Chapter 16
Lila Logan Cameron
Call sign: Cassiopeia
Lila slipped inside the crew’s empty cabin, her bare feet whispering like satin over wood. She had changed out of her post-bathing
kimono and instead into her featherlight cover-up and a white bikini. Alejandro, Nico, and MJ had kept their room tidy, tidier
than Lila’s children’s, at least. It was odd. Lila had assumed that Tia’s stint at boarding school would have made a bed-maker
out of her daughter, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect.
Lila skimmed past Nico’s bunk. The boy had pinned a couple postcards on his wall: marble columns in Athens, a vineyard in
Tuscany, even a spired building in Guadalajara with faded cursive in the corner that read Miss you, m’hijo.
Alejandro’s bed was the upper bunk. Lila poked her small nose over the mattress to see what he kept closest to him. The only
scrap of decor was an old photograph of Alejandro, Francis, and another man, when they were about thirty years younger. Their
arms were around each other, and they were sunburned, shirtless, and beaming. Lila felt a pang at the sight of her husband’s
youthful face.
At home, Lila had her own collection of pinned papers on the wall over the old landline. They were headlines with her name in them mostly, and as the years crept by and she noticed the papers were yellowing and the dates sounded far away, she began to burn to add to it again.
MJ had her own small bed. Everything was not only in place but it also seemed prepped for a storm. Her books were tied up
in a net that hung over the bed and swayed with the rocking of the boat. The only thing loose was an orange prescription bottle
on the side table. Lila picked it up and ran her thumb over the label.
Verapamil.
“Senora Cameron. ?Estás husmeando?”
Lila’s heart gave a gentle flutter. She tucked the prescription bottle in her cover-up pocket on instinct before turning.
Alejandro leaned in the doorway, wiping his hands on his jeans. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.
“Claro que no, guapo,” Lila replied.
Alejandro nodded. He never betrayed any emotion. He was the opposite of Francis in that way, Francis who projected anger or
lust with a single muscle twitch. Lila could read the tension in her husband’s shoulders or trace the cut of his jaw and know
his longings.
Alejandro was different. His feelings, whatever they might be, never reached his body, not even his dark eyes. And she preferred
it that way.
He regarded her, waiting. “My nephew is sitting surface for the divers . . .”
“Which means Francis and the others are still underwater,” she finished for him.
Alejandro nodded again and closed the door behind him.
They were alone together. Nico had to watch for the divers from above as a safety precaution in case another ship came by or there was an accident. And, rest assured, Lila would hear her noisy husband and children returning long before they ever came belowdecks.
Alejandro crossed the small room until they were eye to eye.
“Nunca lo diré,” he growled low and soft.
I’ll never tell.
The promise he made each time before they began.
It had started seven years ago when Francis and Alejandro had had a fight and Francis left for two weeks of business meetings.
The twins had been in sixth grade and were gone all day, and Alejandro had stopped by unexpectedly to bring her chouquettes.
Or maybe it had started earlier, when Lila was pregnant and cooped up at home. While Francis worked eighty-hour weeks, Lila
was alone in their Palm Beach villa, which they had originally purchased for her to have a quiet space outside the limelight.
Palm Beach would become their default home. She was between projects then, taking Lexapro and prenatal vitamins in lieu of
the tequila that usually passed the time. Her hair-care brand was in the red and needed to be euthanized. And Alejandro didn’t
like working more than necessary unless it was to cook. Lila and Alejandro hadn’t done anything back then, not really, but
he would stop by to cook her fajitas or play a round of blackjack. He tutored her in Spanish, traded stories about growing
up Catholic, and never looked away when she spoke.
Or maybe it had been penned in the stars the moment he laid eyes on her.
The day Lila met Francis Cameron, there had been a smiling man with copper hair loitering around her trailer after a shoot.
And then there was the smaller boy that lingered behind.
Francis’s shadow.
Lila had just made a name for herself filming Herald of Mystery, and the two boys were day hires for a catering company, nobodies who wanted to catch a glimpse of a star. Lila had still
been Catholic in those days, still a natural blonde. She hadn’t yet taken up smoking (her director allowed her to film scenes
with herbal cigarettes instead), and she blushed whenever someone recognized her on the street. The two boys following her
had been flattering, cute even. She offered to sign her autograph on a napkin, and Francis had countered by asking her out.
You can’t afford this, Lila had told him.
Francis showed off his crowded teeth. I’ve been saving.
I don’t mean dinner.
She shooed him away, and the other boy stopped and asked for her autograph. It was the only time he’d spoken.
While Francis was away on business, it became a dizzying corner of her life, an affair that held the gravity of Guinevere
falling for Lancelot while Camelot looked on, unwitting. If King Arthur ever knew, would he find it in him to burn his queen
at the stake?
“Nunca lo diré,” Lila repeated. I’ll never tell. She moved to fit into Alejandro’s arms.
The sharp blare of a horn cut between them without warning.
“Jesus!” She clapped her hands over her ears. “What on earth is that?”
The horn sounded over and over. Lila curled her head into her body. All right, we get it. Now, make it stop.
But the interruption seemed to tell Alejandro something that Lila had missed. He stood straight and tense like a prey animal
with cocked ears.
“Five blasts,” he said and then rushed from the room.
Five blasts? Lila followed after him to the companionway and up onto deck before it clicked.
The signal for danger.