31. Charlotte Gallagher
Charlotte Gallagher
The first thing I notice is that it’s morning.
Before I even open my eyes, I know Dane’s still here. After fourteen years together, some part of me always knows when he’s beside me.
He’s lying on his back, staring at the ceiling.
I push up onto my elbow and look at him—the set of his jaw, the way he’s holding himself.
He’s tense.
“How long have you been awake?”
“A while.”
I shift, settling across his chest with my chin resting there. He looks down at me, and something in his expression softens.
“You never stay in bed this late.”
“Sometimes I do,” he says. “When I feel like lying here and watching you sleep. Or when I need to think.”
I tilt my head, studying him. “What’s on your mind this morning?”
He exhales slowly. “Everything. Whether there’s something we’ve missed. Some move we haven’t seen yet. A way to make this chaos stop.” A small pause. “Didn’t come up with an answer. But I did come up with something that might help for now.”
He’s been carrying the weight of this for weeks. Of course he’s trying to solve it.
“Okay. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“We need to get off this property. Not just out for a bit. I mean properly away—out of Brisbane, away from the fence and cameras. All of it. We need to breathe, Charlotte. If we don’t, something’s going to give.”
I hold his gaze. “What are you thinking?”
“A yacht of our own.”
That pulls my attention in completely.
“Tell me more.”
“We’ve got the money, and nothing is holding us here. There’s no reason we can’t.”
“We’d need Grandad to walk us through how to actually buy something like that.”
“Which he’d happily do, I’m sure.”
I nod. “He would. I’m sure of it.”
“Nothing massive. Something we can handle ourselves. No staff. Just us and open water.”
Something in me lifts.
“Yeah?”
“It means we can leave whenever we want,” he says. “If things get like this again, we go. No asking. No waiting. Just... gone.” He watches me. “I’ll need to train properly. Revisit everything Dad taught me. Do it right.”
“This is perfect,” I say without hesitation. “I love this idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” I lean in and kiss him. “Let’s do it.”
The harbor feels like a different world from the one we’ve been stuck in—open, bright, salt in the air. And, most importantly, people are focused on their own lives, not ours.
We board with our bags and the food I packed. By mid-morning we’re on the water, the harbor slipping away behind us, the city fading from skyline to distance to nothing.
I move to the bow and let the wind take my hair. I can feel the shift—not gone, not fixed, but lighter. Some of the weight I’ve been carrying has loosened its grip.
Music plays from the speakers—a song I don’t recognize, something Dane picked.
The sun sits warm against my skin. I reach back, untie my cover-up, and pull it over my head. I stand there in my bikini, letting the sun warm me.
Behind me, I hear him grumble about trying to focus on open water while I’m standing in front of him looking like that, and I smile.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” I say, letting my gaze follow the endless blue.
“Yeah.” His voice is different—not fully relaxed yet, but getting there. “Sun and fresh air. We’ve been inside too long.”
He’s right. We went from spending every day outdoors to hiding inside a house with the curtains closed, avoiding the world.
“We need this.”
“What we need is the peace that goes along with this.”
I turn to look at him—hands steady on the wheel, cap low, eyes narrowed slightly against the light. The tension’s still there, but it’s not sitting as heavy as it was.
“I’ve been thinking about something.”
Dane glances away from the horizon and over at me. “Should I be worried?”
I lean back against the yacht’s railing. “We used to dream about being rescued, but I never thought it would feel like this.”
I don’t soften it. No need to.
“If I’m being honest, I didn’t think being saved would be something we’d want to escape from.”
He’s quiet for a moment, his eyes on the water.
“We fought every day out there. Every single day.” He shakes his head. “This shouldn’t feel the same. It shouldn’t feel like we’re still trying to survive.”
I think about the island—how clear it was. It wanted us dead and never pretended otherwise. We knew the rules. We knew what we were up against.
This is different.
In some ways, worse.
“Maybe the world was always like this, and we were just too young to see it,” Dane says.
“Or maybe it changed while we were gone. Either way, I hate what our lives have turned into.”
“So do I.”
He’s quiet again, then—
“What if we sold the house?”
I turn and look at him, caught off guard.
“What if we stayed out here? No fixed place. No fence for people to stand outside. No one knowing where we are at any given time.” A slight shift crosses his expression. “We could disappear from the public eye, Charlotte. We could be us again.”
“What about Grandad? Your mum and sisters? They just got us back.”
“I love my family. But I love you more.”
I’ve never felt more loved in my life.
