She stared at the dark screen, seeing her reflection—red-rimmed eyes, salt tracks on her cheeks, the devastated expression of a woman who had gambled on love and lost.
You're Lily St. John, she reminded herself fiercely.You don't fall apart. You adapt. You overcome. You turn lemons into lemonade.
The pep talk rang hollow, but somewhere beneath the grief, something else was stirring.
Determination.
She had hours of footage on her phone. Hours of Alex talking passionately about conservation, about the reef, about why this island mattered. The most authentic, meaningful content she'd ever created.
And she had a platform of six million people waiting to hear what she had to say.
Alex Carmichael might not have been brave enough to fight for them.
But Lily was sure as hell brave enough to fight for something.
She pulled up her editing app, even though it wouldn't sync until she had signal, and started making notes.
New series concept: What Actually MattersConservation over consumptionReal impact, not just pretty picturesThe marine biologist who changed how I see the world
She didn't have Alex.
But she had everything he'd taught her.
And she was going to use it to burn her old life down and build something better from the ashes.
Watch me, Dr. Carmichael, she thought as the boat carried her away from the best and worst two weeks of her life.Watch me turn this heartbreak into something that matters.
And when that video goes viral—and it will—you're going to realize exactly what you let sail away.
It wasn'tcomfort, exactly.
But it was something to hold onto.
And for now, that would have to be enough.
Chapter Fourteen
The supply boat had been gone for seventeen minutes.
Alex knew this because he'd counted every single one of them, standing on the dock like a complete idiot while the boat carrying Lily St. John shrank to a speck on the horizon and then disappeared entirely.
Move, he told himself.Go back to the cabin. Finish your research. Do literally anything besides stand here like a broken robot.
His legs refused to cooperate.
The morning sun beat down on his shoulders, indifferent to his crisis. Waves lapped against the dock pilings with the same rhythm they'd maintained for longer than he could count, unconcerned with the factthat Alex Carmichael had just made the biggest mistake of his life.
You let her go.
The thought circled his brain like a shark sensing blood.
She gave you a dozen chances, and you let her go.
Twenty-three minutes now. He was still counting.
Finally, his body remembered how to function. He turned from the empty horizon and walked back toward the cabin, each step heavier than the last. The path through the jungle felt longer than usual, the familiar terrain somehow foreign without her voice filling the silence with observations and questions and terrible jokes that made him smile despite himself.
The cabin door creaked when he pushed it open, and the sound that used to feel familiar now felt like an accusation.
