Page 38 of Slanting Towards the Sea

THIRTY-FIVE

I CALL MARINA’S COUSIN and he confirms what she said.

The hotel can stand on its own, and the olive grove can become a separate plot of land.

The procedure would take up to six months.

My legs jitter with angst as we talk. So many things would have to align for me to pull off saving the grove while selling the hotel in time to avoid foreclosure.

First but not least, my father would have to agree to this, and given how mad and disappointed he is with me, I doubt he’d let me walk away with this win for myself while I’m stubbornly letting his dream die.

Then, I’d have to convince Asier. The grove isn’t a vital part of the hotel, but it does add value.

When he was here, we discussed his vision for Lovorun at length.

To make it a hotel that would work not only in the summer months, but all year round.

A big part of that would be to offer guests a chance to work in the grove.

To pick the olives in October, to trim the trees in February.

“Maybe I could keep you on as a consultant,” he said, and even though he meant it as a joke, I thought, Well, maybe it’s not such a bad idea .

Before I get the chance to talk this out with either of them, I get an email from Asier with the official offer.

The sum is generous. Enough to cover all our debts and leave us well-off for quite some time into the future.

Enough for Dad to receive the best healthcare for as long as he has left, for Sa?a to invest in opening his own dental practice, and for me to buy myself a new grove if that’s what I decide to do with my share.

My skin is sensitive and edgy as I stare at the numbers on the screen, contemplating how to formulate a response.

The deal seems too far gone to change anything so substantial, but I would never forgive myself if I didn’t try.

And yet, asking puts me in the place where I most hate to be.

It’s like stepping onto the stage, taking my clothes off, spreading my arms, saying, Here are my softest parts. Take your aim.

I try typing something up, but whatever I write falls flat, so I decide to call Asier instead.

The day I toured him through Lovorun, he asked me to show him the olive grove.

Not because he was curious about the trees themselves, but because he wanted to know what they meant to me.

Afterward, when he opened his eyes and looked into mine, I saw that he understood; that a part of him was grieving my loss too.

Maybe this will make him more inclined to help me keep it.

“Hey, Gorgeous,” he says when he picks up. His voice wraps around me, and for a beat, I’m poised between his legs again as he holds me against the schoolyard wall.

“Hey yourself,” I say. “Do you have time to talk?”

“I’m all yours.” His tone is playfully suggestive.

“About the offer—”

“I did everything I could,” he says, more serious now. “Upsold it as much as possible—”

“No, no. The offer is… good. It’s fine.” It’s more than fine, more than I expected, but he doesn’t need to know that.

It’s a business transaction after all—which I’m aware is contradictory since I’m calling to ask him for a favor.

“But I’ve been made aware the other day that…

” I stop. How do I word this? On the other side of the line, he waits for me to continue.

“That there is a way to divide the land into two plots. Where the small gate is. And we’re thinking”—I use the “we” strategically—“to put only the hotel on the market and to keep the olive grove.”

I stop and wait, but he doesn’t say anything.

“We’d do all the prep work on our side before we draft the contract, of course,” I add.

“Ivona—”

“And it goes without saying, we would expect a smaller offer.”

“Ivona.”

His tone is the sound of a landslide detaching.

I have the urge to push against it with a wall of words, anything to keep him from calling it.

“Please, Asier. At least think about it. It won’t be a crucial change for the hotel.

And you know how much the olives mean to me.

” I’m appealing to him not as the investor, but as a human being, maybe even a lover, and it feels a lot like begging.

“If I could do something, I would,” he says. “But this is business, and I need to approach it in that respect. You do understand?”

“I understand you completely.” I spit the words out like a hurt teenager. I’m on that stage, naked, scrambling to cover myself. I’m both devastated and angry with myself for exposing my soft parts in such a silly way.

He sighs. “I’m sorry. Our vision for the hotel includes the orchard. The thing is—” He stops, and I hold my breath, hear him puff his chest out. “They plan to build a bar and spa center there.”

