Chapter 5 #2
Amber lifted her phone. “Group picture before we leave.”
“No,” Edge and Tarak said at the same time.
“Yes,” Regan said.
They posed.
Of course they posed.
Edge looked like he was being held hostage by joy. Tarak looked like he was planning revenge against photography as a concept. I stood between them while Amber arranged my hair, adjusted my sash, and told me to stop looking suspicious.
“I am suspicious.”
“You’re eighteen,” Amber said. “Try looking legally mysterious instead.”
The boat pulled away from the dock while Amber was still taking pictures.
The marina slid behind us, all white hulls and waving tourists and bright buildings stacked against the coast. Wind rushed over the deck, lifting my hair and tugging at the ridiculous birthday sash Regan had forced over my cover-up.
I should have felt exposed.
Instead, I felt something dangerously close to happy.
Not pure happy. I didn’t know if pure happy existed for people like us.
This was messier. Salt-stung. Bruised around the edges.
But it was real. Edge was here. Tarak was here.
Amber was here. Regan had somehow smuggled a birthday party into a crisis.
The ocean was impossibly blue, and for once, no one was whispering where I couldn’t hear.
“What about Mason and Sienna?” I asked as we left the last crowded docks behind.
Regan made a face.
Edge suddenly became very interested in the horizon.
Tarak coughed.
I looked between them. “What?”
Regan slid her sunglasses down her nose. “You might not want to talk to Sienna for a while.”
My stomach dropped. “Why?”
“She’s not mad at you exactly.”
“That means she is one hundred percent mad at me.”
“She’s a scientist. They hold grudges differently.”
“Oh no.”
“Apparently,” Regan said, drawing the word out, “some of her soil samples were in the burned area.”
I winced.
“And cactus plants.”
I winced harder.
“And habitat markers.”
“Stop.”
“And something about six months of field work.”
I covered my face. “I’m going to throw myself overboard.”
Edge grunted. “Don’t. Then we’d have to rescue you, and I don’t trust these flipper things.”
“You mean fins?” Amber asked.
“I said what I said.”
Regan smirked. “Sienna understands the circumstances.”
“She understands,” Tarak said dryly, “while being furious.”
“That sounds accurate,” Regan said. “She said she hopes you have a happy birthday and that if you ever burn ten acres of desert again, she will personally make you replant it by hand.”
“I respect that,” I said weakly.
“You should,” Regan said. “She meant it.”
The laughter came easier after that. Maybe because guilt was easier to carry when people didn’t treat it like the only thing you were allowed to feel.
The catamaran cut across the water, smooth and fast, the wind pulling the last heaviness of sleep from my body.
Cabo rose behind us in cliffs and white buildings while the open sea spread ahead, glittering under the sun.
Edge tried to pretend he hated the birthday sash until Regan put one on him that said BIRTHDAY BODYGUARD.
He stared down at it.
Then at her.
Then at me.
“Absolutely not.”
I laughed so hard I had to grab the railing.
Regan tied it around him anyway.
Tarak took one look and said, “If you photograph this, I’ll deny knowing all of you.”
Amber photographed it.
The snorkeling spot was tucked near a rocky cove where the water shifted from deep blue to glassy turquoise.
I could see flashes of fish before we even stopped, quick silver movements under the surface.
The crew handed out masks and fins. Amber started asking whether any fish were “emotionally aggressive.” Tarak told her fish did not need her emotional labor.
Edge looked at the fins like they had personally insulted his bloodline.
“I’m not wearing those.”
Regan didn’t even look up from rubbing sunscreen on my shoulder. “Yes, you are.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I survived wars without rubber shoes.”
“You’re not going to survive me if you ruin this birthday by being dramatic.”
Edge put on the fins.
I stared.
Tarak stared.
Amber stared.
Regan capped the sunscreen, satisfied. “Good choice.”
I leaned toward Tarak. “Has she always been this powerful?”
“Yes,” he said. “We just pretend otherwise for morale.”
At the edge of the boat, mask in hand, I looked down into the clear water and felt something inside me go quiet. The sea below looked endless and harmless at the same time, bright with life, full of motion that had nothing to do with warrants or graves or ugly words painted in red.
Regan came up beside me. “Ready?”
“No.”
She smiled. “Jump anyway.”
I looked back at Edge. He stood awkwardly in fins and sunglasses, the birthday bodyguard sash still across his chest because he had apparently accepted defeat. Tarak was beside him, pretending not to be amused. Amber was already shrieking about fish from the swim step.
For one second, I thought about Dylan.
