Chapter 29
CAMILLE
I n the days after the meeting, a rhythm found us like tide finding its line.
Jacob had moved in without the ceremony of suitcases. My closet, my drawers, my little bungalow that had always felt temporary grew a new shape around his quiet possessions. His dog tags lived under my lemon-scented dish towels at night. His boots learned to wait by my back door.
Mornings started with the sound of the river lifting and his hands already heating the kettle.
Coffee in my chipped blue mugs. His “morning, Doctor” said like a joke and a vow.
A text check to the facility. Becca’s numbers.
Miguel’s notes. Tamika’s gruff emojis. Then the days had unscrolled the way our days do here: a report of another animal seen rolling in the break and a run that ate an hour we didn’t own, a good breath count from the little Kogia that made us generous with one another, a bottlenose that quit riding her own panic and let us be useful again.
He had split his hours—half at my side as a pair of big patient hands, half with the Charleston Danes in those rooms that taste like money and gun oil.
He had come back from Dominion Hall with that particular fuel in his eyes that men get when a plan starts to gather weight and edges.
He’d stand in my kitchen while I chopped apples for the electrolyte cooler and lay out their pieces—boats, aircraft, quiet sensors, the Coast Guard’s good will—and ask where they should stitch them to our charts of tides and sandbars and places my whales like to be when the world isn’t hurting them.
At night, he let sleep come to me the old-fashioned way—body against body until whatever I’d been bracing for all day remembered it didn’t have to win. Then he’d fall asleep faster than is decent and I’d study the name of his new breath until mine matched it.
We were becoming, somehow, the kind of adults who put dinner on a calendar.
My mother had texted to say she had Saturday free if that “friend from the beach” wanted to be introduced to a proper roux.
My father had rolled his eyes at the phrase “friend from the beach” and then volunteered to sharpen the knives because men make offerings where they can.
Jacob had read the text thread over my shoulder and said he’d bring a bottle that wouldn’t embarrass anyone.
It made my stomach do a small, clean trick.
The strandings hadn’t stopped for our sweet domestic experiment.
We’d lost a calf that first night to a heart that refused the math, and I’d cried into the towel like a girl behind the pen gate while Tamika stood where she didn’t have to say anything and said everything, anyway.
The next morning an adult that had been rubbing her jaw bloody had let the water hold her differently when Miguel spoke to her in Spanish for the length of a song. Small victories.
On the second afternoon—today—McGuire had sent a terse line: working; sit tight . Ryker had sent an even terser one: eyes up .
By dusk we were wrecked, hungry, and not quite ready to be quiet. Salty Mike’s called to us the way a familiar vice calls—a place where the floorboards are used to holding up heavy things and the crab traps on the wall don’t care who you are.
We took the stools we took last time, like the bar had remembered our outlines.
The dock outside ricocheted sunset into the room.
I ordered an oyster po’boy I’d pretend wasn’t a betrayal and a Diet Coke I’d pretend balanced it.
Jacob ordered a basket of fries like he was feeding a teenager and a beer with a label that swore it had been brewed by men who respected pine.
“How is it fair,” I said to the ketchup bottle, “that we get smarter and the ocean doesn’t get quieter?”
He didn’t correct me. He set his hand on my thigh under the bar with that easy heat that blew the fuse on my bad mood just enough to keep me from becoming a menace.
“It isn’t fair,” he said. “And that’s not the bar we’re measuring against anymore.”
“They’re still coming in,” I said. “A baby yesterday. The adult today. The quiet in their heads is broken and we’re telling them to breathe, anyway, and I—” I felt the coil start. I let it wind one more turn, then let it go. “The price they’re paying so we can play chess is too high.”
He turned toward me and I could feel the attention like a hand between my shoulder blades. “Camille.”
I glared at the beer taps like they had a vote. “What?”
“This isn’t chess. It’s a bomb squad. We rush, we die. We spook them, they vanish. We do it wrong, and the price the animals pay gets higher, not lower.” He didn’t say who they were. He didn’t have to. The word that had been in the air since the briefing didn’t need to be repeated to do its damage.
I took a breath because I know a truth when it comes in a voice that isn’t trying to win points. “I know,” I said, even though part of me didn’t want to know it. “I want to drag the ocean open with my hands and pull the bad thing out. I want it that simple.”
“It’s not that simple.” He squeezed my thigh, not hard. “But we’re closer than you think. And when it’s time to move,I’m going to make sure there’s muscle behind it.”
“Plan,” I said, mocking him a little to save myself from being touched by kindness. “We make one and then we follow it.”
He grinned, not fooled. “We make three and pick the one that’s best.”
“That’s better,” I said, and took a drink of my fake soda.
The door swung and a schlump of fishermen in sunburn and exhaustion staggered in. On the far side of the room, a man in a ball cap clocked Jacob and then clocked me and then decided the floor was his best friend.
Karl.
I nudged Jacob with my knee. “Your fan club’s back.”
He didn’t bother looking. “Which one?”
“The one with the sternum you made a lesson plan out of.”
At that he flicked a glance, weighed the man, dismissed him. “He’s smarter from the neck down. Good for him.”
I sipped and let my smile go crooked. “You know he’s going to tell someone in town that you walked in with me, and you’ll be making me look like a woman who can’t walk across a bar without a chaperone.”
“I know,” he said, and the warmth in his voice put the edge on the right thing. “And I know you can walk anywhere you want. I also know what happens inside me when a man decides not to take your no the first time. That part’s mine.”
