Chapter 24
The Unsaved Number
Dane's number was not in either of their phones.
That became the next absurd complication.
Nathan had paid for the charter through the booking site.
The confirmation email used a masked service number.
Dane, true to his promise, had not slipped Marissa a card, written anything on a napkin, or found some charming excuse to create a private channel.
The absence of his number became its own form of presence.
By five that evening, Nathan had opened the confirmation email four times without clicking anything.
Marissa noticed on the fifth.
They were in the living room, pretending to watch a documentary neither of them could later name. The legal pad sat on the coffee table between them like a third spouse. Their takeout cartons were still open. Nathan's phone lit his face.
"Are you looking at the booking email again?" she asked.
He froze. "No."
"Nathan."
"Yes."
She did not smile. That helped.
He set the phone screen up on the table. "I keep thinking the fact that we can't contact him directly is a sign."
"A sign to stop?"
"Or a sign that if we continue, we have to do it deliberately. Through the official channel. No secret intimacy disguised as logistics."
Marissa picked up the legal pad and scanned their rules. "That actually fits."
"I hate when my anxieties are practical."
"They're not always. Enjoy the rare win."
He laughed, then sobered. "What would we say?"
She leaned back into the couch. "Thank you for last night. We arrived home safely. We are talking honestly. We may want to book again."
The words were plain. Nathan's body reacted anyway.
"May," he said.
"May."
"Not want?"
"Want would be true for me," she said. "But may is truer for us until you say it too."
There it was again, the carefulness that made his jealousy harder and his trust stronger.
Nathan picked up the pen and wrote Message? at the bottom of the legal pad.
Marissa laughed. "Are we drafting on paper now?"
"Apparently we are nineteenth-century adulterers."
"Don't call it that."
The speed of her correction startled him.
He set the pen down. "Sorry."
"I'm serious." Her voice did not rise, but something in it sharpened. "I know we need humor. I need it too. But if we keep using ugly words as jokes, they'll start building a room around us. I did not sneak away. You did not get betrayed. He did not take me."
Nathan absorbed that. "You're right."
"Say what it was."
The demand was gentle, but it was a demand.
He looked at the legal pad, then at his wife.
"It was consensual," he said. "Chosen. Seen. Terrifying. Beautiful. Ours."
Her eyes softened.
"Thank you."
He touched the pen again. "Nineteenth-century explorers, then."
"Better. Still ridiculous."
They drafted the message together. It took twenty minutes and produced five sentences.
Dane,
Thank you for bringing us safely through last night, in every sense.
We made it home and have been talking honestly today.
We are not sure what comes next, but we may be interested in another charter if you are open to it.
If so, we would want everything to remain transparent and mutually respectful, just as it was last night.
Nathan and Marissa
They read it aloud twice.
The message looked too calm for what it contained. Nathan imagined Dane receiving it aboard the Midnight Mercy, reading it with that still face, understanding all the unsaid heat tucked between transparent and respectful.
"Do we send it?" Marissa asked.
Nathan's thumb hovered over the contact form link in the email.
He waited for panic to cast a final vote.
It came, as expected, wearing the voice of reason.
This will complicate everything. You have children of ordinary mornings.
You have bills, trash day, dental appointments, aging parents, old resentments.
You do not need a boat captain with grief in his eyes standing near the open door of your marriage.
Then another voice answered, quieter but steadier.
The door is already open. The question is whether you walk through with a light.
Nathan pasted the message into the form. He added their shared email address rather than his personal one.
Marissa saw that and leaned against him.
"Good," she whispered.
He pressed send.
The screen confirmed the message had been delivered.
Nothing happened.
No thunder. No immediate reply. No cinematic shift in the room. The documentary continued showing slow aerial footage of a desert canyon. The takeout noodles cooled. Their house remained their house.
Marissa exhaled as if she had been holding her breath since breakfast.
"Now what?" she asked.
Nathan closed the laptop and set it on the table.
"Now we don't stare at the inbox like maniacs."
Five seconds passed.
Marissa reached for the laptop.
Nathan caught her hand. "Maniacs."
She laughed and fell against him, and he wrapped his arms around her.
For the first time since the marina, waiting became its own kind of intimacy.