesn’t stop them or seem to even notice. Heartbreak is another kind of pain that I’m used to. I would take all the pain I’ve had in my life, bottle it up, and down it to replace this feeling in my chest, running down my spine, from the tip of my scalp to the bottom of my soles, I’m lost.

My feet under me are unstable as I begin backing away from the crowd, my vision a little blurry. My fingers begin to twitch, and I can feel the blood rushing in, that familiar yet distant spiral into nothing and everything. No, no, no. Not right now, not near Julián and not during their protest. Please, not now. I somehow make it back to the ocean’s side of the road and begin to run until I feel my knees hit the sand and all control disappears. I stare up at the expansive sky as my mind and body leave the present, the past, and possibly the future.

Chapter Twenty

As I blink my eyes open, my mother is standing over me, her eyes small slits, examining me. There’s a beeping noise in the background, jolting me up. I’m not in my suite, not on the beach. Everything rushes back to me.

“Ry. Oh my god. Be careful, lie down.” She eases my shoulders back against the hospital bed.

I look around the room, taken aback and flustered as the rest of the details come to me. Julián, the words he spoke, the honking cars, the ocean waves, and the low voices as I faded.

“I’m fine.” I sit up again, using my stretched-out arms as a shield from her to get any closer to me. “I’m okay. Julián… he…”

She shakes her head, not able to hide the anger she feels at hearing his name from my lips the moment I came to. “He wasn’t there; he didn’t come to your rescue,” she tells me with venom in her voice.

“I didn’t ask because I thought he would rescue me. As you know, nothing can or will rescue me from any of this.” I yank my arm up, the IV pulling at my vein.

“I’m sorry for wording it that way. I’m just… terrified and glad you’re okay. And why were you there? Thank god Jordi found you when he did…”

“Who?”

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