Three dots. Then:
Dad:Already in the truck.
Of course they are. The man is always three steps ahead.
I put the phone down. Pick up my pen.
At the bottom of the reinforcement plan, underneath the load calculations, I write:
Dolphin tour. 2 p.m.
It's not a decision. It's a note.
That's all.
FIVE
EMMA
Harold's boat is calledThe Good Life,and it looks exactly the way a seventy-two-year-old man who eats fish and takes afternoon naps would want it to look. Not flashy. Not new. Just well-loved—the hull white with a navy stripe that's been repainted so many times it's developed its own texture. The captain's chair has a sunbleached cushion with a permanent indent from Harold's backside. A cooler is strapped to the stern that I suspect has never once been empty.
Two o'clock. Sun directly overhead, turning the sound into a sheet of blinding white. I've got my hand over my eyes, watching Harold conduct what can only be described as a pre-departure briefing for his crew.
His crew is three eight-year-olds.
“First Mate Aidan.” Harold stands at the helm with the bearing of a naval officer. “Status report.”
“Gerald's family is accounted for.” Aidan salutes. It's not a good salute—wrong hand, wrong angle—but Harold accepts it with a solemn nod. “Steve was spotted near the south post at thirteen hundred hours.”
“Thirteen hundred hours. Outstanding. And the new recruits?”
Olson and Mitch stand at attention. Or their version of it, which involves Olson vibrating slightly and Mitch holding a coil of rope he found that I desperately hope was not attached to anything important.
“Deckhands Roberts, reporting for duty,” Olson says.
“Did you practice your bowline knots?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Show me.”
Olson holds up the rope. There is a knot in it. Whether it's a bowline or simply a tangle is unclear, but Harold examines it with the focused attention of a jeweler appraising a diamond.
“Adequate,” he declares. “We'll work on it.”
Lottie is sitting on the bench at the stern, legstucked under her, face tipped up to the sun with her eyes closed. She's been in Twin Waves for approximately six hours and she already looks different—not relaxed, exactly, but like the rigid thing in her spine has started to loosen. The breeze off the water is pulling strands of red hair from her bun. When Mitch accidentally steps on her foot while scrambling past, she doesn't even open her eyes. Just moves her foot.
“How long has it been since you've been on a boat?” I ask her.
“Ryan took me on a dinner cruise for our anniversary two years ago.” She opens one eye. “He spent the whole time comparing it to the ferry system in Seattle. Efficiency metrics. Load capacity. I think he timed the turns.”
“Romance.”
“He tipped fifteen percent. Exactly. He'd calculated it on his phone before the bill arrived.”
Millie is settled at the bow with her book, though I give it four minutes before the wind makes reading impossible. Jenna is next to her, cross-legged, texting with the intense focus of a teenager pretending she isn't textingFinch.
“Jenna, phone.”
