“You... Oh.” I dropped my gaze to the Saint Valentine medal in my hands, trying to come up with something to say, but I couldn’t catch hold of any thoughts at all.
“I think they chopped his head off,” Ollie said, breaking the silence as if he hadn’t just confessed he loved me. “They keep his skull out in some church with a flower crown on it.”
“How... interesting,” I said. It was the only thing I could think to say.
When I looked up at Ollie again, the medal warm in my palm, my heart raced ahead of me, faster than could possibly be safe.He loves me, I thought, not sure what to make of that.
I’d thought I knew what I was getting into when I married Ollie, but I hadn’t, not really. Not the day of our fake wedding. Not when we started sleeping together. I’d let him walk right into my life, intomy bed. I’d broken my second rule, relying on him more than I realized. Our marriage was fake, but the feelings he’d developed were real. As for my own feelings... I couldn’t even begin to pick through them. I didn’t know where to start. I had no idea if what I felt about Ollie was just friendship or something more. I’d never let myself consider it, because it wasn’t a possibility. We’d both been clear from the beginning: This was casual, a mutually beneficial arrangement. Neither of us wanted a real relationship, that was the beauty of the whole thing. That was what had made marrying Ollie such a simple choice.
But with the medal in my hands, nothing seemed simple anymore. How foolish I’d been to think anything about me and Oliver Dunne could ever be simple.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling like a total cliché. I rolled away from Ollie and sat up on the opposite edge of the bed to tuck the medal away into my purse. Ollie didn’t say anything, and I frantically tried to think up some way to spring us out of this awkward conversation and back into more comfortable territory. I spotted the remote on the floor beside the bed and grabbed at it like a life raft. “How much do you want to bet there areDexterreruns playing on Showtime right now?” I said.
Before Ollie could respond, a crash sounded from somewhere on the deck above us.
“What was that?” he said.
“I don’t know.” I leapt from the bed, glad to have an excuse to get dressed. “Maybe it’s Xav.”
I hastily tugged on the clothes I’d left in a heap beside the bed and followed Ollie from the room and up the spiral staircase. When we reached the main deck, Ollie cursed at the sight of light leaking from beneath the galley doors.
We made our way down the rest of the hall and paused outside thegalley to listen. A woman’s voice sounded from inside, but I didn’t recognize it. I couldn’t make out a thing she was saying.
“What should we do?” I whispered. But then a loud pop sounded from within the galley, jolting me into action. Without thinking, I pushed through the galley doors, ready to grab the nearest frying pan and knock whoever it was over the head with it.
But when I stepped inside, I was met by a woman who stood at the sink with a bottle of champagne bubbling over in her hands.
“The fuck?” Ollie said when he stepped in behind me.
I scanned the galley, taking in the mess of champagne on the counters, on the floor, everywhere.
Ollie burst into laughter, but I didn’t think this was funny. Not at all. The woman turned to us with wide eyes and gently set the champagne bottle in the sink. Before I could find anything to say to her, she snatched a dish towel from the counter and dropped to her knees on the galley floor, hurriedly wiping up the mess.
“Bad idea, Jo. Bad idea,” she muttered to herself as she moved the dish towel in circles on the floor.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ollie said.
The directionless way I’d felt moments earlier when Ollie told me he loved me disappeared as I watched this oddly harmless-seeming trespasser clean the galley floor. There was nothing like a crisis to keep me from getting swept up in emotion. Whether or not I loved Ollie didn’t really matter. Getting physically involved with him had been one thing, but getting emotionally involved would be like popping a bottle of champagne. Fun in theory, but risky in practice. Whatever Ollie and I shared, I loved it. I didn’t want to screw that up by making a mess of things. I’d spent enough time cleaning up other people’s messes. I didn’t need to make my own.
When we finally got the woman to talk, she told us her name wasJo Walker and that she was friends with Mr.Simmons, whom Ollie and I knew, seeing as he was friends with the owners and often joined them whenever they took the yacht out. Once she started talking, she didn’t stop—telling us all about her miserable night at her bartending job and how she hadn’t meant any harm.
“I didn’t steal it,” she said, nodding to the champagne bottle in the sink. “I brought it from the bar.”
“Obviously. We’d never keep it on board. That’s an awful champagne,” I said.
“It’s an awful bar,” Jo said, and I decided I liked her despite the trespassing.
“You know,” I said, tapping my finger against my chin as I looked her up and down, “we’re in need of a new stewardess. Perhapsyou’dbe interested, seeing as you seem to like yachts so much.”
“Me?” the woman said at the same time Ollie said, “Are you fecking nuts, Neen?”
“I’m perfectly in my right mind,” I said. “Look at her. She’s perfect for the job.”
I couldn’t explain it, but there was something about this Jo Walker. I recognized that look. It was the face of someone who needed a lucky break.
***
Ollie and I never talked about the Saint Valentine medal or what he’d said. A few days after that night on theSerendipity, I found a thin gold chain on my nightstand. I slipped the St. Valentine medal onto it and hoped he wouldn’t read too much into it. Whenever I wore it, I always kept it tucked beneath my shirt and out of sight.
