2. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
The cold was a living thing. It wrapped around my chest and squeezed, and I couldn’t tell which direction was up, couldn’t feel my arms anymore, couldn’t do anything but thrash in the black water while my lungs screamed for air.
My mother’s voice in my head: Stop making a scene, Blythe. You’re embarrassing yourself.
I didn’t know why that was the voice my brain reached for at the end. I only knew it had been waiting there my whole life, patient as the water, and now I was dying in the dark because my husband pushed me off a yacht and drove away.
The dress dragged at my legs like hands. I kicked and got nowhere. The salt burned through my sinuses and down my throat and I couldn’t cough, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Just cold and dark and the animal panic of a body that refused to float.
Stop making a scene.
I stopped thrashing. My arms went heavy. The water closed over my head, and I thought very clearly: This is how I die.
There was no fear in it, at the end. That was the strange part.
The fear had been in the thrashing, in the fighting, in the animal certainty that if I could just get my head up one more time someone would come.
When I stopped fighting, the fear went with it.
The cold stopped feeling like cold. The dark got softer.
Somewhere far above me the running lights of the Anchorage II were shrinking to nothing, and I watched them go the way you watch something that has already stopped being yours, and I thought about how my mother had been right after all. I’d made a scene. And now it was over.
Then arms.
Something grabbed me from behind, massive, impossibly strong, and yanked me upward.
I fought it, or tried to, because I didn’t know what it was and drowning people don’t think, they just struggle.
But the arms didn’t let go. They hauled me up through the dark water and then suddenly there was air, blessed fucking air, and I sucked it in and it hurt worse than the drowning did.
The world came in pieces. Salt and light and noise, all of it too much, none of it making sense.
I gulped and choked and gulped again, and every breath tore up my throat like I was swallowing broken glass, and still I couldn’t get enough.
My body didn’t believe it was allowed to live.
It kept convulsing, kept trying to cough up an ocean, kept bracing for the water to close over me again.
I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know whose arms these were, or whether they were saving me or dragging me somewhere worse.
I only knew the two truths my body had left: that I was breathing, and that it hurt, and that somehow those were the same thing now.
“Breathe.” A man’s voice, low and steady. “I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t do anything but cough and retch and shake while he held me above the water, one arm banded across my chest, his other arm doing something I couldn’t see. Swimming, maybe. Moving us somewhere.
“Sixty-two,” he said. “Sixty-three. Stay with me. Sixty-four.”
“What-” I choked on the word. “What are you-”
“Counting your pulse. Sixty-eight. Keep breathing.”
My vision was blurred, my eyes burning from the salt. I could just make out lights somewhere ahead, the running lights of a small boat, much smaller than the Anchorage II. He swam us toward it, and I hung limp in his grip, and he didn’t stop counting.
“Seventy-two. We’re almost there. Seventy-four.”
He got me to a ladder. I couldn’t climb it, my arms wouldn’t work, my legs were tangled in my dress, and I was shaking so hard I could barely hold on.
He climbed up behind me and lifted me over the rail like I weighed nothing, and then I was lying on the deck of a small sloop staring up at the stars while someone enormous bent over me.
“Eighty-one,” he said. His hand was on my throat, fingers pressed to my pulse point. “Eighty-two. You’re okay. You’re breathing.”
“Who-” I coughed again, hard enough to bring up seawater. “Who are you?”
He didn’t answer. He was doing something with my legs, cutting away the fabric of my dress with a knife he’d pulled from somewhere. The weight released and I could breathe easier.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
Still nothing. He was checking my arms now, running his hands over them like he was looking for broken bones, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Who are you?”
“Reid Navarro.” He said it to my collarbone. “I was anchored a quarter mile off. Reading.”
“Reading?”
“Book.” He moved to my legs, pressing along my shins, my ankles. “I heard shouting. Saw a body go over a rail. Saw the yacht not stop.”
I stared at him. He was huge, broad-shouldered and thick-armed, built like a dock worker, dark hair plastered to his forehead from the water. His hands were careful on my ankle, impersonal, like a doctor’s hands. Like someone who’d done this before.
“He saw me,” I said.
Reid Navarro didn’t tell me I was wrong.
“He stood at the rail and watched me.” My voice cracked, and I couldn’t stop it. “He told the captain to go. He knows I can’t swim.”
Reid’s hands stilled on my ankle. For a long moment he didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t even seem to breathe. Then he said, very quietly: “I know.”
“He tried to kill me.”
“Yes.”
The word sat between us. I waited for him to argue, to explain, to tell me I was hysterical or confused or overreacting. He didn’t. He just looked at my ankle like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.
“Do you want a hospital?” he asked.
I thought about that. A hospital meant doctors, and doctors meant questions, and questions meant phone calls, and phone calls meant-
“No.” I sat up too fast and nearly passed out. Reid caught me, one huge hand on my shoulder, steadying. “No hospital. That’s - Posy Wetherell will have it in her column by breakfast. The whole - everyone will-”
“Okay.” He helped me stand. “Then I take you to my house. Unless you have somewhere else.”
I didn’t have anywhere else. That was the thing I understood, as clearly as I’d ever understood anything: I had nowhere to go.
My parents’ house was Stan’s parents’ house, really, bought with Chadwick money after my father’s business failed.
My sister was fucking my husband. My friends were Newport friends, which meant they were Stan’s friends, which meant they’d believe whatever version of tonight he decided to tell.
I had a stranger on a boat, and nowhere else.
“Your house,” I said.
He nodded once, already moving toward the helm. “Windrose. Past Ocean Drive. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
I wrapped my arms around myself and shook. The dress was in ruins around my thighs, and the salt was drying on my skin, and somewhere out in the dark my husband was probably pouring himself another glass of champagne and practicing his grieving face.
