Page 28 of For Never & Always

“Thank you so much for doing that for us, Chef,” Levi said. “I know it’s a pain.”

Chef Harlow waved him off. “Anything for you, my dude,” she said before leaving them.

“Who would ever have thought, when we first came here, that I would be back as a friend of the chef’s?” Levi rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly nervous that his sort-of career wasn’t actually very impressive in comparison to Hannah almost single-handedly saving a whole business. “It’s pretty great that almost anywhere I go in the world, I can convince someone much cooler than me to feed me a life-changing meal. One of the mentors on set has, like, one of the top-rated restaurants in the world and he—”

“What’s your plan with all this, Blue?” Hannah cut him off. Her foot was tapping in annoyance, and she put her hand on her leg to stop it. “Did you bring me here to gloat about how you’re famous now? Brag about the show?”

“Gloat about what?” he asked, sipping his water, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong this time. “Wait, are you mad at me for having a TV show?”

“I’m not mad about the show!” She slammed her water glass down. “I’m fucking livid that you have everything you said you were going to get when you left here, and you’re in my home that you scorned all our lives, rubbing it in my face. You have this big, wide life full of adventures, you’re on TV, you’re famous in Australia. Obviously you were right to leave, and I was wrong. And if we were really ‘soulmates,’ you would have known I would be mad about it!”

He tugged at his hair in frustration, but his voice was gentle. “How would I have known that, Hannah? You haven’t spoken to me in four years!” He needed to stay calm, because he wanted to prove to Hannah their dynamic had changed—which would mean not getting into fights every time they disagreed. He wanted to understand what was at the root of this. “I don’t understand what’s wrong with having a big, wide life full of adventures,” he said, “but yes, I wanted things when I left here, I got them, and I came back here to show you, because you’re the most important person in my life and I thought you would be proud of me. And, honestly, partly because I never felt good enough for you, and I wanted to prove that I was.”

“But it’s not fair,” she said. Her voice cracked, and his hand moved toward hers of its own volition, but she pulled back like he might burn her. “What am I supposed to do to makeyouproud ofme? You wanted to see the whole world and learn about the cuisine of every culture you could. You wanted to find your place in the great expanse, and I wanted to run a hotel. A really small hotel! One I didn’t even have to fight for my job at! I could have been genuinely bad at running hotels, and I still would have gotten to be manager, because I’m family.”

“That’s bullshit, Hannah. If you’d been bad at it, Cass would have handed you your ass in an expensive handbag and told you to go find another job,” Levi said.

She paused as the first round of food was set in front of them, smiling at the waiter.

“I felt like there was something wrong with me for not wanting more out of my life than this. And you always acted like Carrigan’s was the worst prison, being stuck here the worst possible future.” She dashed tears off her cheek.

“Which meant that what you wanted most in your life was anathema to me,” Levi said, and Hannah shook her head.

“What I was doing with my life was small, and worthless.” He shook his head, but she pleaded with him with her eyes to let her finish. He set down his knife and fork, folding his hands so she knew all his attention was on her. “I wasn’t having great adventures, or making the world better, or having an impact. You said I was hiding. You made me feel like I was wasting my life in the worst way you could imagine: being at Carrigan’s.” He flinched, closing his eyes for a second, but he came back. He was a hell of a lot better at sitting through discomfort than he’d ever been. “What was I supposed to think? You were the Legend Levi Blue, larger than life. You took up so much oxygen in any room. I was barely even there. The mousy, neurotic girl in the corner, color-coding her life to try to make it stable. Why would you choose me if you had a chance?”

His breath rattled in his lungs. “How was I so bad at telling you what you meant to me? Why I needed to leave? I was so sure you understood why and that you just didn’t love me enough to care.”

She choked back a sob, stuffing a bite into her mouth.

“Hannah, you are the only thing in a room that makes it possible to breathe. Youareoxygen. You’re the one thing most in color in this whole world. I didn’t choose to fall in love with you, because I’m not skilled enough at being a human to have made that choice for myself. Falling in love with you is the smartest, most emotionally responsible thing I’ve ever done, which is how you know I didn’t choose it.”

He pushed his hair out of his face. “I didn’t run from us. I rantoeverything else. Because even though I loved you with every cell of my being, even though being in love with you was the biggest thing in my life, you were the only thing for me at Carrigan’s, and I knew I couldn’t build a future that rested on loving you. That wouldn’t have been fair, to either of us.”

“I know!” she said, still crying. “And I wanted you to have the wide, amazing, international career you dreamed of. It’s why I told you not to come back, so you wouldn’t get trapped here, by us. By this suffocating love that keeps trying to take over our lives! I had to stay here, to keep Carrigan’s safe, but I let you get out! But now you’re back with everything, and I sacrificed all of that for nothing, because Ididn’tkeep Carrigan’s safe.”

He sat back in his seat, a hand over his eyes. “And now I’ve blown back in, showing off my big fancy career that’s so much bigger than Carrigan’s, that’s always going to take me away again. I was trying to show off for my girl, and I…Fuck. I’m so bad at this. How am I so bad at this?”

Levi had been very mad at himself about a lot of things in his thirty-six years, but he’d almost never been as devastated as he was right now, realizing how much damage he’d done to his wife.

He cut his very excellent food into very tiny pieces as he thought about what to say. “Look, yes, I want to gloat. I do. I want to crow to every kid who made fun of me in high school, ‘Look at me, I’m fucking famous in Australia.’ I want to gloat to Cass. She was wrong about me, and I’m mad as hell that I can’t shove that in her face, to be honest with you. But no. I didn’t bring you here to gloat.”

“You keep talking about high school like you were some terrible outcast, not a hometown legend.”

“To you this place was some sort of utopia, but you didn’t grow up here.” Why couldn’t she believe him? “You know what the kids we went to high school with were like. You were there. I told you everything.”

“You choose to remember everything bad that ever happened to you, but you refuse to remember anything good. You’ve rewritten our entire life into this horrifying nightmare, erased every amazing time we ever had,” she said. She sounded frustrated, and he was frustrated right back. Did she not remember all the times when he had told her about the awful town kids? How many times he cried and raged about growing up in this town?

“How am I supposed to know what to believe when everything I remember is so different from what you do?”

He swallowed. “Can you just believe that the way I remember it is the way it happenedfor me?”

“I want you to be honest with me about something,” she said suddenly, tugging on her braid. “Did Cass not like you?”

“Um.” He looked around the restaurant wildly. He’d been avoiding this conversation all their lives.

“Talk,” Hannah demanded.

“Cass didn’t…”He paused, trying to find the magic sequence that would make him understood. He started again. “Cass did not…like me very much. I mean, maybe she loved me once, out of love for my parents, or because I was an exceptionally charming small child.” This was an attempt at a joke, because he had not been.

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