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“I’m still here,” I try to shout, voice thin, and cough violently instead as tears and seawater blur everything together.

Rougher waves push my chin under, and fear closes around my heart with the certainty that I’m going to die out here.

The current drags me back while I watch him kneel over Yelena and do CPR, brushing the wet hair off her face, taking her chin in his hand, pressing his mouth to hers again and again to force the air back into her.

My chest feels punched clean through. Every scrap of his attention stays fixed on her, and still some stupid, drowning part of me that is loyal to the bone waits for him to turn his head, to remember that there were two of us in this water, to come back.

He doesn’t turn his head even once.

Yelena coughs up water and opens her eyes. She grabs his shirt, sobbing into his neck, and he lifts her against him as if he feels everything too keenly to ever let her go.

“Get a hospital ready for her,” he roars, and carries her inside without a backward glance. My heart goes completely cold in my chest.

The cold burrows down into my bones until I cannot feel my own hands, and I don’t know if a single person remembers I’m still out here.

I open my mouth and only a thin rasp comes out. My voice is gone.

The white light on the deck flickers and vanishes as I sink, and only the muffled roar of water fills my ears, thick enough to suffocate me. I will never see Milo again, and every damn cent I have saved for his future will not matter.

Then, as everything fades, a hand clamps around my wrist. An arm hooks under my shoulder and drags me up.

I hope, for one whole breath, that Lev came back. I just want you, some pathetic piece of me begs.

“Hold on, I have got you,” someone pants, leaning over me. The voice is not his. I wince at my own foolishness, and bitterness floods my mouth.

I’m hauled up out of the dark and dropped onto something solid.

Hands press down hard on my sternum, sure to leave it mottled with bruises, until the water surges back up my throat. I cough it out, and my first breath in burns like fire.

“Breathe,” someone says, voice even and toneless, holding me steady by the shoulders. “You’re safe now. Just breathe for me, slow and easy.” They keep me from thrashing off the deck.

They lay me on a bed, and I shake even harder as the warm air reaches my skin, my teeth chattering against each other.

“She’s hypothermic,” a voice says, and blankets pile over me, one thermal layer after another.

I lie there for a stretch of time I cannot measure, wrapped and shaking, peering out from under the layers, and Lev never once comes to find me. The suffocating pain floods straight back into my chest, worse than the cold.

Then I’m lifted, and the sharp scent of antiseptic reaches me, and I make myself open my eyes.

The opulent yacht has docked. Ambulances line the shore, their lights strobing red and white across the dark, accentuating every ripple along the dock.

I see Yelena on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over her face, and Lev right there beside her, watching her like she is all he has left. My own stretcher is wheeled off to the other side.

Lev glances my way once, with little more than a bored look, just long enough to see that I’m breathing, and then he looks back down at her. As they load me in, the restraints across my chest hold me flat, and I should feel safe now, and instead I feel like I’m still out there adrift in the black.

Before the doors block my view, I see him bend down to her. “Lena,” he says, holding her hand fast, and the single syllable is so gentle that I barely recognize it in his mouth, gentler than anything he ever breathed against my ear.

Yelena’s eyes flutter open, and she whispers his name. “Da, I’m right here,” he tells her, and brushes his lips across her knuckles.

And I finally understand it. The name was never mine at all. It was the one small thing that let me near him, the bait that kept me in his snare, and I was only ever a substitute for the woman it belonged to.

He’s been missing a woman who was gone for twenty years, and my similar name and my warm body filled the void she left behind and kept him satiated for a little while. That is all I ever did for him, every time he took me until we were both senseless. He gave me a job and kept me close, a little illicit office affair, and never once gave the two of us a name, and now I understand exactly why he could not.

Substitutes don’t need labels, and maybe this is my punishment for ever forgetting it. They only need to lie in his bed and fill the empty space.

My chest floods with seawater all over again, though I’m lying dry on a stretcher, and the monitor beside me starts to beep. “Try to relax your breathing,” the EMT reminds me. Tears slide out from under my closed eyes.

I know at last exactly who I am to him. We found so many places to be together, and in not one of them was I actually Delaney. I’m only a substitute, a legacy of his grief, whose name happens to sound like Yelena.