Chapter 12 Charlie
CHARLIE
It had become a thing, the veranda.
I don’t know when exactly it started—maybe the fourth night, when I wandered out with my laptop and found Asher already there, barefoot, nursing a beer in the dark.
He’d looked up like he’d been caught, and I’d almost turned around.
But he’d moved his feet off the other chair, and I’d sat down, and neither of us had said anything for maybe twenty minutes.
Just the waves and the tree frogs and whatever was happening between us that we were both pretending wasn’t.
Now it was the fifth night, and we didn’t pretend anymore. Not about the veranda, anyway.
The air was heavy and warm, the kind that settled on your skin like a second layer.
Somewhere below the terrace, the Caribbean lapped at the rocks in a rhythm that had been doing its thing long before either of us existed and would keep going long after we were gone.
I found that comforting. The smallness of it.
Asher was in the chair beside me, legs stretched out, ankles crossed on the railing.
No shoes. No watch. The Asher Pierce who appeared in Forbes and Bloomberg would have been unrecognizable in this version—a man in linen shorts and a faded T-shirt who’d spent the afternoon in the water with Anselmo’s crew, checking the anchor points for tomorrow’s test dive.
I’d been telling him about Mia. I’m not sure how it started—maybe he’d asked about the texts I kept laughing at, the string of voice memos she’d been sending all week.
Mia narrating her life in ninety-second bursts: a disastrous date, a client who wanted her to plan an event theme around “minimalist maximalism,” a new chocolate shop she’d found in the East Village that she was pretty sure was a front for something but the truffles were transcendent so she didn’t care.
“She sounds like a lot,” Asher said, but he was smiling.
“She’s everything.” I pulled my knees up to my chest. “When my dad died—I was in my second year at MIT, and Mia just showed up at my apartment with a suitcase and she just . . . stayed. Didn’t ask.
Didn’t announce it. Just moved in for three weeks and made sure I ate and showered and didn’t disappear into my own head. ”
He was quiet for a moment. “That’s rare. Someone who just shows up.”
“The rarest.”
The tree frogs filled the silence. I took a sip of the wine Carlos had poured with dinner—something local and slightly sweet that I’d never have ordered in a restaurant but that tasted exactly right here.
“You have someone like that?” I asked. “Someone who just shows up?”
He didn’t answer immediately. I’d noticed he did that—took questions seriously enough to think before he spoke, which was disorienting coming from a man who made billion-dollar decisions at the speed most people chose lunch.
“Mike,” he said. “And my brother Destry.”
I’d seen the name in articles. One of the twins, the marine biologist that he’d mentioned at the party. Less visible than Asher, more visible than Devlin, who seemed to exist mostly in tabloid photos from European clubs.
“Are you close?”
“We’re . . .” He paused, turned his beer bottle slowly in his hands.
“Destry’s the one who calls me on my bullshit.
Which I need more than I like to admit. He flew to Singapore once because I’d been dark for two weeks during a deal that was going sideways.
No call. No text. Just showed up at my hotel. Sat in the lobby until I came down.”
“How long did he sit there?”
“Six hours.” A pause. “He ordered room service to the lobby. The concierge didn’t know what to do with him. A Pierce brother eating pad thai on a settee in the Four Seasons for half a day.”
“Sounds like Mia.”
“Except Mia brings chocolate. Destry brings scotch and opinions.”
I laughed. A real one. He looked at me when I did, and something shifted in his face—a softening that I’d only started to notice in Roatan, as if the island was dissolving layers of him that I hadn’t even realized were there.
“What happened when you came down?”
“He said, ‘You look like shit. Let’s go eat something that isn’t pad thai.
’ ” Asher shook his head, almost smiling.
“He didn’t ask about the deal. Just sat across from me at dinner and talked about nothing for two hours until I could breathe again.
That’s Destry. He doesn’t need you to explain.
He just needs you to show up for the meal. ”
The idea landed somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Someone who could cross an ocean on the strength of your silence alone.
“Devlin?” I asked.
“Devlin is . . . Devlin.” A complicated expression crossed his face. “He handles things differently. Louder. More publicly. We’re working on it.”
I heard what he didn’t say—that “working on it” meant something painful, something ongoing, something that cost him. I didn’t push. That was another thing about the veranda. It let you offer exactly as much as you wanted to and no more.
