The breakfast tray sat on the table where the room service attendant had arranged it that morning while I was walking like a criminal through the dark corridors of the lower decks. Half eaten. The coffee cup had a faint crescent of lip gloss on the rim.
I had ordered that breakfast before dawn. I had written the note by the light of my phone so I wouldn’t wake her. I had tucked the flowers onto her pillow and watched her sleep for a moment before I left, because sometimes I just liked to watch her innocent face and wonder if this life with her was indeed real.
And then I walked out of this stateroom and went to room 546.
On our anniversary.
“No.” The word came out of me involuntarily, low and wrecked. Then louder: “No, no, no—”
I checked the bathroom. All her belongings were still there, a mocking echo of the woman who was my wife, my love, my everything. The yellow sundress that she had planned to wear for docking day today was hanging from her closet, swaying in the gentle sea breeze coming in through the deck doors.
I pressed the heel of my hand against the closet door and held it there.
I had to find Camila. I had to find her before the ship docked at CocoCay. She still had to be somewhere on the ship.
I went to the pool deck first — empty of her. The main dining room, the upper promenade, the library lounge she sometimes wandered into in the mornings. I checked the spa reception, the coffee bar on Deck 6, the quiet reading alcove near the stern that she’d discovered on our first day and mentioned liking.
Nothing. Everywhere I went — nothing.
I stopped in the middle of the Deck 7 corridor and tried to bring my thoughts together.
Where could she be?
My thoughts got interrupted by a long, low shudder beneath my feet — the vibration of engines reducing, of something large and moving coming to a stop. The gentle, unmistakable jolt of the hull meeting the dock.
We had arrived.
Camila would definitely disembark.
I needed to find herbeforeshe did.
The disembarkation queue stretched back from the main exit doors in a long, cheerful, completely immovable line. Families had probably started queuing up long before the ship actually docked. Couples with beach bags and sunscreen were casually chatting, families with fussy babies and excited children inched forward. Children in swimsuits ran in the constrained space between the queue barriers.
My eyes fell on the unqueued VIP corridor reserved for guests in the upper suite, and I realized I was not carrying my VIP exit pass. What if Camila was carrying it, and she was already out of the ship?
I could go back. It was ten minutes to the stateroom and ten minutes back, and by the time I returned the line would have moved — or it wouldn’t, and I’d have wasted twenty minutes that Camila was using to put distance between us.
I stepped into the general queue.
I stood for twenty five excruciating minutes among excited children and happy couples and honeymoon pairs in matching resort wear while the line moved in the small, incremental shuffles. A little girl in front of me was playing a clapping game with her father. A couple two rows ahead were sharing earbuds, heads tilted together.
On any other day, I would have been fine with this. On any other day, this line would have been invisible to me — just the texture of a vacation morning, unremarkable and pleasant, with Camila right beside me.
Today I stood in it and thought about Camila’s face in that doorway, and about everything I should have told her a very long time ago, and about what I was going to say when I finally found her.
Today I was going to come clean. I was going to tell her everything. Every single thing, from the beginning, in the right order.
Starting with the name she had never heard me use.
Mateo Gomez.
CHAPTER 9
CAMILA
I felt the ship dock.
The engines gave a low shudder, followed by the unmistakable hum of engines winding down and the hull settling. The tremor moved through the floor and up through my feet and into my chest like something final. Like a door closing.
