Chapter 3 #2
I take the shotgun from her hands, checking the safety before returning it to the storage locker. "Then we run. Second Watch can outpace most vessels her size, and I know these waters better than anyone who might be following."
Sera watches me secure the weapon. "You're not worried."
"I'm always worried. Worry keeps you alive. What I'm not is panicked." I straighten, facing her. "Two days in and we haven't been found. That's good. It means your father's play worked. No one connected him to me, which means no one's looking for you here."
"Yet."
"Yet," I agree. "But every day they don't find you is another day the trail gets colder. Another day the Veronis have to wonder if you're even still in the country. Uncertainty is a weapon, and right now we're holding it."
She considers this, arms crossed over her chest in a defensive posture I'm starting to recognize.
"We're going to be stuck on this boat together for another twelve days. I need to know there's an actual human being under all that tactical competence." She gestures vaguely at me. "Tell me something that matters to you for no strategic reason at all."
I think about deflecting. About keeping the walls up where they belong.
Instead I hear myself saying, "I collect old maps."
Her eyebrows rise.
"Nautical charts. Coast survey maps from the 1800s.
Anything that shows how the shoreline has changed over time.
" I move to the cabin housing, pulling open a storage compartment and extracting a leather portfolio.
"This is the barrier islands in 1847. Half of what's land now was open water then. Half of what was land is underwater."
Sera takes the portfolio carefully, unfolding the aged paper to examine the detailed rendering. Her fingers trace the coastline with the reverence of someone who understands fragile things.
"It's beautiful."
"It's a reminder that nothing stays the same. The coast is always moving, always changing. What looks permanent is just a moment in time."
She looks up at me, and something in her expression shifts. The defensive posture softens. The sharp edges smooth.
"I restore Renaissance altarpieces," she says quietly.
"Four hundred years old, some of them. The paint cracking, the gold leaf flaking, the wood warping from centuries of humidity changes.
Everyone looks at them and sees religious art.
I look at them and see the brushstrokes.
The mistakes the artist tried to fix. The human being behind the holy image. "
"Sounds like we both spend our time looking for what's underneath."
"Maybe." She hands the portfolio back to me, and our fingers brush in the exchange. A small contact. Meaningless.
Except my skin remembers the warmth of hers long after she pulls away.
The afternoon passes in something approaching peace.
I show her the engine room, the bilge pumps, the emergency equipment lockers.
She asks intelligent questions and remembers the answers.
By dinner, she can identify the navigation lights of an approaching vessel and knows the VHF channels for Coast Guard emergencies.
Night falls soft and purple over the marsh. We eat on deck, grilled shrimp and vegetables, the citronella candle doing its best against the mosquitoes. Sera has pulled her hair back in a loose knot, exposing the curve of her neck, the hollow of her throat.
I make myself look at the water instead.
"Can I ask you something?" Her voice is lower now, softened by the darkness.
"You can ask."
"When you looked at me yesterday, after I got off the plane. What did you see?"
I take my time answering. "A woman who didn't want to be there. Who was furious at circumstances beyond her control. Who looked at me like I was part of the problem instead of part of the solution."
"And now?"
Now.
Now I see the way the candlelight catches the gold in her hair. The intelligence in her green eyes. The strength it takes to maintain her composure when her entire life has been upended by forces she can't fight.
"Now I see someone I underestimated."
She makes a sound that's almost a laugh. "Is that a compliment?"
"It's the truth."
Sera stands, collecting our empty plates. She moves past me toward the galley hatch, and I catch that scent again. Lemon and something underneath. Something warm.
"Ford."
I look up.
She's stopped at the hatch, plates in hand, her face half-shadowed by the cabin housing.
"Thank you. For showing me the maps. For treating me like a person instead of a problem."
"You're not a problem."
"I know." A small smile curves her lips. "That's what I mean."
She disappears below, and I sit in the darkness listening to the marsh come alive around us. Frogs and insects and the occasional splash of something hunting in the shallows.
I don't let myself think about the curve of her smile.
I don't let myself imagine what it would feel like to taste that lemon scent on her skin.
I don't let myself acknowledge the way my blood runs hotter when she's close.
Two weeks.
Twelve days left.
I've survived worse things than wanting something I can't have.
But when she comes back on deck an hour later, wrapped in a blanket against the cooling night air, and settles into the chair next to mine to watch the stars appear one by one over the water, I realize that surviving and living are not the same thing.
And Sera Mancini is making me want to live in ways I thought I'd forgotten.