17. Ursula
— ? —
Ursula
The screaming is the worst sound I’ve ever heard.
I’m on deck now, my hand wrapped in a strip of Matteo’s shirt where I cut it open on the fuel line, both of us at the rail staring at the water where Bennett is thrashing and howling. And I understand, in a slow cold wave, exactly what is happening.
The water is already red. It was red before he went in.
My blood, dripping off my ruined hand into these swells for the last hour, a trail no current could erase.
His blood now, from the beating Matteo gave him, running off him into the sea.
And these are deep, cold waters, the kind where the sea keeps what it takes, where the sharks run big most of the year.
I marked the water. I didn’t fully know why I did it. I think some animal part of me did.
Something dark moves beneath the surface. A fin cuts the waves, unhurried, certain, drawn to the exact place two bleeding people have painted for it.
“Oh God.” Renata’s voice is a whisper behind us. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
The Coast Guard boats are closing fast, their sirens splitting the air, but they are not fast enough, and I already know they won’t be. Bennett screams again, a sound that doesn’t seem human, and the red around him spreads.
“Don’t look.” Matteo tries to turn me away. “Ursula, don’t look.”
But I look. I owe the moment that much.
Bennett was my husband for thirteen years.
The man I loved since I was twenty-four, the man I built my whole life around, the man I would once have died for.
Now he’s in the water I bled into, being collected by the thing that lives here, and I wait to feel horror, or grief, or even the satisfaction I was promised.
I feel none of it.
Just a cold, clean certainty, like a ledger closing. The sea keeps what it takes. I only showed it where to look.
The Coast Guard reaches him before it finishes. They haul him out with hooks and ropes, and even from here I can see the damage, the way his left arm ends wrong, the sleeve shredded and soaked black-red.
He’s alive. Screaming, bleeding, ruined, but alive. Which, I decide, is worse for him, and therefore fair.
“Ursula.” Matteo’s hands are on my face, turning me toward him. “Ursula, look at me. Are you hurt? What did they do?”
“I cut my hand open taking an axe to their engine.” I hold up the bloody, bound mess of it, and something between a laugh and a sob comes out of me.
“They locked me below after. I got out when I heard you fighting. I’m all right.
I’m all right because I slowed them down and you came, exactly like I told you to. ”
His face does something complicated, terror and awe and love all fighting for the same square inch. “You crippled a hundred-foot yacht with a fire axe.”
“I told you my family builds ships.” I lean into him, shaking now that it’s safe to. “You should see what I can do with a full toolbox.”
Everything happens in a blur after that. The Coast Guard takes control of the yacht. They put Renata in handcuffs, and for a moment she goes without a fight, her face blank, my mother’s blue diary still clutched against her chest like the last card in a losing hand.
Then, at the gangway, she stops. Turns. Makes the officers wait so she can look at me one final time, and the blankness peels back off something old and rotted underneath.
“Twenty years,” she says. “I spent twenty years being the woman he called when you weren’t enough.
Do you understand what that does to a person?
I taught you which fork to use. I fixed your hems. I stood next to you in your wedding photos knowing he’d been in my bed the night before, and I smiled, because I was patient, because I knew he’d be mine in the end.
” Her voice climbs, cracks. “And you couldn’t even lose gracefully.
You had to burn it all down. You ruined my life, Ursula. ”
I look at this woman I called a friend. At the bruise I put on her face. At my dead mother’s diary in her handcuffed hands. And I find, at the bottom of all that history, that I have exactly nothing left to give her.
“No, Renata,” I say. “You ruined your life. Twenty years, and the only thing you ever actually managed to steal was a man nobody wanted, on a boat that’s about to be evidence.
” I step close, close enough that only she can hear the last of it, and I let her see there’s no ice left in me at all, just a warm and total indifference.
“You were never patient. You were just a coward with good manners. Now let go of my mother, and get the fuck off my family’s boat. ”
I take the diary out of her hands myself. She doesn’t stop me. There’s nothing behind her eyes anymore, and I realize I’ve spent two decades afraid of a woman who was only ever this small.
The officers lead her away. She doesn’t look back, and neither, this time, do I.
My mother’s diary is a solid, blessed weight against my chest.
“Ma’am.” A young Coast Guard officer appears at my side, gentle, concerned. “Are you Ursula Rothwell?”
“Yes.”
“We received a distress call from the Orchid Society, and about forty calls after it. We’re going to need you to come with us, ma’am. The man we pulled from the water is on his way to the hospital now.”
“I understand.” I hold my mother against my chest, the weight of all the words she wrote, all the pieces of her I thought were lost forever, and I start crying without noticing I’ve begun.
Matteo appears beside me. His face is a mess. Split lip, swelling eye, blood dried on his chin. He looks like he’s been through a war.
He looks like the only thing in the world I want to keep.
He crosses the last of the deck and takes my face in both of his ruined hands, careful, like I’m the one who might break, and presses his forehead to mine.
He’s shaking. This man who jumped from one boat to another in open water, who beat my husband bloody on a heaving deck, is shaking against me like a leaf.
