I was already moving.
Not toward the exit. Not yet. I was moving through the corridors in my nightgown and pink robe and flat sandals, crying in the open the way you only cried when you’d stopped caring who saw you, when the effort of containing it had simply become impossible. Other guests moved aside as I passed. I didn’t look at any of them.
The captain’s deck was on the upper level, and by the time I reached it I was breathing hard and my face was wet and I probably looked exactly like what I was — a woman in her nightgown who had just watched her marriage end in a dim room on Deck 4.
The officer at the door looked at me with a carefully neutral expression. He looked like he had no training in handling adistraught woman right off the screen of a soap opera. He looked at me cluelessly.
“I need to see the captain,” I said. “Please.”
Captain Reyes had personally met us on the first night of the cruise. He was an older man — mid-sixties, silver-haired, steady and calm. His eyes were deep and wise, and revealed the steadiness that he must have cultured from decades of being the calmest person in any room. He had kind eyes and a measured way of speaking, and he did not ask me why I was in my nightgown, or why I had been crying, or any of the questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.
He just listened.
“I want to disembark when we dock,” I told him. My voice was steadier than I expected. “I won’t be returning to the ship. Please, can I do that?”
“You can, under exceptional circumstances. But there is considerable paperwork involved.” he said. “Are you safe, Mrs. Riley?”
The name landed strangely.Mrs. Riley.I had been Mrs. Riley for three years and it had always felt like something I’d been given rather than earned — something wonderful and slightly improbable, like finding money in a coat pocket.
“I’m safe,” I said. “I just need to get off this ship.”
He nodded, asked nothing further, and called for the forms.
I signed what needed signing. He walked me to the door himself, and paused before opening it.
“Mrs. Riley.” He looked at me directly, with the quiet authority of someone who had seen a great many things from the bridgeof a ship. “Whatever it is — you’ll know what to do. People generally do.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I thanked him and left.
Jason was not in the stateroom when I got back.
The door was slightly ajar — maybe he’d been here. Looking for me, or maybe returning from her, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore.
The breakfast tray was still on the table. His note was still propped against the coffee cup. The flowers were still on the pillow.
I opened the closet and started packing.
I worked quickly and without thinking, because thinking meant visions, and the visions kept coming anyway — fragments that arrived without warning and lodged themselves behind my eyes. Jason’s hands on her hips. The particular way he shoved himself into her, which I knew, which I had always thought of as mine to know. The sounds she’d made. How he had called him his little bitch.
Stop.Stop, stop, stop.
I packed the beach clothes I’d brought for today. The sandals. The book I hadn’t started yet. I moved through it all methodically, item by item, because methodical was the only thing available to me.
I was zipping the second bag when the door opened.
I turned, braced for Jason.
It wasn’t Jason.
The woman from the bed was wearing a silk slip dress now, black, her poker-straight hair immaculate. The man behind her was middle-aged, heavily tattooed across both forearms. He had a menacing and haunting look in his eyes.
She looked around the stateroom casually, as if she was just someone viewing a property she was considering purchasing.
“Don’t be too heartbroken,” she said. Her accent was heavy, Spanish-laden. Her voice was pleasant and completely without warmth. “This was always going to happen. It was only a question of when.”
I said nothing.
She held up her phone.
