Chapter 10 Jennifer
JENNIFER
Igather my things, but a crew member, a young beta with sunburned forearms, takes the box from me before I can argue.
He carries it like it weighs nothing. Maybe it does to someone who lifts marine equipment for a living, but it holds my books, which makes it precious, and I track every step he takes with the expression of a woman prepared to intervene.
He sets it down on deck with surprising care, proving I may have judged him unfairly.
"Guests usually sit there," Carmen says, nodding toward a bank of cushioned seats facing the water. "Staff is below. I'll show you."
I follow her across polished teak that gives softly underfoot. Ropes creak overhead. Somewhere metal taps against metal in a slow rhythm. The marina slips past around us as we move, sunlight flashing off white hulls, gulls shouting at everyone for reasons of their own.
A narrow stairwell takes us below, the air cooler with each step, the smell of salt giving way to cedar, clean linen, and engine hum deep in the bones of the boat. It feels different down here, quieter, steadier, as if the world above is already further away.
Staff quarters turn out to be perfectly decent, which I mean with full sincerity because I had prepared myself for a storage closet with a camp bed and one suspicious hook on the wall.
Instead, it's a small cabin with two bunks, a narrow window, and a fold-down table bolted in place. Everything neat. Everything solid.
The mattress has a fitted sheet. There's a power outlet beside the lower bunk.
I could cry.
I don't, because Carmen is still in the doorway, and I don't want her having any doubts about hiring me. I have to hold it together on the outside, even if I'm dying on the inside.
Don't let it show.
"How long is the crossing?" I ask.
"About ninety minutes. Calm today." She checks her phone. "I'll go through the guest brief up top when we're underway. Get settled."
She disappears. I put the duffel bags on the upper bunk and the box on the lower one and sit next to it and breathe for a moment.
I can't believe it has been twelve weeks since Vegas. It was the worst and best night of my life, which is not a sentence I've said out loud to anyone because the ratio of awful to wonderful is difficult to explain.
Since the roulette table. The red dress. The three men who smelled extraordinary and looked at me like I was the entire point of the room. Then left money on the nightstand.
My stomach growls.
I find the second granola bar in the bottom of my purse and eat it standing up next to the bunk, and she settles into a sort of provisional truce.
"Don't push it," I tell her.
I put one hand over my stomach for a second and let myself feel it properly before I fold the granola bar wrapper and put it in my pocket and go back up to the deck, because we're moving now, and moving sounds better than sitting with my feelings in a small room below the waterline.
The marina is already shrinking behind us.
I find a spot on the deck railing and hold on and let the wind do what it wants with my hair, which is already a lost cause.
Salt air in my lungs, the cold of it, the clean particular smell of open water that is nothing like the ocean from a beach.
It smells like somewhere you go to start over, which feels pointed in a way I decide not to examine.
My strawberry scent opens up a little in the sea air. I feel it the same way I feel her, that subtle shift, my body doing something honest without consulting me. Strawberry and maybe the beginning of rose but not the thorned kind. Just warmth. Just relief.
Carmen finds me at the railing with a laminated binder, a mug of tea, and a blueberry muffin. She hands me the tea first, then the muffin.
"You look done in," she says. "If you want more food, say so."
"Right now, I want to marry you," I tell her, already peeling back the wrapper. It has been a long day, and I am one inconvenience away from lying face-down on this deck until someone hoses me off.
She snorts once and opens the binder.
"There are also a few personal guests of the owners currently in residence. They'll be wrapping up their stay when the Nakamura group arrives." She turns a page. "The new guests are associates of the owners."
I've been so focused on immediate survival that I never asked who I'd be cooking for. "Who are the owners, exactly?"
"Private," Carmen says in the tone of someone who has answered this many times.
"European investors. They use the island for business hospitality and personal retreats.
They're not usually here during guest bookings.
" She turns another page. "They'll be in residence for the Nakamura meeting first. Japanese delegation.
Formal. That's your first week. After that, leisure guests. "
"When do the owners leave?"