I wondered where he was. If he knew I was out here. If he was staying away because he wanted to or because he was better than the want.
Then I made myself stop.
This was my birthday.
My jump.
My life.
I stepped off the catamaran.
The water swallowed me whole.
Cold. Bright. Shocking. Perfect.
For a heartbeat, there was no sound except the rush of bubbles and my own breath inside the mask. Fish flashed beneath me, yellow and blue and silver, darting around the rocks like sparks from a fire that didn’t burn. Sunlight poured through the water in long golden ribbons.
I kicked once.
Then again.
And for the first time in days, my body didn’t feel like evidence.
It felt like mine.
When I surfaced, I was laughing.
Not a polite laugh. Not a broken almost-laugh. A real one, loud enough that Edge turned toward me immediately, alarmed.
“What?” he barked.
“I’m fine,” I gasped.
His face changed. Softened before he could stop it.
Regan jumped in next, smooth and graceful, because of course she even entered the ocean like she had rehearsed.
Tarak followed with a splash big enough to soak one of the crew members.
Amber shrieked, then declared war. Within minutes, the snorkeling trip had turned into something between a birthday party and a water fight with fish as witnesses.
Edge swam close to me, grumbling about saltwater and fins, but he stayed close.
Not hovering.
Close.
There was a difference.
At one point, a school of fish moved beneath us, hundreds of tiny bodies turning together, flashing silver in the sunlit water. I held my breath and watched them move like one living thing.
Edge floated beside me.
After a minute, he said, “You okay?”
I looked at him through the mask.
Then nodded.
He nodded back once, like that single answer mattered more than anything else said all day.
Maybe it did.
After snorkeling, we climbed back onto the catamaran sun-warmed and dripping.
The crew had laid out food: shrimp tacos, chips, salsa, fruit, lime wedges, cold bottles of water and soda.
Regan made me eat. Amber made me wear a tiny paper crown then started a birthday playlist that was mostly terrible and somehow perfect.
They sang.
Badly.
Edge did not sing, but his mouth moved once, which counted.
Tarak sang like a threat.
Regan sang like she meant it.
And me?
I sat there wrapped in a towel, salt drying on my skin, a paper crown sliding crooked over my damp hair, and let them be ridiculous around me.
For me.
That was the part I couldn’t quite get over.
For me.
Later, when the catamaran turned back toward shore for the dolphin experience, Regan sat beside me on the front netting. The boat bounced lightly over the waves, spray misting our legs.
“Still mad I wouldn’t tell you who was coming?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She smiled. “Good.”
“You’re supposed to apologize.”
“I’m not sorry.”
“Also suspicious.”
“Also correct.” She looked out over the water. “You deserved to be surprised by love today. Not strategy. Not protection. Love.”
My chest tightened.
I looked away quickly, toward the horizon.
The ocean gave me somewhere to put my feelings.
“I didn’t know birthdays could feel like this,” I admitted.
Regan’s shoulder brushed mine. “Like what?”
“Like they matter.”
Her hand found mine on the netting.
“They always did,” she said. “People just failed you.”
I swallowed hard.
That was the thing about Regan. She didn’t soften the truth until it became useless. She said it clean and sharp, then stayed beside you while it bled.
The boat sped on, the coastline growing closer, the afternoon waiting with dolphins and more surprises and a gift at the villa I wasn’t supposed to know about yet.
Dylan still wasn’t there.
The ache of that stayed beneath everything else, stubborn as a bruise.
But maybe that was okay.
Maybe a person could miss someone and still have a beautiful day.
Maybe turning eighteen wasn’t a door swinging open all at once. Maybe it was smaller than that. A jump into blue water. A father in a ridiculous sash. Tarak complaining about fins. Regan’s hand holding mine. Amber laughing. Salt on my lips. Sun on my skin.
Maybe freedom started with one moment where your body finally felt like your own.
I looked back at the wake trailing behind the catamaran, white and foamy against the deep blue sea.
For once, the past was behind me.
And I was moving forward fast enough that it had to work to keep up.
By the time we got back to the villa, the sun had started dropping low over Cabo, turning the water molten gold and the white walls of the house soft pink around the edges.
I was exhausted in the best and strangest way.
My skin smelled like salt, sunscreen, and dolphin water. My hair had dried into a wild mess around my shoulders. My body ached from swimming, laughing, climbing in and out of boats, and pretending my heart didn’t twist every time I looked around and Dylan still wasn’t there.
Nate wasn’t either.
Regan said they were working.
Everyone said they were working.
I believed them.