He leaned, just a little, so his shoulder brushed mine, so his next words belonged to my ear more than the air. “You’re my woman,” he said, low. “Karl, the moon, the guy at the bait freezer—they can all steer clear of what’s mine.”
A blush is a stupid, teenage thing. Mine came, anyway, traitorous and hot. “Possessive,” I said. I meant it like a reprimand. It came out like a smile.
“Correct,” he said, not apologizing, eyes laughing at me a little. “You made me that way … by existing.”
“I was dangerous before you,” I said. “You don’t get the credit.”
“I get the pleasure,” he said, and that shut me up more than it should have.
Our food arrived and we ate hungrily. Grease and salt and that particular relief your body feels when someone else has done the alchemy of hot oil right. The room hummed. The dock kept doing what docks do—letting things leave and letting them come back.
“Do you ever think about that night at the beach?” I heard myself ask, mouth already full of the answer.
His eyes heated. “Every hour.”
“We were lucky,” I said. “Salt, wind, a blind patch on the walkover camera. We got away with it.”
“Mm,” he said. “Or the ocean approved.”
“Don’t bring magic into my bar talk,” I said.
He chewed, swallowed, leaned back. “We can risk it again,” he said, no hesitation. “Night swim. No witnesses. I can be decent at stealth when naked.”
“That’s not stealth,” I said dryly. “That’s felony.”
He made me laugh. With him it’s easy. “Then maybe we stop acting like teenagers who need sand on their knees to remember they’re alive,” I said. “Maybe we do civilization. Bungalow only. Clean sheets. Doors that lock.”
“We can do both,” he said.
“What are we going to be?” The question left my mouth before I had time to dress it. “You and me.”
He set his beer down like the act needed his whole attention.
Then he looked at me the way he looked at the water before he dove in—deliberate and unafraid.
“We can be the kind of people who don’t go looking for trouble,” he said, “and still handle it when it walks through our door. We can be the kind who start coffee and carry coolers and have the same bad joke about semicolons for forty years.”
“You really listened when I said I hate semicolons,” I said, surprised again by the small ways he was paying attention.
“I listen to everything,” he said. “Even when you’re just counting breaths.”
The band by the door decided the room deserved three chords and a harmonica. A woman at a corner table laughed too loud.
I ate a fry and pretended to be casual when I said, “The bungalow isn’t permanent.”
He raised a brow. “No?”
“I was only supposed to be here a few months,” I said.
“Fill a gap for the NOAA. Make Charleston’s chaos someone else’s problem again.
” I picked up a napkin, folded it into a neat square, unfolded it, annoyed myself by needing my hands to be busy.
“My parents would love it if I made up my mind and stayed. They pretend they want me to go where the work is. They also fill my fridge when I’m not home and leave Tupperware like a breadcrumb trail. ”
He smiled, soft at the edges. “Your dad hums to whales and shows up to carry things. Your mom texts you about roux. Yeah. They want you here.”
“They do,” I said, and let the longing sit.
He tipped his bottle, took a slow drink like he was buying time to say the right thing. “If you wanted to stay,” he said, casual, “I bet the Charleston Danes could find a way to keep me in town.” He shrugged. “They’re good at inventing jobs.”
“You’re going to become a Charleston problem, too,” I said, because my heart did the trick again. “My mother will start feeding you before she remembers to feed my father.”
He grinned. “I’m charming to mothers. Daughters, I have to work for. I like the work.”
I looked at the shape of his mouth and let my own soften. “This thing we’re doing,” I said. “It feels like a tide. Not a wave.”
“Good,” he said, not missing that I meant it as a compliment. “I don’t want to be done with you when the weather changes.” He tilted his head, pretend-absent. “Might even need to buy a ring and make an honest woman out of you.”
My body did three things at once—braced, laughed, and reached. “That’s a lot of nouns in one sentence,” I said lightly. “Ring. Honest. Woman.”
He didn’t backpedal the way lesser men do when they realize they’ve spoken aloud. He let it sit between us. “Someday,” he said, the word not heavy. “If you want.”
“If you keep using the right pronunciation of my name,” I said, mocking him to hide the way the idea warmed everything. “Maybe.”
He leaned in and said it quick and right into my neck. “Camille.”
I was about to say something utterly unserious and ruin the sweetness on purpose when my phone buzzed on the bar. McGuire’s name lit the screen.
“Leanne,” I said, already standing. Jacob’s hand left my thigh and went to his wallet on pure muscle memory. He threw bills on the bar without looking.
“Doctor,” she said. No preamble. “It’s go time. We’ve got movement in your corridor that fits the profile. Same water. We need you at your facility now. Dominion Hall is staging. Keep your radio on.”
A slap of cold went through me that had nothing to do with fear. Relief wears that temperature, too.
“We’re on our way,” I said. “Ten minutes.”
“Make it eight,” she said, and hung up.
I turned. Jacob was already on his feet, pulling my bag off the brass hook under the bar without looking down, his eyes on mine.
“Well?” he asked, calm in that way that makes me reckless and good.
“Go,” I said. “Now.”
He took my hand for three steps—past Karl, past the men with the sunburn, past the harmonica that was trying to earn its keep—and then let it go to push the door with the back of his knuckles the way polite men do when they’re about to do something impolite to a problem.
The river air hit our faces like an answer. The world outside had shifted half a degree while we were laughing and it was time to see what it had moved toward.