"Unclear." She checks her phone. "Probably after the Nakamura group. A week, maybe two."
I've worked in service long enough to know the best owners are the distant kind. If all goes well, I won't see them much, and they won't notice me at all unless something catches fire.
"Menu flexibility?" I ask.
"High enough. The regulars have preferences. I'll send dietary notes for the business group tonight." Carmen glances down at the page. "The last chef leaned heavily into fine dining."
"And the guests?"
"Mixed feedback. Some wanted simpler food. One owner," she says, checking the binder, "Santos, specifically, has a standing request for anything that tastes like comfort."
Santos is not an uncommon name.
I take a sip of the very good tea and look out at the open water, telling myself there are probably plenty of men named Santos in Europe.
Several, even, who own private islands and use the word comfort about food.
The one I'm thinking of is obviously a different Santos entirely. None of this is connected to anything.
Not that I ever looked for them. I could have. Social media exists. Rich men love the internet almost as much as they love themselves. I could have found them if I'd wanted to.
I didn't.
Why would I go searching for the men who left without a word and dropped cash on the nightstand like I was something to settle up with before checkout?
My rose scent sharpens slightly. Completely meaningless. Probably the wind.
The baby rolls low in my belly, unconvinced.
"Got it," I say. "Comfort forward."
"He'll eat anything, apparently. The other two are more particular." She hands me the binder. "Matteo doesn't eat carbs after eight. Tomas is allergic to shellfish."
I hold the binder.
"Jennifer," Carmen says.
"I'm reading," I say, and I look down at the page, and the names are there in clean printed type because of course they are, because the universe has a very specific sense of humor and today it has decided to deploy it at thirty knots in international waters, and I breathe in slowly and breathe out slowly and the rose sharpens further and my strawberry scent goes cold and strange in the sea air before I force it back under control through what I can only describe as sheer disrespectful willpower.
Santos.
Matteo.
Tomas.
There are coincidences and then there are coincidences, and as I feel my face growing red, this is the worst of them.
I close the binder.
"Great," I say, and my voice comes out completely normal, which I consider a world-class achievement. "I'll review the full guest list tonight."
Carmen looks at me for one half second longer than necessary.
She nods and takes her efficient self elsewhere.
I turn back to the sea, grip the railing, and breathe while conducting a detailed internal discussion covering fate, coincidence, the personal malice of circumstance, and what exactly I plan to do about it.
What I plan to do is my job.
I'm going to cook three meals a day for a business delegation and whoever else is on that island. I'm going to be professional, competent, and forgettable. Whatever happened in Vegas can stay there, where things are supposed to stay, unlike apparently everything else in my life.
I'm going to save money. Call Anna in the evenings and pretend everything is fine, then occasionally admit it isn't. Grow a small human in peace and dignity.
And when the three months are up, I'm going to leave.
None of this is going to be a problem.
My stomach growls again.
"Working on it," I tell her.
The island comes into view about an hour later, and I forget everything for a little while because it is just genuinely, unreasonably beautiful.
It rises out of the water like it chose to be here and never looked back.
Green hills, the kind of green that only happens where water is never a question.
A white shoreline curves around a small natural harbor, where the sea shifts from deep blue to a shallow turquoise so bright it looks painted on.
There are palms and other trees I should probably know the names of, broader and darker, crowding the slopes.
Tucked into the hillside above the harbor is a house doing what very expensive architecture always does, which is pretending it grew there naturally instead of being designed by someone who charged a fee I prefer not to imagine.
Near the shore sits a smaller building with a lower, longer roofline, and another structure half-hidden by trees that Carmen, appearing at my shoulder, informs me is the staff quarters and kitchen.
The kitchen is separate from the main house.
Good. Excellent. That is the best piece of architectural information I have received all day, and I take it personally.
The crew ties us to a small dock with quiet efficiency and Carmen leads me up a path that is crushed white shells underfoot and bordered by something flowering in yellow that I don't have the botanical knowledge to name but that smells warm and a little sweet in the afternoon heat.
I stop at the top of the path and just look.