Page 127 of The Mistakes I've Made
But this day?
On this day, we were opening Windows Hotel and Resort.
It’d been a long year, full of amazing highs and a few rocky lows as well. The structure of the hotel had sustained more damage than we’d anticipated—that, or it had been in bad shape to begin with. Either way, we’d had to tear down much of the original building and start over.
It wasn’t until the bulldozers had arrived that morning that I realized just how attached I’d become to that stupid old building, and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling as they had taken it down piece by piece.
Thankfully, insurance had covered a lot of damage, and we had been able to start anew, bringing back most of what we’d lost. Then, things had begun to roll right along.
Until the day I had woken up with blood on the sheets and had to be rushed to the hospital.
The wordmiscarriagehad hung in the air as Taylor and I waited for the tech to find a viable heartbeat for the baby we’d both fallen so hopelessly in love with. When that first littlethump-thumphad filled the room, I hadn’t thought I’d ever hear anything sweeter in my whole life.
From that moment on, my activity level had been restricted to desk work, and the pressure for Taylor to finish the hotel had only doubled. He’d worked endlessly, giving fishing tours during the day and putting up drywall at night.
And, somehow, in the middle of all that hard work, he’d still managed to get down on one of those tired knees and ask me to marry him.
Of course I’d said yes.
We had gotten married just days before baby Matthew was born. We’d stood on the beach, barefoot, surrounded by family and friends, as our unborn son kicked his approval deep in my womb. Taylor had cupped my cheek and vowed to be my lifelong partner, promising to always make me laugh and never make me cry.
I’d vowed to be the best wife and mother I could.
It was a promise I held dearly to my heart.
I hadn’t come to Ocracoke looking for a family or a home, but that is exactly what I’d found.
“Hey, Aunt Lani?” Lizzie called out, peeking her head into the freshly painted doors of the hotel lobby.
I’d been hiding in here for the last several minutes, trying to calm the last bit of my nerves, but it seemed my smart little niece had found me.
Although, at a whopping nine years old, she wasn’t looking so little anymore.
“Yeah, sweetheart,” I said. “Over here!”
She found me standing by the large window that overlooked the bay. It was the one major change we’d made to the lobby, knowing it would make a huge visual statement to the guests upon their arrival.
“Hey,” she said with a big smile, giving me a hug in the process. “There is a man here to see you.”
“Okay.” I grinned, loving the yin and yang of this girl.
One minute, she could be lecturing you on quantum physics, and the next, she’d be a perfectly normal kid, complaining about video game levels and how lame it was that she wasn’t allowed to be on Snapchat yet.
“Do you know what his name is? Or what he might need? There are a lot of people here today and—”
“Hello, Leilani.”
The deep, familiar voice stopped me dead in my tracks.
It’d been a solid year since I heard from the man I called father by name only. The last correspondence we’d had was a formal letter I’d sent him, letting him know I no longer needed his trust fund or the job he’d so benevolently blessed me with.
Since then, I’d heard through the grapevine that his wedding to Becky had been the talk of the company, although no one had actually been invited. And, although Piper was now out on her own, having started an up-and-coming interior design business six months ago, she regularly supplied me with Hart gossip from Hawaii.
Unfortunately, she’d failed to catch this little detail.
It would have been nice to have a heads-up that my father was coming.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, feeling suddenly frozen in place.
