“Ah, she wants you,” Carlos said, holding her out to me with the casual confidence of a man handing off a bag of groceries.
Lucia grabbed my shirt with both fists and studied me with the grave intensity of someone conducting a very important interview. Then she put her head on my shoulder and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
“She remembers you,” Marisol said from the doorway, watching with an expression that made my chest tight.
I held her against me—this small, perfect weight—and felt something I rarely allowed myself to feel. The wanting. Not for success or control or the next acquisition, but this. The simple human architecture of people who loved each other, gathered in a kitchen that smelled like coconut milk and green banana.
Charlie appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She’d changed too—loose pants, a simple top, bare feet. Her hair was down, still damp from a shower, curling slightly at the ends in the humidity. She stopped when she saw me—barefoot, holding a toddler, standing in a kitchen that was nothing like my corner office—and something shifted in her expression that I couldn’t read and didn’t trust myself to interpret.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.” Lucia picked that moment to grab a fistful of my hair and pull. “Ow. OK. We’re doing this.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched. It was the closest thing to a real smile she’d given me since the simulation chamber, and I felt it like a fist to the solar plexus.
“Can I help with anything?” she asked Marisol.
“¡Sí! Come, come. You can slice the plantains.”
I watched Charlie take the knife Marisol handed her, watched her fall into easy conversation with Carlos about local fishing methods, watched her laugh at something Marisol said in rapid Spanish that she clearly didn’t fully understand butresponded to anyway because Charlie Winters had never once pretended to be something she wasn’t.
Lucia fell asleep on my shoulder. I held her longer than I needed to.
The first dayof testing started at dawn.
I’d planned to observe from the dock, reviewing data as it came in, maintaining the professional oversight that was technically my role here. Instead I found myself standing at the waterline, watching Charlie wade into the shallows with the local dive team.
She was waist-deep within minutes, helping calibrate the sensor array alongside two technicians who’d started the morning calling her “Doctora” with careful formality. By the third hour, they were calling her Charlie and she was calling them by name—Anselmo, who’d been diving these waters for forty years, and his nephew Marco, who’d just completed his certification.
She didn’t direct from shore. Didn’t hover over a screen while other people did the physical work. She was in the water, adjusting equipment herself, explaining the acoustic frequencies to Anselmo with a patience that never condescended, listening to Marco’s observations about current patterns with genuine interest.
“She’s good with them,” Carlos said, appearing beside me on the dock. “She reminds me of you. Back then.” He squinted at the water. “Before you decided you were too important to get wet.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. Then he grinned—the same grin he’d given me when I was twenty-three and didn’t know the difference between bravery and stupidity.
By noon, the first round of results were in and they were clean. No signal degradation. The acoustic deterrent was performing exactly as designed in open water. Charlie emerged from the shallows with data on her tablet and salt in her hair and an expression of barely contained triumph that she was trying very hard to keep professional.
She hadn’t eaten. I’d been watching long enough to know. She’d been in the water or hunched over equipment since five thirty, running on coffee and adrenaline.
I caught Carlos’s eye and tilted my head toward the lab bench where she’d set up her temporary workstation. Twenty minutes later, a plate appeared there—fresh fruit, bread, sliced fish, a glass of water. No note. No announcement.
I watched from the terrace as she sat down to review data and found the food. She glanced around the lab, briefly puzzled, then ate without pausing her work. Never questioned where it came from.
Good.
Dinner wason the lower terrace, the one that hung over the water like the prow of a ship. Candles in hurricane glass. The rondon was extraordinary, as always, and Carlos held court with stories about the grouper that got away and the tourist who’d tried to feed a barracuda.
Charlie sat across from me, barefoot like everyone else now, her face candlelit and soft with the kind of relaxation I’d never seen on her in San Diego. She laughed at Carlos’s stories. She asked Marisol about Lucia. She was easy here, in a way that made something inside me ache.
“This place,” she said during a lull, looking out at the water. “How did you find it?”
“I didn’t find it. I built it.” I turned my glass in my hands. “After. When I needed somewhere that wasn’t ... anywhere else.”
“Do you have that anywhere else?” she asked. “A place that feels like this?”
“Home.”
