Later, Aine smoothed her hands over the fabric of the dress and looked up at Hayland warmly. "Thank you. I love it."
"A little token from me." He said it the way he always said generous things, as though they cost him nothing and he preferred it that way. "Ravi asked me to drop you somewhere."
The beach came into view and Aine leaned forward in her seat. There on the sand, framed by the open sky, stood two chairs and a small table between them, a canopy draped overhead and threaded through with flowers, white and soft and entirely unexpected. She stepped out of the car and walked toward it slowly, taking it in.
"Where is Ravi?"
Hayland closed the car door behind her. "He should be here any moment. But I have to leave."
"Sure."
She watched him go, then turned back to the arrangement on the beach and smiled to herself at the care that had gone into it. Ravi, who spoke in actions rather than words, had done all of this without saying a single thing about it.
She sat and waited.
Minutes passed. The sea moved steadily against the shore, indifferent and eternal, and there was still no sign of him. Aine rose from the chair and drifted toward the water, letting the pull of it draw her in the way the sea always did. She slipped off her sandals and let the wet sand press up between her toes.
Her fingers found the necklace at her throat without her quite deciding to reach for it. Jokull's gift. She held it between her fingers for a moment and looked out at the horizon.
"Life is really not fair," she said quietly, to no one and to everything at once. "It started with mother. Continued with Jokull." A small, bittersweet smile moved across her face. "And now it is ending with Ravi."
She turned and walked back up the shore, settling herself on her scarf laid out on the sand, and looked out at the waves as they came and went, came and went, as though they had nowhere more important to be.
"Mummy." Her voice dropped to something private and full. "Wherever you are, I am already twenty." She let the number sit in the air for a moment. "I am glad to be your child. Thank you for nurturing me."
The emotion came quietly, the way it always did when she allowed herself to go there, rising without warning and settling in her chest like something warm and heavy at once. She sat with it, not fighting it.
Then she was no longer alone.
A figure dropped into the chair beside her, moving with the kind of casual confidence that immediately told her this was not Ravi. She turned, taking in the cap, the shades, the oversized scarf wrapped around the face with the dedication of someone who had committed fully to an elaborate plan.
Then the scarf came down. The cap came off.
Aine stared.
"Tesni." Her voice arrived somewhere between disbelief and delight. "Are you supposed to be dressed like a man?"
Tesni grinned, entirely unrepentant. "It was the only way I could escape from school."
"Tesni."
"Happy birthday, big sis."
"Thank you."
Tesni reached into her bag and produced a small gift, pressing it into Aine's palm with the particular energy of someone who has been waiting to do this for a long time. Aine unwrapped it carefully and stilled when she saw what was inside.
A bracelet. Delicate and precise, its design moving in the same language as the necklace already sitting at her throat, as though the two pieces had always been meant to find each other.
"Thank you for this. It matches the necklace perfectly."
Tesni's smile faltered. She leaned forward and looked more closely at the necklace, then looked up at Aine with something shifting in her expression.
"What do you mean it matches? That was the necklace we wanted. We saw it together, remember? But when we went back to the jewellery shop to get it, it had already been sold. The shopkeeper said it was the last single piece they had."
Aine touched the necklace at her throat. "It means Jokull bought it for me."
Tesni sat back. "You are still in touch with him?"
"Something like that."
A silence opened between them, full of questions Tesni was clearly organising into some kind of order. Aine looked at her sister's face and made a decision. She told her everything. All of it, from the beginning, laying it out in the unhurried way one can only manage with someone who has known you long enough to hold the weight of it without flinching.
When she finished, Tesni was quiet for a moment.
"So he is Ravi's brother."
"Something like that."
Tesni exhaled slowly, looking out at the water. Then she turned back. "I am glad you are happy, Aine. Genuinely."
"I am also happy to see you." Aine reached over and bumped her shoulder against Tesni's. "What I am not happy about is finding out you escaped school dressed as a man."
Tesni waved this away entirely. "I am not staying with Dad anymore either, by the way."
Aine turned to look at her properly. "Why?"
"I have relocated to my own apartment." Tesni met her eyes with a steadiness that closed the subject before it had properly opened. "Do not ask me anything else."
Aine looked at her for a long moment, reading everything Tesni was not saying in the set of her jaw and the quiet certainty behind her eyes. She understood it. She did not need the details to understand it.
"I am not asking," she said softly. "I understand you."
Something in Tesni's posture eased. She rose to her feet and extended her hand toward the shore, the water catching the light ahead of them, the waves coming in steady and unhurried and indifferent to everything that had just passed between two sisters on a beach.
"Let us catch the waves before your sunshine arrives."
Aine took her hand and stood. "Sure."