Chapter 3
CAMILLE
B y the time the hazard lights strobed through the glare, the chaos had gone quiet. The crowd thinned to the dunes, the ocean pretended innocence, and the shake in my hands announced the adrenaline had slipped its leash—small, private tremors that made plastic crackle and needle caps stubborn.
Wet cotton cooled against my skin, salt tightening everything it touched. Triage was over. Now came the math, the part where hope had to stand up to numbers, and I followed the gurney to the truck.
At the truck, I drew blood from the peduncle, the vein rolling true under my fingers, and the tube filled a bruised red that told me more than I wanted. Becca read out the lactate when the portable analyzer beeped, and I swore softly in French. Miguel didn’t ask me to translate.
He closed the truck and leaned on the door. “You riding in?”
I looked at the water, at the way the horizon trembled like it was trying not to cry. I looked down the beach where Tamika had disappeared and thought about divergent paths and how choices felt like small betrayals you only recognized when you were knee-deep in them.
“Go,” I said. “Get him on fluids. I’ll be right behind you.” I slid the cooler of samples into the cab. “If he crashes, call.”
Miguel’s eyes softened. We didn’t say the word if like a prayer. We said it like an equation. “Copy,” he said, and the truck growled away.
For a minute, the beach felt too big. I stood thigh-deep and breathed in and out and let the water kiss the inside of my knees. My shirt stuck to my skin.
When I closed my eyes, Miami rose behind them—the South Florida Rehab Center’s sharp-clean smell, the efficiency, the way the city’s chaos made me feel like anything could happen.
I missed the noise. The way men there flirted like it was a sport I could win without trying, and the way I sometimes let them because it was easier than being alone.
Charleston wanted different things from me. It wanted patience. Politeness. It wanted me to sit pretty at tables where men said collaborative and stakeholder and impact in voices that made my teeth ache.
My phone buzzed. The screen showed a number with a military exchange. I let it go another round and then thumbed Accept , because avoiding a thing never starved it. It only made it hungrier.
“Dr. Allard,” a male voice said, crisp and pleasant like ice over a river. “Lieutenant Commander James Pincense. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“You have now,” I said, rolling my shoulders back. Salt cracked where fabric had dried and then gotten wet again. “What can I do for you, Commander?”
“We’re eager to coordinate schedules for next week’s training exercise to ensure we’re doing our part to reduce ecological impact. There’s a window this afternoon for a pre-brief with our acoustic team. Are you available?”
I looked toward the horizon where the thrumming had finally faded beneath the hiss of the surf. “Are you operating today?”
“Not in the corridor nearest your position,” he said smoothly. “We adhere to all advisories.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
A beat of silence. Then, “I can send over the map.”
“You’ll send the map,” I said, “and you’ll keep your folks away from the shelf where we’ve had three strandings in fourteen days.”
“We’re in full compliance with?—”
“Compliance isn’t mercy,” I said. “It’s math.”
Another pause, longer this time. Somewhere high in a hotel room behind me, a woman laughed the way a woman laughs when she’s decided to be bad.
The sound skittered down my back like a fingernail.
I eased my legs wider against the pull of the tide.
I had not been touched in weeks and my body was a live wire.
It made everything feel larger: the sun on my throat, the drag of damp cotton over my chest, the way the ocean ate at the edges of my boots.
“We want to work with you, Dr. Allard,” Pincense said finally. “We’re on the same side.”
“We’re not,” I said, and surprised myself with how easily the truth came. “But we can stand on the same beach for a few minutes and pretend.”
He cleared his throat. “Fourteen hundred?”
“Send the map,” I repeated. “And the specs on your mid-frequency.”
“I’ll see what I can?—”
“You’ll send the specs.”
Another silence. “You’ll have them within the hour.”
The line clicked dead. I stared at the screen until it went dark, then slipped the phone back into the waterproof pouch clipped to my belt. I waded out another step and let a wave break against my thighs, sly and intimate.
In Miami, I’d had a lover who’d called me sirène when I came, like the ocean itself had crawled into bed with us.
In Charleston I had the ocean and my work and a city that insisted on pretending its sins were old enough to be charming.
I had a father who still spoke of steel and hulls like they were poems. I had a mother who sent me links to coastal cottages and said maybe, ma chérie, you could have a porch .
I had this: salt, heat, a heartbeat in my palm that lingered long after the animal was gone.
“Dr. Allard?” Becca’s voice again, behind me this time. She’d jogged back from the truck, hair escaping her cap, eyes shining with adrenaline and something soft. “They’re on the bridge. Fluids in. Vitals … not great, but he’s holding.”
“Good.” My whole body exhaled. “We’ll meet them at intake. I want to run a quick decibel log first.”
She grimaced. “You think it’s bad?”
“I think it’s worse than anyone wants to admit.
” I trudged up through the surf toward our gear.
Becca followed, and together we hauled the hydrophone case to the waterline.
Knees in the sand, I fed the cable for the transducer into the sea, my fingers slick with salt, the line sliding like silk through my hands.