“What?”

“The land beside the hotel. Where the olives are. The architect says it’s the perfect spot for an infinity pool, sitting as it is on that bench of land above the sea.”

“And the trees?”

A pause. “I’m sorry.”

The words crackle in my ears like static. An infinity pool.

They aren’t buying the land because of how beautiful the grove is, or to engage their guests in local culture.

They’re not keeping the olives at all. They’re buying it so they can bulldoze the trees to the ground and replace them with the latest fad.

I’ve seen all those posts on Instagram, of Photoshopped, half-naked women hovering in the pool of turquoise water, their lips and breasts bloated, eyebrows ridiculously thick and combed up.

Superimposing that image over my baba’s land makes me sick to my stomach.

We treat our investments with respect , he said back in Split.

I have the urge to shove those words down his throat.

“But you said you would keep the grove. You said you would build branding around that.” My tone is teeming with accusatory disdain. What I really want to be saying is You asshole. Why did you ask me to show you what the grove meant to me? What sort of sick, perverse move was that?

“I had every intention of pushing that. Seeing you there, I could envision the whole thing, the appeal of it. But the board disagreed, they thought the land would be underutilized.”

I coil into myself, protecting the empty space he’s punched out of me.

“Could you at least try? To propose this new deal without the grove?” If I was begging before, now I’m groveling.

I think about how he held me in his arms in that hotel room not even a week ago.

It has to count for something. Connection—isn’t that what I’ve been seeing my whole life, that having a connection gets things done?

“Sorry, Ivona.” His tone is gentle despite the rejection. “This is our offer. It’s your call, though. You can decide not to sell to us and go with another buyer.”

Yeah , I think. If I had the time . Which I don’t, as the bank has all but sold the debt off to the debt collectors.

If I wait any longer, the land will go to someone else’s hands anyway, and we won’t even get compensated for it, let alone have a say about the olives.

I’ve cornered myself with incredible precision.

“Never mind,” I say, my words clipped. “It was worth a shot.” Before he has a chance to respond, I press the red button on my phone.

I burrow into my bed, and for the longest time don’t come out.

It’s not just that I won’t be able to keep the grove.

Or that they are going to cut down the trees I’ve loved all my life, though that is a big part of it.

It’s that, for a brief while, I bought into the lie that there might be someone out there for me.

That, despite all that is lost to me, there might be a full life ahead of me yet.

Dinnertime goes by, then I hear the six clanks of the spoon hitting the d?ezva in the morning as Dad makes his coffee.

But all the energy has leaked out of me, and I can’t get up.

I call in sick at work, tell them I have a stomach flu.

My boss doesn’t doubt me because I “sure sound rough.” At lunchtime, Dad comes to my room and sits on my bed.

I cover my face with my blanket so he can’t see my swollen eyes.

“You okay?” he asks.

He hasn’t spoken a word that wasn’t strictly necessary since the day I stood my ground and told him and Sa?a that I would sell Lovorun, but now there’s genuine worry in his tone.

“No,” I say.

Dad rubs my back like he used to sometimes when I was a little girl, and that makes the pain expand.

For all his opinionated self-centeredness, for all his disapproval of me and my ways, for all his thinking he knows better than I do about who I should be or how I should behave, he has always had a soft spot for me. “What happened?” he says.

What happened is nothing. Everything. What happened is that every time I’m standing on solid ground, the rug gets pulled out from under me.

What happened is that I’m so tired that my bones feel as though they’re infused with lead.

I’m petrifying, slowly, from within. I just want to lie here, give up.

Why try? All the trying never got me anywhere.

Everything I ever did in love, work, family, hobbies…

ended up at zero. I am done in. I am done.

It’s not that I grieve not having anything, it’s deeper than that.

I don’t even want anything anymore. And not wanting? What other proof of death is there?