“No one. I didn’t ... I couldn’t call anyone.”
The words arrived in my head fully formed. Not calculated. Not strategic. Just the only thing that was true.
“Come home with me.”
She went still against me. Not tense—just still. Like the words needed a moment to land.
“What?”
“Aspen. Come home with me.” I heard my own voice and barely recognized it. Stripped of everything I usually wrapped it in—authority, certainty, control. Just raw. “You shouldn’t be here right now. You shouldn’t be in a field house in Roatan processing this between test dives. Come home with me. There’s space. There’s quiet. There’s mountains and snow and nothing that will ask anything of you until you’re ready.”
She didn’t answer immediately. I could feel her thinking—Charlie’s brain never stopped, even in the middle of catastrophe. She was calculating logistics, consequences, what it would mean.
“The SEAS trials?—”
“Jason can run the remaining calibration sets. Mike will supervise. The trials aren’t going anywhere.”
“Asher, I can’t just?—”
“Yes, you can.” I said it with more certainty than I’d said anything in years. “You’ve been carrying everything for everyone for a decade. Let someone carry something for you. Just this once.”
She was quiet for a long time. I could hear her breathing. The waves.
“OK,” she whispered. “OK.”
And the word cracked something open in me too. Because I’d just offered the one place I’d kept for myself—the one place no one got to see, no one got to enter, the house in Aspen that I’d built as a fortress against exactly this kind of vulnerability—and she’d said yes. And I was terrified. And I didn’t take it back.
I eased her gently against the deck railing, made sure she was steady, and pulled out my phone. Sat on the floor next to her while I made the calls, because getting up felt like breaking a promise I hadn’t put into words.
Cheryl first. She’d arrange the plane. She answered on the second ring because Cheryl always answered on the second ring, even at midnight, even in Roatan.
“We need wheels up in three hours. File for Aspen.”
“Copying. Two passengers?”
“Two. And Cheryl—no turbulence if you can help it.”
“I’ll talk to God personally, sir.”
Shane next. My brother picked up on the fourth ring, groggy and annoyed in the way that only Shane could be annoyed—theatrically, even half asleep.
“It’s one in the morning, Ash.”
“I’m coming home. I’m bringing someone with me.”
A beat of silence. Shane was a lot of things—reckless, loud, perpetually in the tabloids for the wrong reasons—but he wasn’t stupid. He heard something in my voice that woke him up the rest of the way.
“Who?”
“Her name is Charlie. She’s ... she lost someone tonight. She needs quiet and space and—” I stopped. Rubbed my face. Charlie was watching me from three feet away and I could see her trying to make sense of what was happening. “Just make sure the guest suite is ready. Extra blankets. She runs cold.”
I’d noticed it—the way she pulled her sleeves over her hands, the way she’d curled into the blanket on the veranda—but I hadn’t known I’d filed it away until the words came out.
“Got it,” Shane said, no jokes now. “Anything else?”
“Asher.” His voice had shifted. The easy theatrics gone. “Who is this woman?”
I looked at Charlie on the floor of the terrace in Roatan with a broken compass pressed to her heart and moonlight on her wet face, and I couldn’t answer the question because every answer I had was too big and too new and too terrifying.
