“Devlin?” I asked.
“Devlin is ... Devlin.” A complicated expression crossed his face. “He handles things differently. Louder. More publicly. We’re working on it.”
I heard what he didn’t say—that “working on it” meant something painful, something ongoing, something that cost him. I didn’t push. That was another thing about the veranda. It let you offer exactly as much as you wanted to and no more.
“My brother and I aren’t working on anything,” I said, before I’d decided to say it. “Wyatt. We haven’t really talked in ... a while.”
Asher glanced at me but didn’t ask why. Just waited.
“Wyatt gave me this compass,” I said. “It’s broken. It was our father’s. He brought it back from Iraq. Wyatt had it after he died.”
I stopped myself. I didn’t usually talk about Wyatt. Or the compass. Or any of the things I carried that I couldn’t fix by working harder.
“Sounds like he knew you pretty well,” Asher said. Quietly. Like he meant it.
“He did. Once.”
The waves kept their rhythm below us. The tree frogs kept singing. And we sat there in a silence that felt like it was holding space for all the things we’d just shown each other.
After a while, Asher got up to get another beer and came back with one for me too, even though I hadn’t asked. He’d noticed I’d finished the wine. He noticed things like that—small, quiet things that a person could miss if they weren’t paying attention. But I was paying attention now. I’d been paying attention since somewhere around the fourth night, when I’d stopped telling myself this was just colleagues sharing a veranda and started admitting, at least to the tree frogs, that I looked forward to this all day. That the hours between the last test dive and themoment I heard him approach on the veranda had started to feel like the longest part.
He settled back into his chair and our shoulders were almost touching. Not quite, but close enough that I could feel the warmth of him without contact. He smelled like salt water and sunscreen and something woodsy underneath that was just him.
“This is nice,” I said. Which was maybe the most inadequate thing I’d ever said, and I’d once described a breakthrough in hyperbaric medicine as “pretty cool” in front of a funding committee.
He turned his head. In the dark, I could only see the outline of his profile and the faint light reflecting off his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
We stayed like that. Not talking. Not needing to. The Caribbean doing its thing below us, ancient and indifferent and beautiful.
I was thinking about time. How strange it was that five days could rearrange your understanding of a person so completely. The man I’d met in San Diego—controlled, calculating, always three moves ahead—wasn’t gone exactly. He was still in there. But here, barefoot on this veranda, he’d let me see the parts of himself that existed underneath the strategy. The parts that missed his brother. The parts that came back to an island full of ghosts because he loved it too much to stay away.
I wondered what parts of me he was seeing. Whether the Charlie on this veranda was someone he’d recognize from the lab.
He stood a few minutes later—got up quietly, the way he did everything, said goodnight, and went inside.
My phone rangat 11:47 p.m.
I know the exact time because I’d just checked it, thinking I should go inside, thinking I should stop sitting in the dark with this man and the warm air and whatever was building between us that I didn’t have a name for yet.
The screen said St. Thomas Royal. Sarah’s facility.
I’d talked to Sarah two days ago. She’d sounded tired but sharp, complaining about the food and asking me detailed questions about the SEAS pressure calibration like she was going to show up and run the tests herself. I’d hung up feeling the way I always did after talking to her—grateful, and guilty that I wasn’t closer, and quietly certain that she’d outlast us all through sheer stubbornness.
I answered on the second ring.
“Dr. Winters, this is Dr. Harrison. I’m calling because—” He paused. A doctor’s pause. The kind they must teach in medical school, the breath before the world changes. “I’m very sorry to tell you that Dr. Chen passed away this evening. It was quite sudden. A cardiac event, approximately forty minutes ago. The staff was with her. She was not in any distress.”
The words landed in a strange order. Passed away. Sudden. Forty minutes ago. Not in any distress.
Forty minutes. Sarah had been dead for forty minutes while I sat on this veranda talking about broken compasses and brothers and chocolate. While I laughed at something Asher said. While the waves did their thing and the tree frogs sang and the world kept spinning like nothing had happened.
“Dr. Winters? Are you still there?”
“Yes.” My voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. A recording of me, played back through bad speakers. “Yes, I’m here.”
He was saying other things. Arrangements. Timeframes. Something about personal effects. The words arrived but theydidn’t attach to anything—they floated past me like subtitles in a language I used to speak.