“I heard you,” he says, barely a breath. “I don’t know how. Dayana’s phone, the signal, all of it, but I swear to God, Ursula, somewhere out there I heard you tell me to come find you.”
“You paid attention.”
“I will always pay attention.” He kisses my forehead, my cheekbone, the corner of my mouth, tasting like salt and copper and terror finally letting go. “Thirteen years I watched you across rooms and did nothing. I am never doing nothing again.”
“You found it.” His voice is rough.
“They gave it back.”
“Are you okay?”
I don’t know how to answer that question. I’m standing on a yacht in the middle of the Atlantic, holding my dead mother’s diary, watching my husband get carried off to a hospital in pieces, waiting to give a statement to the Coast Guard about my own kidnapping.
I’m not okay.
But I’m alive. And Matteo is alive. And the diary is in my hands. And maybe, right now, that’s enough.
“I will be.” I lean into him, let his arms wrap around me. “I will be okay.”
***
The trip back to shore takes forever. I sit in the Coast Guard vessel with a shock blanket around my shoulders and the diary in my lap, Matteo pressed against my side, his hand never leaving mine. No one speaks. The engines hum. The waves roll beneath us.
I open the diary.
My mother’s handwriting fills the first page. Neat and careful, the way she did everything.
October 3, 1985. I’m starting this journal because someone told me that writing things down makes them real. I don’t know if that’s true. But I have a lot of things I want to be real. A home, a family, a life that means something. Maybe if I write them here, they’ll happen.
I close the book. I can’t read anymore. Not yet, and not here, surrounded by strangers and sirens and the aftermath of violence.
But soon.
Soon I’ll sit somewhere quiet and read every word she wrote. I’ll learn who she was before I knew her, who she dreamed of becoming, what she hoped for and feared and loved. I’ll have that piece of her back.
Bennett took it from me.
Now I have it again.
***
At the dock, there’s chaos: police, paramedics, reporters who’ve somehow caught wind of the story. And standing at the edge of it all, five women in designer clothes with matching expressions of murderous relief.
The Orchid Society.
Dayana reaches me first. Her arms go around me, fierce and tight, and she’s crying.
“Don’t you ever do that again.” Her voice is muffled against my shoulder. “Don’t you ever scare me like that again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.” She pulls back, wipes her eyes, tries to look stern. “We called everyone. The Coast Guard, the police, the FBI. I’m fairly certain Lucia threatened a senator.”
“I did threaten a senator,” Lucia confirms. “He deserved it.”
They surround me. Isla and Odette and Catarina, all of them talking at once, checking me for injuries, demanding to know if Bennett hurt me, promising increasingly creative forms of revenge.
“He’s in surgery,” Catarina says. “Lost his arm below the elbow. Shark bite. They’re not sure if he’ll keep what’s left.”
I should feel something about that. I don’t.
“And Renata?”
“In custody. The charges are extensive.” Dayana’s smile is sharp. “Kidnapping. Conspiracy. Accessory to assault. Charges like these follow a woman for the rest of her life.”
“Good.”
There’s a commotion at the far end of the dock, and I turn toward it because I already know what it is.
They’re bringing Bennett up the dock to a waiting ambulance on a gurney, strapped down, a paramedic holding a red-soaked mass where his forearm used to be.
And walking alongside the gurney, keeping pace, is a detective with a badge on her belt and a voice pitched to carry, and she is reading Bennett Rothwell his rights.
The cameras find him the way cameras always find him, except this time there is no charming smile, no practiced angle, no press release.
This time the man who married the Rothwell shipping fortune is flat on his back in a shredded suit, one arm gone, being told he has the right to remain silent while every outlet in the city livestreams it.
I watch the exact moment he understands that this is the picture.
Not the christenings, not the galas, not three generations of Rothwell ships cutting through gray water.
This. A ruined man in handcuffs on a stretcher, screaming that he’s Bennett Rothwell, that they can’t do this, that someone will pay, while a tired detective says sir, I need you to calm down and the lenses drink it in.
He turns his head, wild, searching, and for one second his eyes land on me across the whole width of the dock.
I don’t scream. I don’t gloat. I don’t do a single one of the things the old Ursula rehearsed for years.
I simply hold his gaze, and I let him see that I am not afraid of him anymore, that I will never be afraid of him again, that the woman everyone wrote off as too cold to fight back is standing here whole and warm and free while he is wheeled away into the worst years of his life.
My mother’s diary is in my arms. The ships are already gone. The name is already ash.
Then I look away first, because looking away first is the last power I will ever need over Bennett Rothwell, and I give it to myself as a gift.
They load him into the ambulance. The doors close on his screaming.
The dock goes quiet.
Matteo appears at my elbow. Someone has cleaned the blood from his face, but the bruises are darkening, and he’s moving carefully, like his ribs hurt.
“The police want our statements,” he says. “But I told them you need rest. We can do it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” I lean into him. “Tomorrow sounds good.”
He leads me through the crowd, shielding me from the cameras and the questions and the chaos. His car is waiting. Someone must have brought it. I don’t ask who.
I just get in.
I just let him take me home.
And when we get there, I curl up in his arms with my mother’s diary pressed against my heart, and I finally, finally let myself fall apart.