Chapter 14
Lucy drifted in and out of sleep, but the rest was restless—a shallow drift punctuated by the muted roar of rain against the metal hull.
Every time the ship shifted, her muscles tensed as though the observation cabin’s roof might give way, and she’d jerk awake with both hands thrust above her head, fingers splayed to brace the ceiling.
She rose at last and stepped into the compact shower stall. Steam curled around her, softening the harsh fluorescent light.
She rang for help and a nurse appeared at the curtain, handing her a simple cotton sundress with the cruise logo on it. It was dusty blue, shapeless, sliding over her shoulders and dragging several inches past her knees.
She ran her thumb along the pale indentation left by the engagement band.
The cool soap had washed away the dirt on her hands but not the hollow feeling there—an emptiness that felt nothing like relief.
She flexed the digit, tested how light it felt, and remembered the last time she’d slid the ring onto her hand, believing it to be hers forever.
A knock startled her. The nurse opened the door even before Lucy could answer and admitted Steven on a pair of gleaming metal crutches.
His good foot hovered above the deck as though he feared it might still sting; his borrowed gray sweatpants and the ship’s T-shirt hung on him like an ill-cut costume.
He swung into the cabin and nearly rammed the frame.
“I have to use these until tomorrow,” he muttered, jabbing a crutch at the wall. “Doctor Marco said so. I think he enjoys watching me hobble.”
Lucy managed to suppress a smile. Steven’s eyes didn’t brighten. He eased himself into the chair beside her bed, draping one leg over the second chair the nurse brought.
She sat on the edge of the bed, feeling the mattress spring beneath her.
The nurse poured steaming coffee into sturdy paper cups and left a plate of egg-and-cheese sandwiches on the table.
They ate in deliberate silence for several minutes, each bite marking a heartbeat while neither mentioned Adam or Karina.
Lucy broke the quiet at last. “Have you talked to anyone back home?”
Steven poked at the croissant crust. “They think I’m still on a cruise with my girlfriend. They’ve already sent six messages asking if Karina and I watched the sunrise together.” He lifted the coffee to his lips without drinking. “Technically I suppose, we both saw it.”
Her gaze flickered to the window, where dawn’s gray light seeped in. “Do you plan to tell them the truth?”
He sighed, as if shrugging with his whole chest. “Not sure what the point would be. It would only make them worry for no reason.”
She understood entirely. No reassurance could inoculate one against a parent’s piercing concern. “I’m sorry. I don’t know if Karina meant to leave me purposefully or not, but I’m sorry you got caught up in whatever it was.”
His mouth thinned to a straight line. “You’re mad Adam didn’t notice you were missing, but at least when he eventually did, he came looking for you. Karina didn’t give me a thought.”
“What she did,” Lucy said softly. “was awful.”
“To both of us.” He rapped his knuckle against the tabletop.
She glimpsed the scratch in the wood and imagined every tiny nick as proof of his frustration.
“Karina used to be the one person I felt like I could trust. Now I can’t tell if I was just a convenient shield for her interest in Adam.
” He sighed. “I suppose I used her too though.”
Lucy studied him. “Both things can be true.”
He gave her a sidelong look. “That’s inconvenient.”
“People usually are.”
He chuckled, a short breath of relief. Then his expression darkened. He glanced at her bare hand, felt conspicuous, and looked away. The room held its breath until he leaned forward again. “Adam came by to see me.”
Lucy’s chest narrowed. “When?”
“After you sent him away.” Steven sipped his coffee as though its warmth might steady his nerves. “He wanted every detail of the night on the island. He asked what you said, when you panicked, if you cried, and whether you called for him in your sleep.”
Her grip on the cup tightened. Mouth dry, she traced the rim. “What did you tell him?”
“I said you were the one who kept us alive.” Steven set the cup down. “I told him if he wants the story straight, he can ask you himself, but that he probably doesn’t deserve you.”
Relief unspooled inside her, tangled with disappointment.
Part of her longed for him to learn it all without her reciting the horror like a witness in court.
She wanted him to imagine the churning surf, the battered camera battery flickering its last, the boat drifting off into blackness.
She wanted him to hurt at that mental snapshot just as his ignorance had hurt her.
Lucy swallowed. Her voice caught. “How did he take that?”
Steven’s lips twisted. “He told me I wasn’t qualified to comment on his relationship.” He paused, then with surprising calm added, “Then he apologized, which irked me because I had more to say.”
His words rebuilt her image of Adam—capable of admitting fault once the heat of anger cooled. She understood that apology signaled not just regret, but a way back to conversation. Harder for him was lingering in someone else’s disapproval without jumping in to fix it.
“What is he doing now?” she asked, voice level.
“He’s tearing apart the last year of Karina’s work.” Steven snorted. “He asked Daniel for her email logs, expense records, travel itineraries, event photos, intranet access—everything. He says he’ll find any evidence if she was deliberately sabotaging you.”
Lucy pictured Adam in the conference lounge, screens glowing in the dim, fingers tapping keys like a man possessed.
“He probably won’t find anything,” she said.
“He already has.” Steven reached into his sweatpants pocket and pulled out several neatly folded sheets. “He told me to give these to you. You don’t have to look if you’re not ready.”
Lucy’s breath caught. She hesitated, then let him lay the pages on the table. “What are they?”
“Calendar invites, company posts, photographs. Emails where he specifically asked Karina to add you to things—and she never did.” He smoothed out the top sheet. “Invites to company events she never forwarded to you. Photos she sent to PR with you deliberately cropped out.”