“My brother and I aren’t working on anything,” I said, before I’d decided to say it. “Wyatt. We haven’t really talked in . . . a while.”
Asher glanced at me but didn’t ask why. Just waited.
“Wyatt gave me this compass,” I said. “It’s broken. It was our father’s. He brought it back from Iraq. Wyatt had it after he died.”
I stopped myself. I didn’t usually talk about Wyatt. Or the compass. Or any of the things I carried that I couldn’t fix by working harder.
“Sounds like he knew you pretty well,” Asher said. Quietly. Like he meant it.
“He did. Once.”
The waves kept their rhythm below us. The tree frogs kept singing. And we sat there in a silence that felt like it was holding space for all the things we’d just shown each other.
After a while, Asher got up to get another beer and came back with one for me too, even though I hadn’t asked.
He’d noticed I’d finished the wine. He noticed things like that—small, quiet things that a person could miss if they weren’t paying attention.
But I was paying attention now. I’d been paying attention since somewhere around the fourth night, when I’d stopped telling myself this was just colleagues sharing a veranda and started admitting, at least to the tree frogs, that I looked forward to this all day.
That the hours between the last test dive and the moment I heard him approach on the veranda had started to feel like the longest part.
He settled back into his chair and our shoulders were almost touching. Not quite, but close enough that I could feel the warmth of him without contact. He smelled like salt water and sunscreen and something woodsy underneath that was just him.
“This is nice,” I said. Which was maybe the most inadequate thing I’d ever said, and I’d once described a breakthrough in hyperbaric medicine as “pretty cool” in front of a funding committee.
He turned his head. In the dark, I could only see the outline of his profile and the faint light reflecting off his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
We stayed like that. Not talking. Not needing to. The Caribbean doing its thing below us, ancient and indifferent and beautiful.
I was thinking about time. How strange it was that five days could rearrange your understanding of a person so completely.
The man I’d met in San Diego—controlled, calculating, always three moves ahead—wasn’t gone exactly.
He was still in there. But here, barefoot on this veranda, he’d let me see the parts of himself that existed underneath the strategy.
The parts that missed his brother. The parts that came back to an island full of ghosts because he loved it too much to stay away.
I wondered what parts of me he was seeing. Whether the Charlie on this veranda was someone he’d recognize from the lab.
He stood a few minutes later—got up quietly, the way he did everything, said goodnight, and went inside.
My phone rang at 11:47 p.m.
I know the exact time because I’d just checked it, thinking I should go inside, thinking I should stop sitting in the dark with this man and the warm air and whatever was building between us that I didn’t have a name for yet.
The screen said St. Thomas Royal. Sarah’s facility.
I’d talked to Sarah two days ago. She’d sounded tired but sharp, complaining about the food and asking me detailed questions about the SEAS pressure calibration like she was going to show up and run the tests herself.
I’d hung up feeling the way I always did after talking to her—grateful, and guilty that I wasn’t closer, and quietly certain that she’d outlast us all through sheer stubbornness.
I answered on the second ring.
“Dr. Winters, this is Dr. Harrison. I’m calling because—” He paused.
A doctor’s pause. The kind they must teach in medical school, the breath before the world changes.
“I’m very sorry to tell you that Dr. Chen passed away this evening.
It was quite sudden. A cardiac event, approximately forty minutes ago.
The staff was with her. She was not in any distress. ”
The words landed in a strange order. Passed away. Sudden. Forty minutes ago. Not in any distress.
Forty minutes. Sarah had been dead for forty minutes while I sat on this veranda talking about broken compasses and brothers and chocolate. While I laughed at something Asher said. While the waves did their thing and the tree frogs sang and the world kept spinning like nothing had happened.
“Dr. Winters? Are you still there?”
“Yes.” My voice sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. A recording of me, played back through bad speakers. “Yes, I’m here.”
He was saying other things. Arrangements. Timeframes. Something about personal effects. The words arrived but they didn’t attach to anything—they floated past me like subtitles in a language I used to speak.
“Was she—” I started, and then didn’t know how to finish. Was she alone? Was she scared? Was she thinking of me? Did she know I was sitting on a veranda in Roatan laughing while her heart stopped? “Did she say anything?”