Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT. Cooper never showed up.
But guess who did?
My dad.
Of all people!
I was weeping with abandon, crumpled on the bottom steps—going whole hog with full-body sobs after losing all hope—when there was a knock at the door. And then I heard my dad’s voice, muffled through the metal. “JoJo? Are you in there?”
I stood up. “Dad?”
“It’s me, honey. Open up.”
“How did you find me?”
“I tracked your phone’s GPS.”
“But my phone died,” I said.
“Last known location,” my dad said.
“You can do that?”
“It’s easier than it should be,” my dad said.
“Dad,” I said, starting to cry again. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Let’s go, sweetheart,” my dad said. “We need to get back to the boat.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m stuck.”
“Define ‘stuck,’” my dad said.
“Somebody locked me in,” I said. “I might have to die in here.”
It tells you a lot about my state of mind that it did not occur to me that my dad could let me out until he did. I heard a clank and then a chunk and then my dad swung the iron door wide open.
“Dad!” I shouted, so overjoyed at the sight of him standing there holding Ashley’s dress that I hurled myself over the threshold and into his arms—with so much force that my dad tumped right over, and we both hit the ground.
It was the first hug I could remember giving him since I was a kid.
And it was nothing short of a doozy.
WE MADE IT back to the boat, but just barely.
We cut it so close, my dad asked the cab driver taking us back to the dock to “step on it” three different times.
We cut it so close, my mother called to say they were paging us over the ship’s loudspeaker to report to the purser’s desk and account for our whereabouts.
We cut it so close, we ran—actually ran—up the gangway, the dry-cleaner plastic of Ashley’s dress fluttering over my dad’s shoulder like a kite.
Technically, we were late. There’s an all-aboard time for a ship about to disembark, and then, forty-five minutes later, there’s an actual pulling-away-from-the-dock time.
We made it with two minutes to spare on the second one.
They were paging us again as we arrived.
Guess who else they were paging?
Cooper.
“Passenger Cooper Watts, please report to the purser’s desk to confirm your return.”
Cooper wasn’t on board?
I looked around, like maybe I could locate him, just as my mom and Ashley showed up, demanding to know what had taken us so long.
“We ran into some traffic,” my dad said, giving me a little wink, like that was all they needed to know.
Ashley took her dress and cradled it. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.
“You got it, squirt,” my dad said, like a guy who’d just saved the day.
Which he really had, I realized. He’d grabbed the dress, saved my life, and gotten us both back to the ship—all in record time. But here was another thing I was noticing about my dad: He wasn’t a guy who liked to take credit for things.
My mom was squinting at my dad like she could tell there was more to the story, and then, as we all started to make our way back to the main deck, she noticed him limping a little.
“What happened to your leg?” she asked then.
My dad glanced at me. I’d maimed him a bit with that hug earlier, that’s what happened.
I gave him a little nod, like Tell her!
But he just gave me a tiny headshake, like Not necessary.
But it was necessary—right?
It’s one thing to not be show-offy about things—it’s quite another thing to not even mention them. How exactly was my mother supposed to appreciate him if she didn’t know what there was to appreciate?
This guy needed a PR team!
“Dad is being modest,” I said. “He didn’t just pick me up back in town … he rescued me. He saved me.”
That got everyone’s attention.
“Rescued you?” my mom said.
Just as Ashley said, “Saved you?”
Did we need to get into the whole menaced by Pork Pie situation? No. Those vibes were too creepy to make the conversation-topic cut for the best week of my sister’s life. Pork Pie was not worthy of our attention today. We could process all that later—if ever.
But the topic of how great my dad was?
That, we needed to process right now.
“I got myself locked into a lighthouse,” I explained.
My mother sighed, like this was really not the week for shenanigans of that nature.
“An abandoned lighthouse,” I added, trying to capture my desperation, “out at the end of a peninsula, with nobody around.” I was trying to cherry-pick my details without actually lying about anything, and I decided it was fair to classify Pork Pie as “nobody.” I glanced at my dad to see if he caught the Homeric reference, but he was studying the ground, like he really, truly was uncomfortable getting any credit for anything.
Huh. Had he always been this way?
I went on. “I was locked in, and then I accidentally shattered my phone, and I really, really thought nobody would ever find me and I would just have to die there. Right? How would anyone ever even think to find me? I thought I would just slowly starve to death, like a lizard in a sunroom.”
I took a step closer to my dad, and then I put my arm around his shoulders like we were BFFs.
