Chapter Fourteen
Petra
Petra wasn’t wearing the right shoes for this trek.
The website said there would be an adventurous trip through jungle-like St. Croix to the tidepool. Once there, it was a short walk to the pools.
Short walk, not a mountain climbing adventure.
There was another way out, which the website described as a short hike.
But Tamika was gung-ho on the adventure part. And she preferred her adventures while sitting down. She couldn’t see a reason to hike all that way for a tidepool. “Ride through jungle-like St. Croix. Now that’s going to be a memorable experience.”
And she was right. It was an experience. And Petra would remember it.
Her driver, Lucky, was a hoot and a half. Just a naturally easy-going, wry-kind-of-funny guy.
He was also an ace mechanic who got that engine humming again when everything cut off, which it did every time his tire slid into a rut. And his tire went into a rut every few minutes.
But he was having a good time of it.
And his happy-go-luckiness (the reason for his name?) was contagious.
Petra needed to cut off any Herb conversation and pretend he wasn’t even in the vehicle with her.
Something about Herb made Petra think of a man with a crowbar, who was looking for a crack to wedge into to pry a bigger opening.
Petra didn’t want to give him a sliver of space.
She regretted every word she said to the man.
Happily, though, as soon as Lucky parked their vehicle, Herb was darting toward the trail to get ahead of his family as they arrived and parked behind Lucky’s piece of shit vehicle.
With a bag slung over her shoulder and the kids in a hand-holding row, Petra followed the Johnson family, and the group moved out of the trees.
The trail was non-existent.
The way to get from dirt road to tidepool was to mountain goat it over the side of a cliff wall.
Normally, this would be easy enough. The wall was craggy, with plenty of handholds and footrests. But Petra was wearing flip-flops with her sundress.
She still had that wonky eye going on, making the light do funny things to her vision. And she, per doctor’s orders, couldn’t take off her extra-dark sunglasses. They were so dark that Petra couldn’t make out anything along the side of the cliff.
Lucky was patience personified as he talked her along. “Your foot needs to go a few inches more. Okay, now let go with your right hand, and I’ll put it in a new place for you.”
Seventeen? Eighteen? How had this kid learned to be so generous?
As they got to the ridge of the tidepool. Petra stopped and looked out. “Well, that isn’t good.”
“What is wrong, Miss Armstrong?” Lucky asked, and Beans swung his head around, then came to stand near her to listen.
“See that?” She pointed. “I thought this was high tide?”
“Yes.” Beans looked at Lucky. “High tide is now. Low tide will come this afternoon around two.”
“But you see what I’m seeing? There’s that channel of water over there. See how choppy it is? See the different colors like a streak of one kind of blue flowing through a different color blue? There. And there. And there. Look at that foam and the seaweed. See how it’s getting pulled out? Those are—”
“Rip currents. And very bad ones. They shouldn’t be here like that this time of day,” Lucky said, holding the flats of his hands over his eyes like a visor.
“It’s the wind,” Beans told Lucky.
“The Christmas Winds?” Petra asked. “They make rip currents?”
“They can,” Beans said. “But this time of day?”
“I haven’t seen this before,” Lucky said as he turned to the people at the tidepool. “Hello!” he called, raising a hand in the air. “My friend Beans and I are looking at the sea. It is very rough and dangerous. We can see what looks like rip currents. If you are not from a place with seawater, you should know that these currents can pull even a very good swimmer like Beans here out to sea. You become so exhausted from the struggle that, unless there is a boat right there to help, it is possible to drown. This is your vacation, and you will do as you wish. We want everyone to have a wonderful time. But you should know that Beans and I cannot swim after you to save you. Please stay here, safe in the tidepool, and choose a different day to go into the sea.”
“You did a good job with that, Lucky.” Petra’s gaze was on Herb. He had to have heard, but he didn’t cast his gaze around to check on his children or wander over to have a little talk to make sure they didn’t climb over the rocks to the shore.
Jenny seemed to have taken up the task as the kids circled around her, and she was pointing and talking, then collecting shirts and shorts as the kids peeled down to their swimsuits, then walked away with a rolled beach blanket.
They left their necklaces on. And that bothered Petra in ways that she couldn’t identify.
So, yeah, she was going to be nosey.
Petra decided to let Jenny settle, then she’d lead with the conversation she and Herb had started, the one where she was an author and, “Your husband says you like to read. He also told me you do international adventure races…”
Petra did write. She just wasn’t an author.
It wasn’t everyone’s definition, but to Petra’s mind, an author was paid for their work.
She was a writer, someone who put words on paper in the form of stories. By design, nothing she wrote was for public consumption, and she had no desire to expose herself to public scrutiny.
She wrote because, at night, her mind liked to ruminate, to go over every conversation to pick it apart, to second guess, to dig up some memory from her past. Memories from when she was two years old and that thing that happened.
That thing that someone said.
Ruminating. Ruminating.
Too often, the topic set on replay was from her time in Afghanistan, listening to the soldiers vent to her in their counseling sessions about the horrors that they lived through—about their friends who didn’t live through them. About holding their buddy's arm and then realizing it wasn’t attached to their friend’s body anymore.
She didn’t have PTSD.
She had neurodivergence, and the processing and reprocessing and the reprocessing of the repossessing was all part of that packaging—not to say that one diagnosis precluded the other. Just to say that Petra personally didn’t fit the criteria for PTSD.
