All Chapters of Moan For Me Moana : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

132 Chapters

BOOK ME A FLIGHT TO ITALY

❤️‍🩹DYLAN❤️‍🩹I stepped away from the microphone and the room erupted in applause. People were clapping and wiping their eyes and raising their glasses. Octavia was crying into a napkin. Asher was grinning at me like I had just given him the greatest gift in the world.He hugged me before I could move. His arms wrapped around my shoulders and he pulled me close and I stood there with my hands at my sides while my best friend held me and thanked me for words I hadn't even written."That was beautiful, man," Asher said, pulling back to look at my face. "I didn't know you had that in you."I nodded. I couldn't speak. My throat was tight and my chest was burning and my eyes kept drifting to the back of the room where she had been standing."Did you know?" I asked.Asher's smile faded. His eyes flickered. Just for a second. But I saw it."Did I know what?""Did you know she was going to be here?"Asher looked at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. The silence was enough."How

TIRED OF RUNNING

🎀MOANA🎀I sat in the back of the taxi with my hands in my lap and my shoulders shaking and my breath coming in ragged gasps that I couldn't control. The gold dress was bunched around my thighs. My heels were off, sitting on the floor next to my bare feet. I had kicked them off the moment I got in the car because I couldn't run in them anymore.The driver kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror. His eyes were brown, tired, framed by wrinkles that told me he had been doing this job for a long time. He had probably seen crying women in his backseat before. Drunk women. Heartbroken women. Women running away from something.I didn't care what he saw. I didn't care what he thought. I didn't care about anything except getting to the airport and getting on a plane and putting an ocean between me and that reception hall.My phone buzzed in my hand.Octavia.“Where did you go?”I stared at the words. The letters blurred and sharpened and blurred again. My thumb hovered over the keyboard bu

A SMALL COLLISION

❤️‍🩹DYLAN❤️‍🩹The plane landed in Italy at ten in the evening.The flight had been delayed twice. First because of weather, then because of a mechanical issue that kept everyone sitting on the tarmac for an extra hour. I sat by the window with the veil folded in my pocket and my fingers pressing against the fabric every few minutes, feeling for it, making sure it hadn't disappeared. The woman next to me asked if I was okay. I didn't answer.The airport was nearly empty at that hour. A few travelers dragged their suitcases across the terminal, their faces blank with exhaustion. I walked through customs without any luggage because I had left everything at the resort. The overnight bag with my toiletries. The journal I never traveled without. None of it mattered. I had the veil. I had her name. I had the address of her company in my phone. That was all I needed.My branch company here had already prepped everything. A hotel suite. An SUV and driver. A local assistant who had sent me a

RECOGNITION

❤️‍🩹DYLAN❤️‍🩹I stepped out of the elevator and a small body slammed into my leg.I looked down.A girl. Blonde hair falling in messy waves around her face. Green eyes staring up at me with an intensity that made my chest tighten. Pale skin. A tiny beauty mark near her jawline. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her mouth was pressed into a thin line and she was looking at me like I had personally offended her by existing in her path.She was me. A smaller, younger, female version of me. The same face I had been looking at in mirrors for twenty six years, staring back at me from a child who couldn't be more than six or seven years old.I couldn't speak. My mouth opened but no sound came out. My hands hung at my sides. My feet were frozen to the floor. The veil was still in my pocket, the fabric pressed against my thigh, and I couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't do anything except stare at this little girl who had my eyes."Don't you look at where you're going to, mister?"

HELLO LITTLE FLOWER

🎀MOANA🎀I sat in my office with a blank sketchbook in front of me and a pencil in my hand that hadn't moved in forty five minutes.The page was empty except for a few faint lines I had drawn and erased, drawn and erased, the paper rubbed raw in places from the pressure of my hand. I kept starting and stopping, starting and stopping, unable to commit to anything because my mind wasn't here.It was across the ocean. It was in a reception hall with gold curtains and champagne flutes and a man with green eyes who stood at a microphone and talked about the other half of his soul.I hadn't slept since I got back to Italy. Three nights of lying in bed with Mylana curled against my side, her blonde hair spread across my pillow, her small hand clutching Little Flower to her chest. Three nights of staring at the ceiling and listening to her breathe and thinking about the way he looked at me through the veil.Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him. Standing at the microphone. His hands shaking

IS HE MY DAD?

