Previously
Before Marisol, Nick's mates never learn the real reason he keeps returning to Peru. His mates dismiss it; Mum senses it. He flies home from the Amazon determined to find honest customers for Samuel's coffee, but forty emails bring thirty-seven silences and two flat rejections. Just as doubt sets in, Melbourne roaster Priya says yes, chocolate and orange peel, and orders a pallet. The cooperative signs its first Australian buyer, freeing three families from Vargas's debt trap. Nick and Marisol's bond deepens across the distance. Then, days before his return flight, Rosa sends an urgent message: "We have a problem."
---
“Distance means so little when someone means so much.” — Tom McNeal
---
Nick heard the twin Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines spool up behind him, a low, building whine that climbed into a roar. Brakes off, and the LATAM 787-8 began hauling 228 tonnes of aluminum, carbon fibre, and nervous humans down the runway, gathering speed until the shudder of tarmac gave way to nothing at all. Nick watched Melbourne tilt and shrink through the window, and felt something tilt and shrink in his chest while six months of waiting finally converted into motion.
Nine hours later, a flight attendant with a practised smile held up a seatbelt buckle and began the safety briefing Nick had heard once or twice before. This time he watched the whole thing, oxygen masks and floating seat cushions and all, his mum's voice still sitting somewhere behind his ribs. He was going back to Peru with Australian trinkets to share and one very clear idea, finally, of what he wanted to say when he landed.
Marisol was waiting past the barrier at Jorge Chávez, and Nick spotted her before she saw him, hair pulled back, reading something on her phone with the same focused frown she'd had over her grandfather's farm all those months ago. He almost called out. Instead, he found himself just watching her for a second, the way you look at something you've been picturing for six months and want to get exactly right in your memory before it becomes real again.
Then she looked up, and whatever careful thing Nick had planned to say evaporated on the spot.
“You cut your hair,” she said, which was not what either of them had rehearsed for this moment, and it broke something open between them, both of them laughing before he'd even reached her.
The hug lasted longer than an airport hug reasonably should. Neither of them seemed to mind holding up the arrivals hall.
“I have something to say,” Nick said, once they'd untangled enough to actually look at each other, “and I've been rehearsing it since Santiago, so let me just get it out before I lose my nerve.”
Marisol raised an eyebrow, amused, waiting.
“I like you,” Nick said. Plain, no hedging, no joke to hide behind. “Not in the vague way people say that from a safe distance. I mean I've spent six months choosing to keep talking to you every single day, even on the nights I was exhausted and had nothing interesting to say, and I want to keep choosing that, properly, not just over WhatsApp.”
For a moment Marisol said nothing at all, and Nick had just enough time to wonder if he'd read this wrong. Then she stepped in and kissed him, quick and certain, right there in front of a bored security guard and a family reuniting loudly two metres away.
“Finally,” she said against his cheek. “I was thinking Australians only communicated in jokes.”
They took the long way to her car, in no hurry now that hurrying had stopped feeling necessary.
They had two days in Lima before Nick continued east, and they spent both of them exactly the way people do when six months of distance have just collapsed into arm's reach: happily and unable to stop talking. Marisol took him to a cevichería her grandfather used to swear by, and Nick discovered a version of ceviche that made every plate he'd eaten before taste like a rough draft.
Over the meal, Marisol finally told him what she'd been too careful to mention over text, that her trade group had been quietly tracking the cooperative's export numbers since Priya's order, and that Rosa had recently called her, worried, about something to do with paperwork Nick didn't yet understand.
“Worried how?” Nick asked.
“You'll see when you get there,” Marisol said, which told him nothing and everything at once.
On his last morning in Lima, she drove him to the bus station herself instead of just seeing him off from the flat, and this time there was no careful distance in the way she held his hand. “Go fix whatever this is,” she said. “And then come back through here before you fly home. I'm not doing six months of just texting again if I can help it.”
Nick promised, and he meant it in a way that felt different from every promise he'd made on this trip so far.