What Petra had was an overly rambunctious mind.
Petra started writing following Rowan’s good counsel from back in their days at university, when he told her he handled the memories of his time in the military by writing about it.
When Petra could motivate her butt into a chair and her fingers around a pen, it had proved a successful strategy.
Instead of gnawing at the bone of some emotion, witnessing injustice, or re-evaluating some conversation, Petra could give that experience to her characters, and her characters could work it out.
Petra could chase down all the different ways things could have turned out and follow them to their likely conclusion.
A cognitive trial-and-error written out in long hand.
Petra knew she’d picked that bone clean when she was bored and wanted a new experience.
And so, with the Kennedys as friends—Rowan, the private writer, and Avery, the public editor—it made sense for Petra to make her public cover story that she was an author when she wanted the anonymity of an unexposed life.
Petra had both the lived experience of struggling to get words on a page, and all of the background words and industry updates in her back pocket to sound convincing as she told people things like what she was now saying to Jenny as they sat side by side with their feet in the tidepool, “I was talking a bit with Herb on the way here and he says you like military romance novels.”
“That’s true and rather an unusual subject of conversation.” Jenny scanned the area until she found Herb on a stone, slathering sunscreen on his beer belly. He positioned his things in a place where he couldn’t possibly see the children. And he looked like that was where he planned to stay. That left the kids to Jenny alone.
“He asked me what I did for a living,” Petra explained. “I told him I was an author.”
Jenny suddenly looked interested. “Have I read something you’ve written?”
“I write in a different genre. But I have a friend who’s fairly successful, Holly Smokes.”
“Reverse harems with SEALs and Delta Force operators. She’s talented.”
“Amazing at what she does.” Petra had never actually read Holly’s work, so she needed to move the conversation in a different direction. “I brought Holly up because your husband says you do adventure racing. I was wondering if you knew her from that?”
“I didn’t know Holly was an adventure racer. And there aren’t a lot of women who compete at my level.” Jenny turned in Herb’s direction.
He was sliding a ball cap protectively over his receding hairline.
Then Jenny scanned for her children. The water wasn’t deep. There was no current here. There were plenty of family-looking adults. She seemed satisfied that all was safe.
Jenny slid her sunglasses on. She looked like she wanted to lie back and end the conversation.
Since Petra was only talking to learn the story of the matching necklaces, before the “go away, please” vibe got too strong, Petra ventured, “On the way here, I noticed Herb was wearing a necklace with such an interesting design. And now I see that you and the children are wearing the same. They must be meaningful.” Petra had no reason to be nervous, but she found herself stimming to self-soothe, rubbing the ends of her hair between her fingertips.
Jenny’s gaze swept over her children, then up to Herb, who was staring out at the adjacent cove, paying zero attention to his family. Her gaze moved back to her middle child, the daughter—Petra didn’t know if any of these relationships she had mapped were correct. They seemed right, though.
And that middle daughter scowled back at her mother with ferocity.
Their eyes held for a long time.
The child wasn’t giving in, and Jenny looked away indifferently.
“Yes, well. Our family had a ceremony, a renewal of vows kind of thing, and we wanted the children to be included and have a remembrance that they kept with them, telling them they were loved and part of a bigger happy family.”
The oldest child, a boy—probably eight, maybe seven—turned his head to his mom with his brows knit and a tilt of his head that Petra read as a sincere question about why his mom would say something that wasn’t true.
Jenny purposefully didn’t look his way.
And Petra found that odd.
But before Petra could ask more questions, Jenny pulled a paperback from her bag and leaned back to read. She was done conversing.
For the rest of their hour in the tidepool, Petra ruminated. And watched.
When Beans finally called out that they would start back across the cliff’s edge in ten minutes, Jenny finally roused from the plotline. After pulling the children’s clothes from the bag and folding her towel, Jenny stood and caught her daughter’s eye, then signaled her in.
The daughter scowled at Beans and glared at her mother. Then suddenly, she flicked a glance towards her dad and ran behind a large rock. Leaning back, Petra could see that the girl reached up, grabbed her necklace, and yanked it violently time and again until it finally broke, leaving a red welt along her neck.
Gripping the chain in her fist, the girl lifted her arm over her head and, with a mighty heave, flung the necklace toward the sea. She seemed satisfied with herself as she scrambled toward her mother.
Was it her mother? That was a leap that Petra had made. It could be anyone.
The whole thing was odd.
Something was off .
Petra had watched the necklace land. She made her way carefully down toward the water’s edge, where she gathered the chain until the pendant lay on her palm. Taking her first clear look at the design, Petra felt something unsettling mix into her bloodstream.
But in her brain, Petra could sometimes know she knew a thing—a name, a definition, a fact, or a statistic—but that thing would hide from her.
If Petra chased after it, working hard to remember, it was like a child on the playground calling, “Come catch me!” and then racing away. A better strategy was to leave the thought alone and move on to something else. Eventually, the information would pop out enough that she could snatch it up.
Why did her brain do that?
Petra had no clue, but it came with her diagnosis. She knew it didn’t just happen to her.
For now, she’d just slide the necklace into her pocket.
“Miss Armstrong?” Lucky was calling her. “Where are you?”
“Here, taking a photo.” Petra pulled her phone from her pocket and pretended to snap an image. “I’m coming!”
But as Petra picked her way back to the group, her head spun toward the sea, where shrieks of horror rode the wind.