Chapter 40 Ore
Chapter 40
Ore
Day 5
Ore only managed about three hours of fitful sleep before she gave up on the idea. She was in turmoil. She needed to send that first draft, but she couldn’t stop thinking about Daniel. This was why men, sex and feelings weren’t supposed to mix. Had she learnt nothing from Kyle? Was she doomed to continually confuse closeness and care for attraction? Now she’d lost the only person on this boat she’d felt like she could trust.
On top of that she was nowhere near done with her investigation and Henry was expecting a draft from her any minute now. She had to push the Daniel stuff to the back of her mind and focus on her job.
She took a while to get settled, as she always did when a deadline was looming. Her brain got ahead of itself and insisted on completing any other task that had also been neglected. That’s how she found herself hanging all her clothes in the empty wardrobe, a whole five days into her stay. As she tidied the bathroom, she remembered with a start the strange goings-on in her room from the day before. She’d wanted to discuss it with Daniel, but then everything had gotten crazy and now that probably wouldn’t happen. She put it out of her mind.
Finally she made it to the desk. For the next hour she started a draft of the article she wanted to write. She soon realised that a series of suspicions did not a story make. There were serious holes. She’d followed up on Klauparten, but the company seemed to be a shell, registered in 2000, with no employees and owned by someone called Derek Foley. Derek, after some quick googling, appeared to be a South African ecologist. He was kind of handsome, tanned and blonde with exceedingly symmetrical features and an easy smile. She had no idea how he fit into this thing.
So the only facts she had were that Chuck’s origin story was at worst a fabrication and at best some massaging of the truth. That Chuck had gone to school in Belgium with one of his now serious investors, who didn’t seem to actually exist: Claude. She also knew that the previous captain, a woman named Annie, had been assaulted by that very same mysterious Claude, paid off and silenced by an NDA. But she didn’t have any on-the-record sources to back up those allegations or any real proof. She tore up the sheet of paper she’d been scribbling on and lowered her head into her hands. Billionaire has dodgy friend and covers up sexual assault , sadly, in this day and age, wasn’t a headline.
So Ore relented, and wrote the story that everyone wanted her to write, the one Henry was expecting. It was basically a regurgitation of Chuck’s spiel that very first day at breakfast with a little bit of colour added in, the odd unattributed quote from Vicky, another from Carlos. Some overly verbose descriptions of the interior of the boat, and a couple of lines about Chuck’s doting reunion with his daughter. Defeated and deflated, she hit the send button.
She leant back in her chair and stared at her pile of notes, all useless now, and fought the urge to cry. She wasn’t sure if it was the exhaustion catching up with her or general emotional deregulation but even though she understood she should be happy, that a job at the New York Herald was probably now in the bag, she felt empty. Like she’d somehow betrayed her journalistic integrity.
Ore crawled into bed, and was about to drift off, when there was a swift knocking at the door. She didn’t move. She didn’t have the energy to speak to anyone right now.
‘It’s Daniel …’ The voice was soft and deep and unmistakably his. She held her breath.
‘I don’t know if you’re in there …?’ he continued, and then let out a big sigh. She watched as he tried the door handle, and was relieved that she had locked herself in, as she had started doing since the previous night. ‘I guess not,’ came the voice, and then another sigh.
He laughed to himself, a sad laugh. ‘I don’t know what I was going to say anyway …’ He turned silent for a moment and Ore waited, expecting the sound of retreating footsteps. But none came.
‘I guess I would say that I am sorry, for what happened earlier, that I feel like I’ve lost my mind since I met you, which is somehow only five days ago.’ He chuckled to himself. Ore imagined him with his back to the door, maybe sitting on the carpet. She smiled at the thought of it, this man baring his soul like a dramatic, heartbroken teenager.
‘I used to be practical, rational, routine-driven, and now, I don’t know, I don’t seem to care as much about everything being in the right order, in the right place; instead I find myself wondering when I’ll get to see you again.’ His tone was soft but Ore could hear the frustration in it too, like he’d been wrestling with this new wayward version of himself.
Ore wondered if she should speak up now, but she felt suddenly sleepy, calmed by his murmurings, and unwilling to break this liminal spell.
‘I realised today, just now in fact, that I run away from things, or maybe that’s not quite it. I just never even walk towards them in the first place, because, well, maybe because I think that the things I really want, they’ll reject me, slam the door in my face.’ Ore strained to hear him, as his voice grew quieter.
‘Ironic really, that I’m saying all of this to an empty room from the other side of a locked door …’ He trailed off and then Ore heard him clear his throat, and shuffle his feet, as though he had suddenly broken out of this confessional trance.
‘What the hell are you doing, Daniel?’ he scolded himself, and before Ore could decide whether she should finally respond, she heard his footsteps retreating and she almost immediately fell into a deep, dark sleep.