Chapter 16
CAMILLE
I saw the end before I understood the beginning.
A mother’s scream tore the morning open—high, ragged, the kind of sound that makes people turn even if they don’t want to see.
A little blonde girl, ankle-deep in the wash.
Jacob in the surf, dripping, stunned, a handprint blooming red across his cheek.
The woman yanked the child up the sand like she was hauling anchor and threw words that burned on contact—monster, creep, pedophile—each one a flung stone.
My body moved before my brain did. Down the dune, sand giving under my boots, heat already climbing, gulls lifting like gossip. Jacob’s gaze found mine. Fury, confusion, and shame lit behind his eyes.
“It isn’t what it looked like,” he said, voice raw, palms up like a man facing a gun.
I stopped three paces short, the tide licking my toes.
My pulse made a drum out of my throat. The night before roared up at me—the tent, my body opening for him, the word breathe in his mouth like a sacrament—then slammed against the sight of a woman dragging a girl away and calling him words that sour every room they touch.
“Camille—” He took a step, checked himself. “She was in a rip. I pulled her out. That’s all. I swear to God.”
“Don’t,” I said. I heard how it sounded, like a command I gave on a beach when an eager volunteer reached for a fluke without asking.
Don’t is a tool. Don’t is a wall.
He flinched. “I’m telling you the truth.”
The truth. My father’s voice ran under mine: a conclusion faster than the facts is a kind of superstition. The words tried to be enough. They weren’t.
Because the facts I had weren’t facts at all.
I didn’t know his last name. I didn’t know where he lived.
I didn’t know who he fought for when it wasn’t my body or my cause.
I knew the way he said my name right and the way his hands knew my body better than men who’d had months to learn it.
I knew he could put three men on a deck on the ground without breaking a sweat.
I knew the ocean liked him. None of that would help me, if I was wrong.
The mother’s voice kept echoing in the bones of the beach. People had started to look and then look away, the way they do when shame enters a scene. The wind pushed damp hair into my mouth. I tasted salt and bitterness.
“I don’t know you,” I said. It came out quiet and hurt, not clever. “I don’t know you at all.”
He opened his hands wider, like he could hold the whole mess between his palms and keep it from touching me. “I know. You will. Ask me anything.”
My mouth filled with questions— What’s your last name, where did you sleep last night, why did that woman hit you —but the only one that climbed my tongue was a stupid, small thing. Can I trust you? I swallowed it until it hurt.
“Someone accused you of—” The word wouldn’t come. I am a woman who says pulmonary hemorrhage at breakfast and writes perimortem in ink. Yet, I couldn’t make that one move through my teeth.
“I know what she said,” he answered, softer. “It’s a lie.”
Wind battered the zipper of his duffel and made it clack. Atlas’s detail sat up on the access road, silhouettes behind glass. I had a ridiculous thought— Did they see? Would this go in some report that put my name next to Jacob’s under a heading that got people fired?
“They’re waiting for you at the facility,” he said when I didn’t speak, as if he knew I needed a reason to flee that wasn’t him. “Go. I’ll—figure this out.”
It would have been easier if he’d blustered or begged. He did neither. He stood there with the ocean panting behind him and let me decide.
“Camille.” He said my name the way he had in the tent—ka-MEE, vowels careful, reverent. “Just don’t run from me .”
My throat clenched. “I’m not running,” I lied.
Damn this.
Miami had been easy. Heat and straight lines. Water that told you what it was going to do and then did it. Charleston always seemed to find the burr under my skin.
For half a breath I pictured the airport—throwing wet clothes in a duffel, texting Becca that she had incident command, Tamika taking comms, Miguel minding the logs. They would keep the animals alive. The Navy could talk to its own reflection. I could go back to the place where I felt comfortable.
Except, I had started to like Jacob. Not just the heat. The steadiness. I’d let my guard slip. Given him my number. Let myself want more than a couple of nights.
Tiny daydreams crept in. Coffee on my porch swing. His quiet at my shoulder after a hard day. His name on my phone with flirty texts and sappy voicemails.
It was premature. I knew that.
But the wanting had already taken root, and ripping it out hurt.
