The Catch (Catch and Hold #1)

1. 2012

2012

T he fog was as much a native of this neighborhood as Julia was. But it was January, so this morning she had a clear view out the window of her old bedroom to the houses on the next block. Beyond that, across the Great Highway, the ocean would be glittering all the way to the horizon.

Julia hadn’t slept, which wasn’t all that surprising since it was her first night back in her parents’ house. But also, her conversation with her sister the night before kept running through her mind. So did the name of the person they had talked about for the first time in over five years.

“He’s doing that whale watching thing,” her sister had told her. “It worked out.”

Julia’s kids would wake up at any minute. She let the curtain drop and tiptoed through the shadows, silently closing the bedroom door behind her so she wouldn’t wake her daughter. She padded through the living room of her parents’ house and descended downstairs.

In the in-law unit, she flipped on the light and opened the bedroom door a crack. After confirming that her son still slept soundly, she went to the computer, booted it up, and opened a browser window.

She had restrained herself from doing this for the past several years. She doubted the wisdom of what she was about to do, and did it anyway.

She typed “William Quinn whale watching” into the search engine, and hit enter.

Boom, she thought. The very first result was a whale watching company based out of San Francisco. The meta description underneath it contained his name.

Steeling herself, she clicked on it. There it was, the business she had imagined with William all those years ago, fully realized. She searched the navigation bar on the left. There was a link to “The Vessel” and one to “The Naturalists,” but none for “The Captain.”

So she clicked on “The Vessel,” and read the description of the catamaran. Her stomach flopped when she saw its name – The Albatross. This definitely had to be it, but still no sign of him anywhere.

Then she scrolled down.

True to form, he had hidden himself far below the information about the vessel itself, refusing to devote a whole section of the web site to himself.

Well, she thought. This was what I came all the way down here to see.

She allowed herself one final look at him, standing casually on the deck of the boat. He had grown a beard again, as he had in Alaska, and his face showed new signs of wear and tear. A hat covered his hair. But the eyes told her it was him.

She moved the cursor to where it said “The Naturalists.” Here’s where she might have been, had she not made the choices she did. Who would she find there, in her place?

She allowed the cursor to hover, without clicking on it. Then she closed the browser window and sat motionless in front of the screen a while.

It didn’t matter anymore. She had made her choices. What had her sister told her just last night? “Do something for yourself, for a change.”

So Julia opened two new browser windows. In the first one, she typed, “Castro Aquarium Service.” In the second, she typed, “How to write a business plan.”