“But this guy figured it out,” I continued, “like a total hero—and he came to my rescue.”
I wasn’t even exaggerating.
“He noticed I wasn’t back yet, and he couldn’t get in touch with me, so he went ashore to check in with the tailor, learned that she’d texted me the dress was ready but never heard back, did some stalking on his phone to figure out my last known location, showed up there, got me out—and then brought me and the wedding dress back here just in the nick of time. All without a wrinkle!”
It occurred to me as I said it that it might not technically be true. That dress had hit the ground pretty hard when I knocked my dad over. And I was feeling a little wrinkled myself, to be honest.
But the point remained.
My mom was taking it all in, frowning. “And the limp?” she asked.
“I was so overjoyed to be rescued,” I said, “that I tackled Dad with a hug—and knocked him right over.”
My mother looked back and forth between us. “You hugged your dad?”
I nodded.
“So hard that you knocked him over?”
I shrugged and said, “Yeah,” like Of course. Like we all tackled Dad with hugs all the time.
My mom looked at my dad.
He shrugged, too.
But she was impressed. I could tell.
That’s when Cooper got paged again, and we all paused at the sound of his name. “Is Cooper not back yet?” my mom asked.
“Sounds like maybe not?” I said.
“Well, where is he?” my mom demanded of me, like he was being naughty and I had to account for it.
“I really don’t know.”
“You always know everything about Cooper,” my mother said.
Not everything. Not always. “He might not be coming back to the ship,” I said, thinking my mom probably didn’t need to be actively worrying about Cooper on top of everything else. Then I said, “He might have missed the boat on purpose.”
“On purpose?” my mother asked.
I sighed. Time to say it. “This morning, he said he was quitting.”
“‘Quitting’? Quitting what?”
Quitting me, I supposed? The idea squeezed my heart. “Leaving the ship,” I clarified. “And going back to London. Today. That was the last thing he said to me.”
“How’s he going to get there?” my mom demanded. “Swim?”
“He said he’d figure it out.”
My mom was so baffled, but as she turned it all over in her mind, she started to suspect it was my fault. “Okay,” she said, putting a hand on her hip. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing!” I said. “We just had a—misunderstanding.”
Sheesh. If that wasn’t the understatement of the year.
My mother tilted her head. “A ‘misunderstanding’ that made him want to leave the ship?”
“I guess, technically,” I said, “it was more like a fight.”
“What were you fighting about?”
Where to begin? “I don’t know. Just—the usual.”
Just then, the ship blew its horn, and we all looked around to notice we were moving. The dock was sliding away past us.
I ran to the railing. “Are we setting sail?”
We clearly were. Without Cooper.
I searched the dock in vain, willing Cooper to appear, running after us on the wharf and waving his arms.
But nothing. Just dockworkers. People milling about. Seagulls.
“Looks like he really did quit,” my dad said.
We watched Bishop’s Cay drift away from us for a few minutes—nobody talking—and I had that time-lag feeling where I just couldn’t seem to grasp that what was happening was really happening.
Had we truly just left Cooper behind? Had I really never set him straight about anything that mattered? Had I genuinely called him for life-and-death help—and then he actually didn’t show up?
Most important: Was there nothing at all I could do to rewind time, do this day over, and get it right?
I kept flashing back to that moment just before Cooper had stepped onto the elevator—and rewriting it in my mind. What if, propriety be damned, I’d shouted all the way down the hall, “I didn’t sleep with Finn!” Could I have bought enough time to explain?
I guess we’d never know.
When we were fully, undeniably, irreversibly at sea, my dad announced to the group, “I’m going to walk JoJo to her room now.”
More befuddlement from my mom: “You are?”
My dad assessed me. “She needs to rest before dinner.”
I nodded, glad to be rescued. Then I nodded at Ashley. “I’m okay. You should go try on the dress.”
“Let’s hope it fits,” my mother said, shifting back to the original crisis of the day.
And so we went our separate ways—my mom in charge of Ashley, and my dad in charge of me.
But here was the problem: I really didn’t want to go back to the room.
The room was the last place I wanted to go, in fact. Even the thought of it, all empty, with every trace of Cooper gone, felt bleak beyond words.
Had he really just … left?
Even when he’d declared out loud that he was done—I didn’t really think he was done. I didn’t think he could possibly give up on me so easily. Sure, I was frustrating—but that wasn’t news! I’d been frustrating my whole life!
It had never bothered him before.