Within the span of a minute, the impulse to leave Charleston flared and died. Coward , something in me said. Or maybe just not you .
That didn’t mean I was staying on this beach.
I turned and climbed the dune like a woman walking out of a rip—sideways, stubborn, refusing to let the water pull me.
Each step felt like it should leave more of a mark than sand could hold.
At the top, I almost looked back. If I did, I knew what I’d see—him in the bright, unforgiving light, something like disbelief and something like understanding both on his face.
I didn’t look.
In the SUV, my hands shook hard enough that I had to sit on them. The radio on the dash blinked the quiet channel Ryker had given me, patient as a dog. I stared at my phone until my eyes blurred, then focused on the words I understood.
Night crew: Resp 22. Lactate steady. Kogia quiet. All’s well.
All’s well. I latched on to the lie and drove.
The road back to the facility cut through marsh that glittered like a thousand small, mean truths. The world smelled like hot grass and tide and something burning on a far pier. I breathed like he told me to because breath is a habit, not a promise.
Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t make an enemy because it feels righteous. Don’t bring a mess into a room that is supposed to be clean.
He could be anyone. A Marine. A liar. A man who saved a child and got slapped for it. A man with a history he hadn’t shared. A man I had let inside my body and into the parts of my brain I keep iron-gated. All true and not enough.
The facility gates yawned. The air inside was different, curated—iodine, bleach, wet rubber, the particular breath of water that has decided to be helpful today. It calmed a layer of me I hadn’t known was screaming.
“Doc?” Miguel clocked my face and didn’t ask anything stupid. “We’re good. Bottlenose held his line. Kogia blink response is cleaner. Becca swapped slings. Tamika’s on donors.”
“Where’s the log?” I said, voice too steady.
He handed me the clipboard. Becca slid out of the pen aisle, eyes soft. “Hey.”
“Don’t,” I said before I could help it, and winced at what I heard in me—fear that came out as sharp.
She nodded once, took three steps back, and turned to busy herself with the cooler labels. The kindness of it almost knocked me over.
I washed my hands for longer than the skin on the backs of them liked, the water going from cool to hot and back again while my brain replayed the beach in loops.
I told the part of me that wanted to sit on the concrete and cry to shut up.
It listened because the other part—the one that knows where a blowhole is and how to keep it clear with two fingers and a towel when the world is falling apart—was louder.
I went to the Kogia first because Kogia always go first. The quiet pen held like a cupped hand. Shade settled in soft. The little whale’s eye watched me without moving—too calm, too wise, too indifferent to my human chaos.
“Bonjour,” I said. “You and me, hm?”
We worked. Sling check. Blowhole clear. Pectoral tone—still there. Respiration—high but not panicked. I let the numbers climb into my head one rung at a time until they made a ladder I could climb out of myself on. The wave that had been lodged in my chest since the dune receded a notch.
Tamika arrived as if on cue. She looked at me, really looked,. “You want me to ask or you want me to stand here and be a body?”
“Be a body,” I said, and my voice cracked like a girl’s voice.
She did. Quiet as a tide post. Hands steady on the sling line. Close enough to reach, far enough not to make me feel cornered.
The bottlenose’s pen breathed slow and wide. He lay like a tired boy in a sickbed, a towel tented over his dorsal. Miguel had tucked a damp cloth behind his melon where pressure can bruise.
Good man.
I stepped into the water, slid my palm along the peduncle catheter to check the tape, then ran my other hand along his flank, counting ribs as if they were worry beads. My breath slowed to the music of him.
Bodies are easy. People make it hard.
“Lactate’s at six point one,” Becca said quietly from the dock. “Down two ticks.”
“Good.” My voice found a place that didn’t shake. “Write it. Note the time. Note my witness.”
“Tamika present,” Becca said, pen scritching. “Miguel present. Dr. Allard present.”
Official. Safe. A room where facts live.
After a while, my phone buzzed. I didn’t check it. I ignored the second buzz, too. The third got me.
I looked. The name made my breath trip.
Jacob: Please. Let me explain. Meet me where there are people if you need that. I’ll take whatever terms you set.
I stared at the text until the words floated apart and rearranged into nothing. Another buzz.