She ran her eyes over the typed columns.
Lucy turned the sheet over and found the chain of emails about Northstar’s holiday party.
There it was: Adam’s request—“Please make sure Lucy is beside me at the executive table this year. Last year she got stranded with legal.” Karina’s swift reply: “Handled.” And below, Adam’s sole response: a blue thumbs-up.
She bit the inside of her lip and leaned back, staring at the corner where the ink formed a triumphant emoji. The next page showed the Hartmann launch in Toronto. Lucy’s name appeared in draft schedules, vanished from final ones. A note said, “Reducing travel costs.”
She closed her eyes and felt a knot tighten in her chest. It had been a banner year for Northstar; they hadn’t been cost-cutting. The betrayal stung.
Without warning, the cabin intercom flicked on followed by a corporate notice directing all Northstar employees to a meeting in the main theater—or else to watch via live feed.
Steven reached for the remote. The camera cut to the theater as people slowly trickled in. “What do you think this is about?”
Lucy shrugged, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Several minutes later, Daniel stood at the podium beside the captain; Adam waited off to one side, sleeves rolled up in a clean white shirt. He looked exhausted.
Daniel spoke first, his voice measured. He announced external investigators were probing the unfortunate incident involving two Northstar employees’ guests who were left behind after an excursion.
He stressed that no confidentiality agreements would be enforced for employees or guests regarding what had happened, and that everyone should be cooperative with investigators.
Lucy pressed her lips together and watched Daniel finish with pledges of support and reassurance, corporate words that meant nothing.
Then Adam stepped forward. No notes. Either he’d memorized his speech, or he was speaking off the cuff.
“Yesterday, Lucy Brooks and Steven Driver were left behind during a Northstar excursion,” he began, voice steady. “Our group coordinator certified every passenger had returned. When questions arose, false information delayed the search.”
A murmur rippled through the seats. He paused until it faded.
“Those facts are under investigation.” He gripped the lectern’s edges; she saw the strain in his knuckles. “What is not under investigation is my own negligence in this situation.”
His admission cut through her. He looked straight into the camera—she found herself clutching the edge of her chair, unable to tear her gaze away. The moment was intimate enough that she felt him speaking to her alone.
“I failed her, both privately and publicly. I should have been more attentive and I should have noticed when the most important person in my life wasn’t there.
To Lucy, and to Steven, I want to apologize.
.” He stepped back and nodded to Daniel.
Then he walked offstage without asking for forgiveness or promising to earn it.
Daniel resumed the meeting, but Lucy heard none of it. Steven muted the TV. “I think he meant it,” he said.
Lucy pressed a hand to her chest. “I know.”
“He did this on camera, in front of the entire company.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “That’s what makes it so brutal.”
A knock sounded at the door. The nurse reentered, carrying a stiff white envelope on a small tray as though it were something that required handling. “This came from Mr. Shay,” she said. “He asked that you decide whether to open it.”
Lucy’s throat tightened. She took the envelope and held it without opening it, feeling the slight give of several folded pages inside. Steven watched her from across the room.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said, and stood carefully on his bandaged foot. She nodded and held his hand for a moment before the nurse helped him out, pulling the door shut behind them.
The cabin was very quiet. She turned the envelope over once, then broke the seal.
The first page stopped her almost immediately. He had written it by hand, which she hadn’t expected, and the handwriting was worse than usual—hurried, pressed too hard in places, the kind of writing that happens when someone is trying to outrun their own hesitation.
He was sorry for the hours lost. Sorry for the delay in realizing she was gone. Sorry for every time she had brought Karina to him as a problem and he had handed it back to her as a misunderstanding.
The apology was not elegant, it simply named things, one after another, and she felt something in her chest loosen as she read, some tight and exhausted thing that had been waiting for exactly this. She turned the page.
Halfway down the second page, the handwriting steadied.
The sentences grew longer. The excuses started.
He wrote that she had to understand Karina had been with him for three years, that he knew her, that the evidence was concerning but that people were capable of misreading patterns under stress, and that Lucy, given everything she’d been through, might not be in the best position right now to assess the situation clearly.
He wasn’t dismissing her experience. He just wanted her to consider?—
Lucy set the page down on the blanket and looked at it.
She picked it up and read it again, in case she had misread it.
She had not misread it.
She turned to the third page. He wanted her to come home before she made any permanent decisions. He would sleep in the guest room, give her whatever space she needed, spend however long it took. He would do anything.
He wrote the word anything and underlined it once, and she could picture him doing it, the small decisive stroke of the pen, the relief of having found the word that covered everything so he didn’t have to keep listing.
The care in the letter was real—she didn’t doubt that—but the care was organized around the assumption that she would return to the life she had fit into, the life where he decided what was a reasonable concern and what wasn’t, where his certainty about Karina’s place in his life was simply a fact she would eventually come around to accepting.
She found the pen in the bedside drawer and refolded the letter into its envelope. She held the envelope for a moment, feeling the pages inside, all that careful handwriting, and then she turned it over and wrote across the back of the seal in the steadiest hand she could manage:
You apologized but you still don’t understand why I’m angry.
She pressed the flap flat. The nurse appeared in the doorway as though she had been waiting just outside, which perhaps she had.
Lucy held out the envelope. “Would you take this to Mr. Shay, please.” The nurse took it without comment and left, and Lucy sat with her hands in her lap and let a quiet tear fall.