Cairn narrowed her eyes. “Look, man, I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’m not angling to be some sugar daddy’s midlife crisis.”
He chuckled. “Oh, I’m not a pervert—just a decoy. She instructed me to distract you until she finished her set.”
“She?” Cairn repeated dumbly. All too late, she realized that the band had stopped playing, that the audience had resumed talking among themselves.
When she turned, she found Delphine standing an arm’s length away, arms folded across her iridescent dress. The look in her watery caramel eyes could have been so many things.
None of those possibilities were forgiveness.
Behind Cairn, Alonso innocently whistled the melody to “The Girl from Ipanema” as he slunk off into the palms.
Cairn’s mouth went bone dry. Her heart hammered in her chest. And in that moment, she blurted out the first words generated by her malfunctioning mind: “Is that feather real peacock?”
Delphine’s face didn’t even twitch. “Six weeks—we haven’t talked in six weeks—and you want to discuss the authenticity of my hair accessories?”
“In retrospect, it wasn’t the smoothest conversation starter,” Cairn admitted. “But you’re talking to me, so in all fairness, it did work.”
“Do you think I haven’t seen you lurking back here, watching me night after night?” Delphine jabbed a finger at the stage. “Do you know how hard it is to get up there and perform and smile and keep my voice steady like nothing’s wrong while you haunt my workplace like a poltergeist? It’s been absolute agony.”
Cairn wiped the perspiration from her brow. Suddenly, she wished she was anywhere but in the humid air of this subtropical bubble. “You stopped returning my messages. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I stopped returning your messages?” Delphine echoed. “Cairn, you went AWOL for days, then bailed on my opening night here, even though you knew it was a huge deal for me. I had to sing to the empty chair I reserved for you in the front row, wondering where you were, or if something had happened to you. Then I found out that same night you were at some party up at Salem State.”
Cairn fidgeted. “I needed space.”
Delphine’s gaze hardened. “Didn’t sound like there was a whole lot of space between you and Theresa.”
So Delphine knew everything. Cairn winced as the hazy memory of that night drifted back. She had just flown in from Canada, after scattering her mother’s ashes along the coastline where she grew up. Desperately needing an escape, she’d stopped by a house party hosted by some former classmates attending college upstate.
The keg beer. The tequila. The Jell-O shots. More tequila. A downward, booze-fueled spiral. Theresa, her old softball teammate, sliding down next to her on the couch. The warmth of their thighs making contact. Leaning into her as they giggled uncontrollably. Her mouth on Theresa’s—who kissed whom first? Then Theresa tugging her up the stairs to an empty room in the sorority house. Hands roaming clumsily. The door creaking open. Was someone else there, watching from the shadows? Whispers, hushed laughter, the flash of a phone camera. Lurching for the bathroom. Throwing up again in the bushes on the walk home. Waking up the next day feeling like a spear had pierced her skull, that dull ache behind her eye sockets, and later, knowing that in just a handful of hours, she had irrevocably altered the course of her life for the worse.
It was all Cairn could take not to vomit all over again right there. “I could tell you about how that night was a blur, that it was just the alcohol, that I blacked out, but I know in the history of cheating, that has literally never made anyone feel any better. I take responsibility.”
Delphine shook her head. “I didn’t stop talking to you because you hooked up with someone else—under the circumstances, I might have been able to get past that. I stopped taking your calls because of what you said to me the next day.”
Cairn remembered the pounding on the door that morning, unsure at first whether it was just her blistering hangover. Instead, she found an agitated Delphine standing on her doorstep. Her eyes had widened as she took in Cairn’s rumpled, day-old clothes and smelled the stale bouquet of alcohol and bile on her breath. “Where were you?” she’d demanded.
Cairn had said nothing at first, but as Delphine began to unload on her about missing her set, and how disappointed she was, something inside of Cairn finally snapped and she said: “She’s dead because of you.”
Those five words had stunned Delphine into silence. Her mouth gaped open as she searched for a response, but Cairn, still halfway drunk from the night before, barreled on. “I almost had her. Another few strokes and I would have reached her if you hadn’t yanked me out first. So how about this: you forgive me for missing your fucking karaoke, and I’ll forgive you for killing my mother. Seem like a fair trade?”
Delphine, trembling, had just pulled off her Claddagh ring and dropped it at Cairn’s feet. It was still spinning like a top on the doorstep as Delphine’s car screeched away from the curb. She hadn’t said a word to Cairn since.
Cairn tried to swallow the concrete lump in her throat. “Those were just drunken words. I hope you know that I don’t blame you for any of it. My mother decided to end her life. That’s something I’m coming to terms with.”
Delphine shook her head. “When you’re grieving, you get a pass for doing a lot of things,” she whispered. “But there’s a limit to how much of an asshole you get to be before the people who love you say ‘enough.’ I deferred attending Juilliard for a year to stay home and take care of you, and that was the thanks I got?”
“I didn’t ask you to press pause on your life for me,” Cairn protested.
“Love is not having to be asked—it’s making sacrifices on your own accord. It’s being there for someone unconditionally.” Her outburst drew the stares of an older couple passing by, so she lowered her voice. “Look—after what happened, I didn’t expect us to jump right into a relationship like everything was fine and beautiful. The timing royally sucked, trust me, I get it. If anything, I just wanted to be there for you as your friend, the way I’ve always been. But you pushed me away.”
Cairn’s eyes burned. “You can’t possibly know what the last few months have been like.”
“Maybe I can’t know exactly what you’re going through,” Delphine admitted. “But you’re not the only person whose heart broke that day on the boat. Ahna was like the mother I never had, since as early as I can remember. She was always there for me.”
Cairn wanted desperately to throw her arms around Delphine, to burrow her face into her best friend’s neck and never let go, but the arm’s length between them was too crowded with the weight of pain and time and betrayal.
“I come here every week,” Cairn said finally, “because I can’t let you go. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready to let you back in either. To let anyone back in.”
“Well, that’s a purgatory you’ve chosen to live in. As of this moment, you don’t get to drag me down there with you.” Delphine exhaled. The anger appeared to leave her body, but it was replaced with a dull look in her eyes that Cairn recognized as something even worse: resignation. “Maybe someday we can be friends again. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t still want to be there for you. But until that day … please don’t come around here again.”