“Time to earn your sea legs!” Jim elbows Matthew playfully as I duck under the rain shield towards Jules and Patricia. But Matthew’s grimace tells me he’s as ready to get wet as a spool of cotton candy.
I jump up and grab his arm as Jim unties us.
“You sit under the bimi-thingy, Matthew,” I tell him, cocking my head towards the rain cover. “I’ll stand.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m already soaked,” I tell him. “What’s another ten minutes?”
He doesn’t protest. Soon Matthew is wedged between his mom and future sister like Oreo cream.
I stand beside Jim in my rain gear, gripping onto the metal bar beside the helm as the warm wind snaps my hair against my shoulders. It’s so rainy I can barely see the waves around us. I can certainly feel them, though, pulling us down and upwards like a rocking horse. Patricia and Matthew screech in the same octave as one splashes over the rubber and sprays them in the shins.
“I can see why it would have been hard to land this on Sunday,” I yell to Jim over the sound of the waves. “Was the swell this bad then?”
“Sunday? Nah, trip’s been smooth sailing since you got here. Pretty lucky break so far!”
I wrinkle my nose in confusion.
“Caleb said the waves were too high on Wayasewa. It’s why we skipped our picnic.”
Jim shakes his head.
“Don’t think so, mate. We haven’t had a wave over two feet all week, until now.”
“Are you sure?”
He nods.
“I’d be a pretty crap First Mate if I wasn’t!”
As he speaks, I watch his blonde mustache bounce across his lip like a waterlogged squirrel. Caleb definitely told us we couldn’t land on Wayasewa safely. Did our illustrious captain, lover of all things strict and regimented,lie?
“I must have misheard him,” I cover. If Calebwaslying, the last thing I want to do is out him to Jim. But why would he make that up if it wasn’t true?
When we pull up back to the yacht, our disembarking alittle rougher than usual, Gia is there to meet us with fresh towels.
“Are you alright, Stella?” she asks me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“Just a little seasick, I think,” I lie. It backfires on me when she starts running through all the possible cures: ginger, Dramamine, electro pulse bracelets…
“Thanks so much, Gia, but I’ll be fine. I think I just need to lie down for a second,” I tell her.
I powerwalk downstairs and sink into my bed, still soaked from the ride, to run back over every single minute of the past week in my mind. Running into Caleb on the bridge after dinner. Caleb kissing me in the elevator. But something’s not adding up. What reason would golden retriever-level loyal Caleb have to lie to his precious employers?
I remember something Caleb said on our Patricia recon mission. Gia told him about dinner, about the whale. Probably about the way I stormed out as soon as our plates were cleared.
I chew on my bottom lip. Calebknewthe only way the Warrens would agree to visit the Conservation Center was if their other plans fell through.
Did he lie about the swell forme?
Last night in the lagoon, I told Caleb that whatever we were doing wasn’t worth the risk. But if my theory about the tides is true, he’d already taken it. Caleb was willing to risk his job for me even before he knew if I felt the same way.
If it’s true… maybe whatever this is between us isn’t so meaningless, after all.
I pull the corpse of my phone out to see if I can get it to turn on. Nothing. All I want is to talk to Marianne—to find someone to help me pull out the spoon that’s stuck churning in my garbage disposal brain. There’s only one person on this boat who can know that I know about the tides. One person who can give me the answers I’m looking for.
If I can’t talk to Marianne, I have to go find Caleb.