I cross the deck and settle into his lap, his arm coming around me.
“I love you the most,” I say.
He presses a brief kiss to the top of my head. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”
“Of course I will.”
Dane drops anchor late in the afternoon, far enough out that the shoreline is barely visible—a faint line on the horizon—and water stretches in every direction.
I stand on the deck and look out, feeling the difference straight away.
No eyes. No watching. It’s like something restrictive has been taken off.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d been holding in until it stopped.
I bring dinner up as the sun starts to go down. Just reheated pasta with a sauce I made before we left. Salad. Fresh bread from this morning. A bottle of wine we open like we know what we’re doing, pouring it into glasses with a kind of ceremony.
I take a sip. So does Dane. We look at each other.
“Hmm,” he says.
“Give it a second,” I tell him.
We wait a minute and try again.
He shakes his head. “Still not good.”
“No.” I set mine down. “Definitely not better.”
“Maybe it’s an acquired taste.” He reaches for his water instead. “Didn’t like the beer either when I went out with Lachie. He took that personally.”
I laugh. “We’ve made it this far without developing a taste for alcohol.”
“Seems that way.” He twirls his fork. “Reckon we’re not missing much.”
We eat, and the sky darkens, stars coming out one by one. I watch them appear and think about the island—same stars and stretch of ocean.
“You’ve obviously given this some thought,” I say, twirling my fork through the pasta. “What would living on the yacht look like? How would we do it? Where would we go?”
He shrugs, putting his fork down. “Head up the coast, maybe. See what’s out there.”
“We would just keep going until we felt like stopping?”
“That’s the beauty of it, Charlotte. We can do whatever we want.”
“What happens when the weather turns?”
“We keep an eye on it and deal with it.”
“That sounds very much like you’ll figure it out as it happens.”
A grin tugs at his mouth. “That’s how we lived for years. I’m very comfortable with the philosophy of figuring it out as it happens.”
I huff a quiet laugh. “So we’ll live on a boat and drift around?”
“We wouldn’t be drifting. We’d be choosing where we go.”
“That sounds like drifting, but with better branding.”
He smiles slightly at that, but doesn’t argue.
I tear a piece of bread, thinking about it. “How would we see family?”
“We go to them. Or they come to us wherever we are.”
“And when they ask where that is?”
He shrugs again. “We tell them when we feel like it.”
I shake my head, but I’m smiling. “That’s not a real plan.”
“It’s a flexible one.”
“It’s barely a plan.”
“I’m still working out the details.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to them... coming back after being gone for so many years only to leave them again.”
“Is it fair to stay and be miserable just to be near them?” he says.
“There’s no easy answer.”
“No,” he agrees. “There isn’t.”
By the time we’re done, the sky’s fully dark and the water is quiet around us. I take the plates below and wash them at the sink.
I hear him come up behind me.
“You’re thinking about it.”
“I am.”
His arms slide around me, pulling me back against his chest. I lean into him, hands still in the warm, soapy water. His mouth finds my shoulder, his teeth catching there—light this time.
My body reacts anyway.
A memory hits all at once—the last time his teeth found my skin, the shift in his voice, the mark I kept touching for days because I couldn’t leave it alone.
Heat follows straight away. No build, no warning—just there, immediate.
I decide to make use of it.
“You know,” I say, rinsing the last plate, “if we stay at the house in Brisbane, we might need to revisit that idea I had.”
“Which idea?”
“The one about seeing other people.” I set the plate on the drying rack. “Publicly, I mean.”
His arms don’t tighten, not yet—but something in them shifts. “That conversation’s over.”
“I don’t think we actually finished it.”
“Charlotte...” he warns.
“I was just thinking... a man taking me out to dinner would probably put his hand on my back as we walk into a restaurant.”
I feel the change in his breathing against my neck.
“That’s what men do, isn’t it? Guide a woman through a door.”
“Stop.”
“And he’d pull my chair out.” I tilt my head slightly, as though I’m considering it. “And lean in close when it’s loud. His hand might find my knee under the—”
“Charlotte.”
I smile at the warning in his voice.
“I bet he’d—”
Dane moves. No hesitation—just both hands on me, lifting me off my feet.
I let out a startled sound as he carries me out of the galley toward the cabin. I grab at his arms, feigning offense, but missing the mark completely.
“Dane—”
“You think this is funny.”
“I think—”
He drops me onto the bed. I land on my back, bounce once, and look up at him. His mood has shifted exactly the way I wanted it to.
Heat curls low in my stomach, sharp and satisfying.