“Set the recorder at thirty-second intervals. Gain at mid.” I glanced up. “You okay?”
She blushed, startled. “Yeah. I just—I’ve never been this close. It’s … intense.”
“It is.” I smiled without showing teeth. “If you cried when the truck pulled away, that means you’re doing it right.”
She blew out a laugh. “Maybe a little.”
We logged five minutes of water and wind and the distant grumble of boats. Nothing overt. Nothing like the throat-singing that rattled me earlier. The ocean pretended innocence.
We packed the gear and shouldered the cases. Becca took the umbrella. I palmed the cooler. At the access path, I turned back for one last look. The beach had already swallowed the grooves our gurney had carved. The crowd had dissipated, attention migrated to the next bright thing.
As we climbed, my phone buzzed with an email chime. Map. Specs. Compliance checkboxes like confetti. I didn’t open it. Not yet. I let the tightness in my chest sit there and kept walking.
At the top of the stairs, the smell of frying shrimp from a beach shack hit me like a memory. My stomach growled. Becca grinned and elbowed me. “Post-rescue hushpuppies?”
“You’re learning,” I said.
We ran inside, slapped a twenty on the counter, and came back out with a to-go bag hot enough to sting our fingers, the smell of cornmeal and fryer oil chasing us.
“Is this … is this really where you thought you’d end up?” she asked as we crossed the lot. “Like, after your PhD? Coming back here?”
The honest answer rose. “No.” I opened the SUV and slid the cooler in, cool air spilling over my overheated skin. “I thought Miami would keep me. But Charleston has a way of hooking into you.” I paused. “And sometimes the thing that needs you is the thing that bruised you.”
Becca went quiet in the way of someone storing a line to take out later and turn over in their hands. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said finally.
I was glad, too, and I hated it. Both truths could live in me at once, like cold and heat, like the drag of a wet shirt and the promise of a dry one later, like the way I craved a pair of strong hands at my hips and the way I didn’t trust anyone to hold me properly.
“Seatbelt,” I said, and she clicked it.
When we pulled onto the road, my phone lit again—this time a text from an unsaved number that began with a local area code. A link followed. No words. The map Pincense had promised. The corridor lines cut the water into neat boxes like a surgeon’s mark-ups.
I didn’t answer. I let the message sit there while Becca cued up a playlist and hummed along to a summer song about bodies and bad decisions. I drove with the windows down and let the wind dry the wet fabric over my skin, let it trace the shape of me for anyone who cared to look.
A pickup full of surfers passed and one of them whistled low. I lifted one eyebrow in the mirror and ignored him. I might have wanted to be touched, but I didn’t have the energy for boys who thought they were men.
At the causeway, pelicans drafted the air currents over the marsh, prehistoric and perfect. The truck carrying our patient crawled ahead of us, and I kept my distance. We were a small convoy of hope, bright against the green.
“Hey, Dr. A?” Becca said softly, chin propped on her fist as she watched the water.
“Hm?”
“When you talk to him,” she said, meaning the dolphin, “why French?”
Because it feels like my mother’s perfume. Because it makes me soft when I want to be sharp. Because if I’m going to beg, I want to do it in the language I learned first. “Because I’m rude in English,” I said instead. “And he deserved sweet.”
Becca smiled. “He did.”
He absolutely did. All of them did. Even the ones that didn’t make it. Especially them.
We reached intake. The team moved like a muscle: triage, fluids, an oxygen rig that always smelled faintly of rubber bands and salt.
I stood shoulder to shoulder with Miguel while we watched numbers print out.
I chewed the inside of my cheek and tasted copper.
The lactate dropped a fraction. Not enough. But not nothing.
“Hold,” I told him. “We give him every chance.”
“Always,” he said.
Hours later, after briefings and forms and a shower that scoured sand from skin I hadn’t realized was raw, I stood alone on the dock behind the facility, brown hair wet down my back, a clean tank top clinging to damp skin.
The sun had slid west, turning the water the color of old gold.
In the yard, a flag snapped in a breeze that smelled like rain.
My phone lay face down beside me on the railing, the map unopened.
I drank from a bottle of water and imagined it was something stronger.
Down the creek a small motor cut, and I lifted my chin into the wind.
The world tilted when I did, the way it always had since the day I fell hard for the ocean as a girl.
Everything in me listened. My skin ached at the edges where the air met it.
I could almost feel the pressure changes offshore, like a hand on the back of my neck.
Somewhere out there, men in uniforms would sit in a cold room and watch lines that turned sound into graphs.
Somewhere beyond them, a swimmer with more arrogance than fear would cut through sky-warmed water like a knife.
Somewhere even beyond that, deep, where the light faltered and the world turned blue-black, something enormous would sing into the dark and wait for an answer.
I tucked my hair behind my ear. The day wasn’t done with me. I opened the map, traced a neat little box someone else had drawn over the body I loved—then locked the screen and slid the phone into my back pocket.
“Fuck it.”
I wanted ice in a glass and a room too dark for good intentions. I grabbed my keys, left the map facedown on the rail, and went to find a bar.