But Bea had wanted Hawaii, so that’s where she’d gone, and Blanche could get fucked with her judgey face and pointless opinions. She was just jealous, anyway. Tripp hadn’t taken her anywhere since their honeymoon in Italy, and Bea knew for a fact he was still paying off the credit card bills.

But she sat there in her beach chair day after day, looking out at the ocean—as blue as she’d hoped it would be—and Blanche’s words had spun around her mind. Should she have gone somewhere a little more exotic? Somewhere harder to get to? Somewhere where she wasn’t spending her days avoiding families and honeymooners?

It was always a balancing act, separating the wants of the girl she used to be from the needs of the woman she was now.

Another mai tai, too sweet, but she drank it anyway. No, Hawaii was good. Hawaii was accessible, and that’s part of what Southern Manors was selling, right? Class, but in a comfortable way. She might do an entire Hawaiian line for next summer. Hibiscus blooms painted on glass tumblers. Napkin rings in the shape of pineapples. A cheeky hula girl print.

Thinking about work calmed her as it always did, made her brain cease that constant circling, like she was forever looking for the places where she’d stepped wrong, or could step wrong. She never had that uncertainty and self-doubt when it came to her business.

Bea pulled her iPad out of her beach bag where it sat next to the three magazines and two books she’d picked up at the airport, but knew she wouldn’t read.

Within a few minutes, she had a page of ideas for the summer line, and was trying to think of a name for the collection that would be fun and catchy, but not overly cutesy. Another fine line she walked all the time, but easier.

She was on her third attempt (“Something with Blue Hawaii? Too dated?”) when a shadow fell across her chair, and she heard someone say, “Working at the beach? I’m not sure if that’s inspiring or depressing.”

It was the smile that did her in, almost from that first moment. Looking up at the man standing there in striped trunks and a white T-shirt, one hand casually in his pocket, his sunglasses spotted with dried seawater, his hair falling over his brow like he was the hero of some rom-com she’d just stepped into.

Bea smiled back, almost without thinking. Later, she’d realize that he was good at that, at breaching walls before you’d even had a chance to put them up, but on that sunny afternoon, there hadn’t been anything sinister about his charm.

“Beats working in an office,” she heard herself reply, and his grin had deepened, revealing a dimple in his left cheek.

“I’ll drink to that,” he replied, and then he was offering her his hand, that smile as bright as the sun overhead.

“I’m Eddie.”

Eddie. It was a boy’s name, Bea thought, but it suited him because there was something boyish in his smile.

And she liked that. Liked it enough that she let him sit in the empty chair next to her and that she accepted his invitation for dinner that night.

Why not? she’d thought. Wasn’t this the kind of thing that was supposed to go along with this new life of hers? Expensive vacations, fancy cocktails, dinner with a handsome stranger?

They ate in the hotel restaurant, near the big plate glass window overlooking the sea, the sky a violent mix of pink, purple, and orange, a candle flickering between them, expensive wine sweating in a bucket of ice by the table.

Looking back, Bea could see how it was almost too perfect, too much of a romantic cliché, but at the time, it had just felt exciting and … right, somehow. Like she was finally getting everything she deserved.

They talked, and she was surprised at how easy it all was. How easy he was. He was from Maine, originally, and loved boats. He was in Hawaii because he had a friend looking to get into the yacht charter business, and they were scouting out other companies, seeing how it was done.

And she’d told him about growing up in Alabama, leaving out the more Southern gothic aspects of her childhood, focusing on the fancy boarding school, the debutante scene, the all-girls college she’d attended in South Carolina. As she spun out her tales, she realized that she was doing it again, papering parts of Blanche’s life over the less savory parts of hers, but she’d been in the habit for so long that it hardly registered anymore.

Over dessert, laughing sheepishly, a little chagrined, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck: “You are really fucking beautiful.”

Shake of his head. “And I am clearly really fucking drunk,” he added.

But he hadn’t been. He’d had one old-fashioned earlier, and his wine was mostly untouched.

Maybe it should have alarmed her, that he was faking being drunk as an excuse to say something like that to her, a woman he’d just met.

But it didn’t alarm her. It interested her. It felt like it might be a hint at a weakness in a man who, from what she could see, had no reason to be weak. Good-looking, smart, successful …

Bea would eventually find out that he wasn’t in Hawaii “on business” like he’d said, that the charter yacht idea was closer to a pipe dream than an actual pursuit, but by then it was too late and she didn’t care anyway.

“I’m sure you get that a lot,” he went on, and Bea had looked at him, really looked at him.

His eyes were blue, and there was just a hint of red high on his cheekbones, from the sun she thought, not booze or embarrassment.

“I do,” she replied, both because it was true and because she wanted to see how he’d respond. If the script he’d come up with in his head had counted on her playing that mythical creature boys sang about, the pretty girl who didn’t know it.

But he didn’t seem flustered at all. He narrowed his eyes slightly, tilting his glass at her. “So, beautiful and smart enough to know it.”

“And rich,” she added. Also true, and again, she wanted to see the look on his face when she said it.

To his credit, he didn’t give anything away. He just smiled again. “A triple threat, then. Lucky me.”

Bea laughed, tucking her hair behind her ear, sincerely charmed for maybe the first time that evening. She liked that he didn’t bluster about it, didn’t pretend it was no big deal. He probably already knew, of course—later, she’d wonder a lot about that first encounter—but something about the way he handled it appealed to her. He accepted her, right from the start. She’d built an image of the person she wanted to be, and Eddie was perhaps the first person who truly understood it.