“You need to let me go,” he says.
“No.” After finally learning that I wasn’t to blame for Courtney’s death, I can’t face being responsible for the death of her brother. “Help is coming,” I spurt.
He pushes away from me. “It’ll take too long for that ship to get here.”
I grab his arm. “Do you hear that?”
I turn toward the hum of a motor, but I can’t see anything over the choppy water.
“Let me go.”
“Wait. Look!”
In the distance, a green light speeds toward us. It looks halfway between us and the cruise ship, which is now heading in our direction.
“They must’ve sent out a lifeboat.”
I wave my hands over my head. “Hey,” I call. “Over here!”
As the light comes closer, the drone of the motor grows louder. A bright beam sweeps across the surrounding water before coming to a stop on Russell and me.
“They see us,” I gurgle, lowering my arms.
The orange-encapsulated boat slows. As it pulls up beside us, a life ring is tossed over the side.
Russell and I sling our arms over the sides of the ring.
“Hang on,” a man calls from the boat. “I’m going to pull you in.”
After being pulled on board, a woman covers us each in a hypothermia blanket and introduces herself as the ship’s nurse.
“Is it just you two out here?” asks the man driving the boat.
“No,” I tell him. “There’s another person in the water, and another on our sailboat. We lost power, so there’s no light. The woman on the boat has been shot. She needs to get to a hospital.”
“We’ve already called the Coast Guard. They’re sending out a helicopter. I’ve got eyes on the boat. I’ll let them know.” The boat driver lifts a radio mic from the dash.
“You said there’s another person in the water?” The other man on the boat asks.
“Yes. She’s wearing a life vest, and it has a flashing white beacon like mine.”
The man scans the surrounding waters with a searchlight beam before turning back to me. “We’ll keep looking. But I don’t spot anyone.”
I huddle against Russell as the ship’s nurse asks if we’ve sustained any major injuries.
We assure her we didn’t, and she tells us to keep the blankets on. “We need to get you warm,” she says.
I turn to Russell when she goes to help search the water for Beth.
“I’m sorry about Courtney.”
“Thanks,” he says, his shoulder touching mine. “But it’s not your fault.”
Across from Russell and me, a small window shows the searchlight sweeping the ocean’s surface. Sitting beside Courtney’s brother, I’m struck by an eerily unsettling feeling—this moment echoing the day I left the trailhead in Beth’s van twenty years ago. Except now I’m not carrying a dark secret.
Although freeing myself from my lie has come at a very high price.
Epilogue
