CHAPTER 5
CAMILA
I woke up to sunlight and the sound of the ocean.
For a moment I just lay there, eyes still closed, taking stock of everything — the warmth of the sheets, the soft salt breeze coming through the open deck doors, the distant sound of the ship moving through calm water.
My whole body felt loose and content in the way it did after a genuinely perfect evening.
And last night was genuinely perfect.
We arrived at the private dining room later than our reservation, and found it nearly empty.
Most guests had already moved on to the evening shows and the upper deck bars.
Rather than the crowded, noisy dinner I’d expected, we had the whole candlelit room almost entirely to ourselves.
The head waiter, a lovely older man named Henri who wore his silver hair parted with military precision, had taken one look at us and quietly arranged something special.
A pianist appeared. Then, after our dessert plates were cleared, Henri reappeared and asked if we’d like to dance.
Jason had looked at me across the table with that slow smile.
I thought you’d never ask, he’d said, to Henri, and then he’d held out his hand to me.
We’d danced on the empty floor of the private dining room while the pianist played something I didn’t recognize but which felt exactly right, and I thought: this.
This is the thing I’ll remember when I’m very old and trying to think of the best moments of my life.
This specific moment, in this specific dress, with this specific man’s hand at the small of my back.
By the time we’d gotten back to the stateroom, we were both loose with wine and contentment and the tiredness that comes from a day that has been extravagantly good.
I sat on the bed with Jason’s arm around me, the television on low — some episode of House Hunters, buyers debating open-plan kitchens — and I remembered thinking I should stay awake, we should celebrate properly, it’s the eve of our anniversary.
I didn’t stay awake.
I woke up in the morning, tucked under the covers, with no memory of falling asleep and a faint phantom impression of Jason’s shoulder under my cheek.
I reached across the bed.
Empty. Still warm, but empty.
I sat up and looked around the stateroom. The deck doors were open, the sheer curtains moving in a slow, easy breeze. Sunlight poured across the floor in long golden rectangles. The television was off. Jason’s side of the bed was neatly turned back, his pillow undented. He’d been up for a while.
Then I saw the flowers.
They were on the pillow beside me, a small, perfect bundle of pink petunias. Beside them sat a tray from room service, covered with a silver dome.
I lifted the dome.
Oatmeal with agave and crushed nuts. A Greek omelet, still steaming faintly. Coffee, pressed, exactly the strength I liked. A glass of ginger lemon water, the slices thin the way I preferred.
Every single thing exactly right.
There was a note propped against the coffee cup, Jason’s handwriting on the outside.
I unfolded it.
Happy third anniversary, Camila. Three years ago I walked into an animal shelter looking for a dog and walked out having found the best thing that has ever happened to me.
I don’t know what I did to deserve you, but I intend to spend the rest of my life making sure you never regret choosing me.
I’ve gone to sort a few things with the staff for today — we dock in two hours and I have plans for us on the island. Don’t eat too much. I love you. — J.
I read it twice, then set it down carefully on the tray.
Don’t eat too much. I immediately reached for the oatmeal.
I took my coffee to the open deck doors and stood in the breeze, the sheer nightgown doing essentially nothing against the warmth of the morning sun.
It was the skimpy one — pink, almost transparent, with thin spaghetti straps — and in the privacy of our stateroom with the Atlantic stretching endlessly ahead, I felt no particular need to change it.
I felt, actually, quite beautiful and sexy.
Sunlit and content and slightly smug in the way you felt on a morning when everything was good.
Three years.
I tried to line it up in my mind — the person I had been before, and the person I was now — and found the distance between them almost too large to measure.
Three years ago I had been twenty-seven and quiet and entirely settled into my smallness. I had my library, my shelter shifts on weekends, my small apartment with the good reading lamp and the plants I was just keeping alive. I had Elena and two or three other friends I trusted completely.
And then a Tuesday afternoon in October.
I had been reorganizing the puppy enclosures when I heard the shelter door open and looked up to see Jason Riley — all six-foot-two of him, in a suit that probably cost more than my monthly rent — lower himself to the floor of the puppy pen with focused intensity.
I had watched him for a full minute before he noticed me.
The puppies were immediately in love with him.
He let them climb on him without any apparent concern for the suit.
He made sounds at them that I can only describe as extremely undignified for a man of his general bearing.
One of the golden retriever pups climbed directly onto his face and he laughed — a real laugh, unguarded and easy — and I remember thinking: oh. His laughter is so pure.
By the end of his visit he had adopted the golden retriever, the one who’d climbed his face, and had asked me for a coffee date with the same calm confidence he probably brought to closing real estate deals.
We named the puppy Brownie because we’d ordered a brownie to share on our first date and Jason had watched me eat most of it with a shy, content smile.
Three months later he had proposed, on a Tuesday, in the same coffee shop, with a ring he’d clearly put significant thought into. Six months after that we were married.
I was smiling at the ocean when I heard something behind me.
A soft sound. A papery whisper.
I turned.
A folded note was sliding through the crack at the bottom of the stateroom door.
I crossed the room quickly and pulled the door open. The corridor stretched in both directions — empty, except for the retreating edge of a shadow disappearing around the far corner. I stepped out and looked. Whoever it was, they were gone.
I looked down at the note in my hand.
Plain paper. Folded once. My name written on the outside in a handwriting I didn’t recognize.
I unfolded it.
Want to know what your dear husband has been up to? Go to room 546 and open the door. NOW.
I stood in the doorway of our anniversary stateroom and read it twice.
Behind me, my coffee was going cold.
I stood there for a long moment, the note in my hand, and did not move.