Jacob: I didn’t touch that kid until she went under. The mother didn’t see anything until after. I said a name that wasn’t hers. That’s on me.
I turned the phone face down on the dock and set a towel over it as if I could muffle him the way you muffle a pump that’s rattling the wrong way.
“News?” Tamika asked without turning her head.
“No,” I said.
We pulled warm fluids for the bottlenose and I threaded the line. I sank into work so deep the facility sounds drew a soft curtain around the parts of me that had been flayed on the beach. Air pump hum. Pen slap. Becca’s timer chiming like a lullaby. Miguel’s steady footfall. Tamika’s breath.
When the bottlenose’s rate settled into a rhythm, I climbed out and wiped my face with a towel that smelled like vinegar and sun. My throat burned like I’d swallowed the wrong water.
Becca edged into my eyeline. “Do you want to tell me he’s a jerk so I can agree with you and we can eat crackers on the dock until you feel better?”
I barked a laugh that surprised us both. “It’d be easier if he were just a jerk.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Easy’s overrated.”
The phone buzzed again. I let it. Then again. Then silence. Relief and disappointment braided themselves together.
McGuire: Preliminary private permit list in your inbox. I can be at your facility at 1100 to walk you through it if that helps. —L.
I thumbed back.
Me: 1100 works. Bring anything with “Typhon” on it. Thank you.
I didn’t tell her I was grateful for an officer who understood how to be a person in a room where uniform usually wins. I didn’t tell her I needed numbers to lean on because my legs were shot.
When I looked up, my dad stood at the edge of the pen aisle like a dock post that had always been there. He must have come in quiet. He always did. He took in the sling, the towels, my face, in that order.
“Ma fille,” he said, not surprised and not curious, because he is the kind of man who waits for you to bring him your trouble in your time.
“Papa,” I said, and the word broke something small.
He kissed my hair, a father’s benediction, the kind that makes you furious because it’s simple when nothing else is. “Do you need me to move steel,” he asked. “Or only to stand here and be the tallest thing in the room.”
“Stand,” I said, laughing on an inhale that hurt. “Please.”
He stood. It helped.
Later, walking alone, I took the long way through the facility, the one that takes you past the rehab freezer and the old photos and the wall where we keep the names of the ones we couldn’t bring back.
I stopped at the sink and finally let the tears go the way you let a wave that’s too big roll you once so you don’t crack your head on the next one.
I pressed both palms to the cool metal and let my shoulders shake without sound. I counted to twenty. I washed my face.
Back at the pens, the world had not fallen apart without me. It never does. That’s the humility and the cruelty of this work: the ocean keeps moving, with or without your pretty feelings.
My phone lay face down under the towel like a patient I hadn’t decided to triage. I lifted the corner, as if the device might bite me. No new texts.
Behind me, the Kogia took a clean breath. I put my hand on her flank and felt the small slide of muscle under skin. Living. In and out. The smallest obedience.
“Breathe,” I told her. And then, because I am not a woman who lets a man own the best thing he said to her, I told myself.
I didn’t have to decide anything about Jacob in that moment.
I didn’t have to call him back or throw my phone in the river.
I didn’t have to pick a villain or forgive a thing I did not yet understand.
I had to keep two animals alive and be ready to face a uniform at eleven and say the words that would move resources where they needed to go.
My father’s quiet shape at the edge of the aisle steadied the whole room. Tamika’s watchful silence, Miguel’s strong hands doing big things without asking for praise, Becca’s soft orbit that never crossed a line. They were close without crowding. Present without prying.
It sank in that I was held up by good people who wanted nothing from me but the chance to help.
I was lucky, even with salt still burning the back of my throat.
I could hold the distance and the not knowing and the ache like a handful of sharp shells. I could bleed a little and still do the work.
I ran my hand down the Kogia’s side again, counting. “One,” I said to her. “Two. Three.” I kept going until my voice stopped shaking and the numbers were a rope I could hold.
Outside, the tide kept time. Inside, my chest found a slower setting.
I didn’t know who Jacob was to me. I knew who I was to the water. I chose that and let the rest sit where it had to.