Twenty minutes later, Reid pulled the sloop into a private dock at the base of a cliff, and I looked up at the house above us and stopped breathing.
This wasn’t Chadwick money. Chadwick money was old and careful and invested in things like trust funds and charitable foundations.
This was newer than that, and far bigger.
A sprawling modern estate clinging to the rocks, all glass and steel and clean lines, with lights burning in every window like whoever lived there didn’t care what electricity cost.
“It’s not-” Reid stopped himself. Tried again. “I don’t have guests much. It’s probably dusty.”
I followed him up a winding path to the front door, my bare feet slipping on the stones, my ruined dress dragging behind me. He unlocked the door and held it open, and before I could step through, something massive and black came barreling out of the darkness inside.
I screamed. Or tried to. It came out as a croak, because my throat was still raw from the seawater.
“Bayes.” Reid’s voice was sharper than I’d heard it. “Down.”
The massive black shape resolved itself into a dog.
A Newfoundland, I thought, remembering pictures from some coffee table book.
The kind they bred to pull drowning people out of the water.
A hundred and thirty pounds of fur and muscle, and he hit me at thigh height and then shoved his enormous head into my lap and stayed there.
“Sorry.” Reid hovered in the doorway, looking mortified. “He’s - he knows you were in the water. It’s what they’re bred for. He won’t leave you alone for a while.”
I sank my fingers into the dog’s thick fur and felt my chest crack open.
“I’m going to get you clothes,” Reid said. “Mine. There aren’t any others in the house. They’ll be too big.”
He disappeared down a hallway, and I stood in the foyer of a stranger’s house with a dog pressed against my legs and tried to remember how to breathe.
The house was beautiful and cold. High ceilings, polished concrete floors, art on the walls that looked expensive and impersonal. No photographs anywhere. No signs that anyone actually lived here. Just space and silence and a view of the ocean that had almost killed me.
Reid came back with a stack of clothes, sweatpants, a T-shirt, a hoodie that would swallow me whole. “Bathroom’s through there. Take as long as you need. I’ll make food.”
The bathroom was bigger than my childhood bedroom. I peeled off the ruins of my dress and stood under the shower until the water ran clear, until my skin stopped stinging, until I could feel my fingers again. Then I put on Reid Navarro’s clothes and looked at myself in the mirror.
The sleeves came to my fingertips. The sweatpants were rolled four times at the waist and still pooled around my ankles. I looked like a child playing dress-up.
I looked like someone who had nothing.
I found Reid in the kitchen, his back to me, doing something at the stove. He didn’t turn around when I came in.
“There’s a library,” he said. “If you want to sit somewhere that isn’t - I don’t know. The kitchen probably isn’t comfortable. There’s a library. It has a ladder. I’m sorry about the ladder. I’m sorry about the house. It’s too-”
“It’s fine.” I sat down at the island. Bayes immediately pressed himself against my legs under the counter. “What are you making?”
“Eggs. I don’t - I’m not sure what else to do.”
He still hadn’t turned around. I watched his shoulders, massive in a wet T-shirt he hadn’t changed out of, and I tried to put together what I knew about him.
Reid Navarro. Anchored a quarter mile off with a book.
A house past Ocean Drive that cost more than the Chadwick estate.
A dog bred to pull people out of the water.
“I saw all of it,” he said.
My chest went tight. “What?”
“He stood at the rail.” Reid’s voice was flat, factual, like he was reading a report. “He watched you go under. Then he spoke to the captain, and the yacht turned, and they left.”
I couldn’t speak.
“If you need me to tell that to someone,” he said, “I will. The police. A lawyer. Whoever you need.”
He slid a plate of eggs in front of me. Our eyes met for the first time since he’d pulled me out of the water. His were dark and steady, impossible to read.
“He knows I can’t swim,” I said. The words came out small and cracked. “I’ve never been able to. Not once in my whole life. Everyone in Newport knows it - I’ve made the joke at a hundred rails. And Stan knows it better than anyone.”
Reid didn’t say anything. He just stood there with his hands on the counter, not moving, barely breathing.
“I’m going to put a film on,” he said finally. “In the library. You don’t have to watch it. But it’s - the room feels less empty with something on.”
The library had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a ladder on a rail and two leather couches facing an enormous television.
Reid apologized for the ladder again, then for the television, then for the size of the couch.
He put on something old and black-and-white, I didn’t recognize it, didn’t care, and sat down on the opposite end of the couch from me, leaving three feet of space between us.
Bayes jumped up and sprawled across both our laps.
“Sorry,” Reid said. “He’s not supposed to - I’ll move him.”
“Don’t.” I buried my hand in the dog’s fur. “Please.”
We sat there in the flickering light of a movie neither of us watched. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. My throat still burned from the salt. Somewhere across the water, my husband was telling people I was dead.
I thought about my mother’s face when she got the call. I thought about Birdie’s hand on her belly, the baby that would have Stan’s eyes. I thought about seven years of a marriage built on nothing, on lies, on a foundation I hadn’t known was rotten until I was already drowning.
The adrenaline went out of me all at once, between one breath and the next. My eyes got heavy. My head tipped sideways. I felt myself sliding, felt my cheek hit something solid and warm, and then I was gone.
I woke up once in the night, just for a second. The movie was still playing. Bayes was snoring on my legs. And Reid Navarro was sitting perfectly still, barely breathing, his arm pinned under my head where I’d fallen asleep against his shoulder.
He didn’t move. He sat there perfectly still for hours, because moving would wake me.