🎀MOANA🎀"Mommy?" Mylana's voice was confused now. Worried. Her smile faded. Her green eyes searched my face. "Are you okay?"I couldn't answer. I couldn't move. I couldn't do anything except stand there and look at him and feel everything I had been trying not to feel for six years crash over me like a wave.Dylan stood up slowly…carefully. Like he was approaching a wild animal."It's okay," he said to Mylana. "Your mommy just needs a minute."He was protecting my daughter from my reaction. He was shielding her from the panic on my face. He was being gentle and patient and nothing like the man I remembered.I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know what to do with any of this.The anger came first. Hot and fast and completely unexpected. It rose up from somewhere deep, somewhere I had been keeping it locked away for six years, and it burned through the fear and the shock and the weakness in my knees."How did you find me?" My voice came out sharp. Not the voice I used with M

SILENCE

🎀MOANA🎀Mylana didn't ask another question until we were in the car.She was unusually silent on the walk to the parking garage. She didn't hold my hand like she usually did. She didn't skip ahead or point at things or ask me what we were having for dinner. She just walked beside me with her arms at her sides and her eyes on the ground and her little mouth pressed into a thin line.I wanted to say something. I wanted to scoop her up and hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay. But I didn't know if everything was going to be okay. I didn't even know what okay looked like anymore.The car ride was quiet. The city blurred past the windows. Streetlights. Buildings. Other cars full of people who didn't have a six year old daughter in the backseat who had just learned that the man with her face was her father.Dylan had answered first. When Mylana asked "Is he my dad?" he had looked at me, waiting, giving me the chance to speak. But I couldn't. My throat was closed. My tongu

THE PROMISE I COULDN'T TAKE BACK

🎀MOANA🎀The following morning, I came downstairs late.I had stayed up all night thinking about Dylan and me. About the way we were and the way we might have been. About what could have happened if I had stayed, if he had changed, if we had been different people.I couldn't sleep until four in the morning. The sun was already starting to rise. The birds were already singing. I lay there with my eyes open and my phone in my hand and his message still unread on the screen.I didn't respond. I couldn't.So I woke up late. My head was heavy. My eyes were swollen. My whole body felt like it had been run over by something large and unforgiving.Mylana was already at the kitchen table when I walked in. She was holding Little Flower in the crook of her arm, her small fingers wrapped around the bear's worn fur. A bowl of cereal was in front of her, half eaten, the milk turning gray.She looked small. Smaller than usual. Like she had shrunk overnight.I walked to her and kissed her forehead.

AFTER SIX YEARS

❤️‍🩹DYLAN❤️‍🩹I needed to be in control of something, I needed my hands doing something other than punching a wall so I told my driver I'll be driving.I drove back to the hotel with one hand on the wheel.The other hand was flat on my thigh and I kept my eyes on the road and my face straight and I let the city move past the windows without really seeing any of it because all I was seeing was a pair of green eyes looking up at me from a six-year-old face and asking why she had my face.I had a daughter.I said it in my head three times on the drive back and it didn't feel real any of the three times. It just floated there, the same shape, the same weight, refusing to settle into something I could hold properly.I parked in the hotel garage and sat in the car for a minute after I cut the engine.The last time I saw Moana she was running out of that cottage door. She had thrown her phone at me and called me a dickhead and cried and ran, and again at the mall.She was already pregnant.

FIRST TIME BEING A DAD

❤️‍🩹DYLAN❤️‍🩹I left the hotel at three fifteen with three bags from two different shops.Strawberry yogurt tubes, the frozen kind, which I had called ahead about because I needed to know they were available before I walked in and had to have that conversation. Mint chocolate chip ice cream in the small individual cup because I didn't know how much she liked to eat in one sitting and I didn't want to guess wrong. Two backup flavours that were close enough to be safe if I had somehow gotten the main one wrong, which I hadn't, but I was not taking chances on the first day.Also a small bouquet of white daisies because I had been passing a flower stand and I had stopped and stood there for thirty seconds and then bought them, which was not something I had ever done in my adult life and I was choosing not to examine the impulse too closely.I got to the school at three forty-five.The other parents were already gathering near the front courtyard, a loose cluster of people with pushchair

...

9 10 11 12 13 14

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP