Chapter 16
Rafe
Third night of the watch schedule, and the sky has finally decided to cooperate: clear to the waterline, with the moon a shining, shy waning sliver yet.
I’ve got the late watch, from midnight to first light, wrapped in a blanket on the meadow bluff with the flare gun in my lap.
Neri finished the evening shift more than an hour ago, but she never went to bed.
She’s twenty feet away at the bluff’s edge, knees drawn to her chest, watching the black water.
We’ve been careful with each other since we retrieved the flare gun, and if there’s a thing on this island I hate more than the taste of mussels, it’s this careful neutrality between us.
I can’t say I was surprised when she told me everything would change when we go back. That I’m the Chair of her department and she’s one of my postdocs. That people will talk.
She’s right. People will talk. Gossip will spread far and wide, as the world of academia is incredibly fertile ground for whispers and rumors. People will judge both of us.
I say, let them. It doesn’t seem she shares my sentiment. I’ve tried to start the conversation ever since. Every time I get close, either she changes the subject or I lose my nerve. I know what I want. I want Neri, plain and simple.
But the biggest question isn’t what I want. It’s what Neri wants. And she hasn’t given me her answer yet.
So I watch the water.
Then I see a light, low on the water, west-southwest. Then another appears beside it. They’re moving slowly along the horizon.
“Neri.” My voice comes out strange. “Neri, lights.”
She’s beside me before the blanket hits the grass. We stand shoulder to shoulder in the dark, staring at them.
“Boat,” she whispers. “They’re close enough.”
Her voice shakes. Mine probably would too if I tried to speak, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t allow it. My hands are already clutching the flare gun.
This is it. One shot. If it fails, there isn’t another.
I flip the flare gun from one hand to the other and stare at the seemingly flimsy object. My hand shakes.
“You fire it,” I say. “You found the case.”
“No.” Her hand closes over mine on the grip, cold and steady. “We found it.”
She squeezes my fingers once.
“Aim high.”
So I do. I aim high above my head, and pull the trigger.
The kick is small. The sound is enormous, a flat crack that rolls out over the water.
The flare goes up in a hard red line, up and up, then blooms. Red light illuminates everything.
The meadow, Neri’s face, the water below, all of it is bathed in slow-falling crimson.
Ten seconds pass, then fifteen seconds, the brightest thing this island has seen since the lighthouse died, and we stand in the glow of our one chance with our hands locked together hard enough to hurt, barely breathing as we watch the boat.
The flare dies. Darkness slams back twice as thick.
Nothing. The lights keep moving. Same direction. Same steady pace.
My stomach drops. Then the boat turns. One of the lights disappears. Another swings into view.
A spotlight snaps on. It sweeps across the water, finds the rocks below us, then climbs the bluff and catches us full in the face. A horn sounds across the black Atlantic.
They saw us.
I grab Neri. She grabs me. We’re yelling into each other’s faces, laughing, jumping like idiots, and for one blissful moment, I forget what I could lose once we leave this island.
She’s holding me again. I’m holding her.
We’re getting rescued.
Then the boat works toward us, slow, careful of the water that killed the Belle, and the waiting starts. And in the waiting, everything goes wrong.
Not because Neri says anything.
Because I do.
We’re standing on the beach near the cottage, boat lights growing out on the black, twenty minutes out, maybe thirty, and relief has blown straight through every sensible thought I possess.
“Come home with me.” It’s out before I can stop it.
She turns to me, confusion on her pretty features.
“I don’t mean from here, we’re getting off this island for sure.” I laugh, and it’s a sad, nervous little chuckle. “I mean after. Come with me and let’s face all this together. We can’t just give up on us because I’m your boss.”
Her face changes. It’s small. Her shoulders tighten beneath the blanket. Her eyes leave mine.
I keep going anyway. Because there’s a tiny, desperate spark inside my chest that pushes on, despite knowing I should be giving her some time. Some distance to sort her own feelings.
“I want this when we get back, Neri. I want you. Do you want that too?”
For a few seconds, all I hear is the relentless sound of the waves licking the shore.
“I want to go home without losing my career,” she says. “I worked too hard to risk it now.”
The answer catches me completely off guard.
“What?”
“You know what I think about when I picture going home?” She looks at me now. “I think about every time I’ll get a featured speaker spot at a conference or a grant for my research and someone will whisper I got it because I’m sleeping with the department Chair.”
“Neri—”
“You know I’m right.” Her voice is quiet, but there’s nothing uncertain in her tone. She’s as solid as the granite. “That’s what’s waiting for me. Whispers and rumors.”
“Who cares what people think?”
“That’s easy for you to say.” She gives a short laugh with no humor in it. “You get to tell people a lovely story. I get talked about.”
That shuts me up.
She stares past me toward the approaching boat. “If people think you slept with one of your postdocs, they might question your judgment. If they think I slept with the Chair, they question everything I’ve earned.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It isn’t.”
Her eyes shine in the firelight.
“I worked so long to get where I am. I don’t want every paper, every recommendation, every job interview after this to come with somebody wondering if you gave it to me.”
“Then I stop being your Chair.”
Her head snaps toward me.
“I mean it. You don’t report to me. We disclose the relationship. I step away from anything involving your work. Whatever has to change, I’ll change it.”
“You can change your title.” Her voice cracks for the first time. “You can’t stop people talking. You’ll always be Doctor Rafael Vasquez, one of the world’s most famous astronomers, who is involved with his postdoc.”
“I don’t care what they say about me.”
“I care what they say about me. I can’t afford not to. I’m not just a girl in a man’s world, Rafe. I’m a mermaid in a human world. There is no escaping the kind of shadow standing next to you would cast on my work.”
There it is. She finally said the quiet part out loud. I should have understood that days ago.
The boat’s engine is loud enough now that I can hear it between the waves.
“And what about us?” I ask. “What do you want?”
Her lips part.
A spotlight washes over the beach before she can answer, and voices carry across the water, breaking our days-long solitude.
Neri turns toward them and the moment is gone.
Then everything comes fast after that: the larger boat stands off beyond the shallows, a rigid inflatable roars toward the beach, voices carry over the engine, red-and-white strobes turning our quiet cove bright.
Two crew members splash ashore asking if we’re injured, if there’s anyone else on the island, how many people need transport.
“Two,” I say. “Just us.”
Then a third figure comes over the side of the inflatable into knee-deep water.
I know him before my brain catches up.
Beige fur, silvered at the muzzle now in the strobe light. A voice I last heard shouting about squall lines, cracking wide open across the fire-lit sand:
“BOTH OF THEM! By all the deep and drowned, look at the pair of you, brEATHING!”
Captain Fergus.
He hits us like the solid wall of muscle and fur that he is.
One arm hauls me in, the other takes possession of Neri.
He’s got a grip like a vise and he smells of diesel.
He’s also crying, this furred barrel of a man, completely uninterested in hiding it, whiskers shaking, his laughter and his sobbing melting together in the same sound.
“I spent three days in the water and all I could think about was the two of you.” His voice breaks. “I washed up on a ledge off Matinicus like a drowned dog.”
He grips both of us tighter. He pulls back enough to look at us, tears running unchecked into his fur, then his gaze settles on Neri.
“I should have listened to you.” His voice goes rough again. “I’m sorry. I’ll be sorry for a long time.”
Neri blinks at him.
Then he grabs her again.
“Still breathing,” he says into her hair. “Both of you.”
Fergus survived. He survived and he was able to tell the rescue team where the Belle capsized.
That’s why there was a boat out here tonight.
I’m laughing and my face is wet from tears.
Along the way, someone wraps me in an actual blanket.
Another appears around Neri’s shoulders.
There are radios, shouted instructions, hands checking us for injuries, and a thermos of coffee that tastes terrible and might be the best thing I’ve ever swallowed.
I look for Neri in the middle of all of it. She’s standing very still near the edge of the water.
Looking at the boat. Not at me.
She steps close, and my whole stupid heart lifts toward her out of reflex even now, but there’s something in her face that stops me from reaching for her.
She says, quietly, so only I hear it over the radios:
“Rafe. Whatever happened between us, it stays here.”
“No.”
The word comes out before I can soften it.
Her mouth trembles once.
“I’ve worked too hard to be taken seriously.” She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. “I’m not going home as the woman who slept with the Chair and hoping everybody is generous enough to believe I earned my own career.”
“I told you. I’ll step down. I won’t supervise you. I’ll do whatever—”
I stop. Her eyes close for one second. When she opens them again, she looks straight through me.
“You can’t fix this for me.”
The crew are loading equipment back into the inflatable behind her. Fergus is talking to one of them. The whole beach is moving around us, and she stands completely still.
There it is. The thing I’ve been trying not to hear for three days.
Not caution. Not waiting. Not we’ll figure it out when we get home.
An ending.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
Then she turns and walks down the strobing beach to the inflatable, upright and small in the too-big blanket, and lets one of the crew help her aboard.
She does not look back at me. For the first time since I met her, I don’t follow.
A crewman calls for me and I walk down to the water. Neri is already sitting in the stern when I climb aboard, her face turned toward the open water. There’s an empty place beside her.
I sit across from her instead. The inflatable carries us out through the small surf toward the waiting boat. Neither of us speaks.
Behind us, the signal fire shrinks to a small orange point on the beach. Then the cottage disappears. Then the island itself is gone.
She never turns around.