Epilogue
Almost a year later
For the first time in months, the sun is out.
The Linfield grounds are full of students sitting against trees and gathered around picnic tables to catch up on last-minute assignments before spring break.
It’s warm enough that I shed my sweatshirt as soon as I drop my stuff at an empty table, thrilled to have escaped the library, even if it’s only for a few hours.
As I sit, my phone pings with a message, and I fish it from my bag.
Emmy.
I click it open right away. It’s a photo of her posed in front of an old castle, with weathered stones and moss. She’s smiling ear to ear. It makes me smile too. She must still be in Scotland.
I haven’t seen her in six months. Not since I dropped her off at the airport with a single bag and a one-way ticket to Spain. She’s been to about a dozen countries since then, and I couldn’t be prouder after everything she went through to get there.
It took Emmy months to recover from her injuries.
The infection in her arm was so bad, she almost lost it.
But she was well enough to leave for her world tour in October—much to the delight of the internet.
Between her Instagram account and the travel blog she started, Emmy’s basking in our post-survival internet fame.
I, on the other hand, made all my accounts private, and that’s how they’ll remain. Everyone wanted to hear from the girls who survived being trapped at sea with a murderer; meanwhile, all we wanted was to put the whole thing behind us and forget it ever happened.
To this day, neither of us has done a single interview about what happened out there.
The public seemed to settle for watching Emmy travel the world in place of getting the answers they wanted.
If they couldn’t satisfy their curiosity, they could at least watch her “heal” and “move on” and whatever else people say in the hundreds of thousands of performative comments.
Emmy’s using the publicity to her advantage though.
She’s got brand deals out the ass, and she actually seems happy. Somehow.
I’m…not exactly happy, but things aren’t as dire as they were when we first made it home. I’m at school. I’m settling in and getting through.
But it’s hard.
I rarely go home anymore. Everywhere I turn there’s a memory of Jackson.
My own kitchen. His bedroom window on the second floor of the house next door.
The corner where he broke things off with me.
His Mazda sitting in the driveway. His devastated, hollow-eyed parents, going about their lives like zombies.
I can’t look them in the eye, knowing Jackson’s dead because of me.
My dad is trying his best, but he doesn’t understand.
Before our trip, he wanted me to stay at home and commute to college, and he doubled down after we were rescued.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even bring myself to walk the stage at graduation, because they planned a moment of silence for Jackson as part of the ceremony.
If I saw his face on the screen, I would have lost it.
They mailed me my diploma instead.
I almost bailed on Linfield too. It felt like my dreams belonged to another version of me.
One who went out on that boat and didn’t make it back.
But Emmy wouldn’t hear of it. She sat me down and asked me to imagine my life ten or fifteen years in the future.
Once the grief lost its edge, and I was no longer thought of as “one of those girls who almost died on vacation,” where did I see myself?
And while I couldn’t imagine the grief as anything but all-consuming, I also couldn’t imagine doing anything but helping people.
So, at the start of the semester, I was here.
Emmy helped me move into my dorm.
She’s the only person who understands.
She’s also the only person who knows Bennett Mulholland didn’t die when the boat went down.
They never found his body, which feels like some kind of poetic justice.
Thanks to him, they’ll never find Captain Keith or Jackson either.
Ben’s parents threatened a wrongful death lawsuit for a minute, but with the owner of the boat dead and Ben himself having booked it, they eventually had to back down.
They’ve done several interviews claiming their son wasn’t the violent, unstable person the media made him out to be, but public opinion has landed squarely against them.
Despite their best efforts, Ben Mulholland has gone down as the villain in this story.
A burst of laughter shakes me from the past, and I glance around the campus. A group of girls are clustered around someone’s phone, laughing so hard they have tears in their eyes.
I glance at the empty seats around my table and sigh.
I should really put more effort into make friends here.
My dorm-mate is from Seattle, and she’s invited me out with her friends a handful of times, but I keep finding excuses to stay behind.
Which is probably for the best—I’m not the best company at the moment.
Next week is the one-year anniversary of our doomed voyage.
I’ve been trying and failing to find a way to commemorate it. If I treat that week like any other set of days, it’ll pass that way. I’d much rather make it matter, so that maybe I can find the closure I need to leave what happened in the past. The worst parts of it, anyway.
I just can’t figure out how. Jackson’s parents are throwing a memorial at their house, but the thought of attending breaks me out in a cold sweat. And I’m running out of time to find an alternative.
My phone rings in my hand, and a picture of my dad’s bald head fills the screen.
I swipe to answer. “Hey Dad.”
“Heya, child o’ mine. How’s your week?”
We chat for a minute about classes and the weather, the same things we cover every single time he calls. Which is often. He’s clearly anxious about me living in the dorms, but each time I tell him about my day and it doesn’t include some kind of maritime disaster, I think he calms a little more.
“Are you coming home this weekend?” he asks, sounding hopeful. “I can trade shifts with someone at the hospital if you want to stop by.”
I smile. “I’m almost out of clean pants, so it’s probably time.”
He lets out an affronted gasp. “I see how it is, using me for my free laundry facilities.”
“Well, that and you feed me.”
He laughs. “Where are you? The library again?”
“No, actually. I’m trying to soak up some weak sunlight while it lasts. Why?”
He’s quiet for a beat. Then, “No reason. Have you eaten?”
I blink at the phone screen and put it back to my ear. “What? Why?”
Someone sets a bag of takeout on the table, and when I look up, Emmy’s standing beside me. I squeal so loud, about fifty heads turn in my direction. I launch myself into her arms, and she laughs.
“Oh my god! What are you doing here?” I practically yell in her ear.
“Visiting you, of course.”
I let go of her and spot my phone on the ground. When I pick it up, my dad’s already hung up.
“He was in on it,” Emmy says, sliding onto the other end of the bench. “He picked me up from the airport. He’s right over there, actually.”
I follow her pointed finger in time to see his car pulling away from the curb across the lawn, and I can’t stop smiling. That’s why he was being so shifty. I sit beside her. “I thought you were in Scotland.”
Emmy grabs a burger from the bag and uses it to wave me off. “It was raining a lot, and I figured if I was going to get caught in the rain, it might as well be here with you. Besides…next week is the big one. I didn’t think either one of us should be alone for that.”
Tears burn behind my eyes, and I blink them away.
Emmy has very little memory of what happened once the boat flipped.
Everything before the second storm is clear, right up until Jackson and I shoved her into the cabin, but it gets blurry after that.
She knows I took care of her, but she has no specific memories of being trapped in the boat or surviving on shore, and I’m so grateful for that.
I remember plenty for the both of us, and Emmy lost her brother, which is trauma enough.
We scarf down our burgers in silence in the weak March sunlight. It glints off the jagged scar on her arm, still pink and several shades lighter than the skin around it, but fully healed.
“How long are you here?” I finally ask when we’re done.
“As long as you need me.”
I lose my fight with the tears and let my head fall to her shoulder. She wraps her arm around me, and for the first time since I left her at the airport, I don’t feel alone.
“How are you really?” she asks.
“I’m…alive?”
She laughs. “I can see that. Please elaborate.”
It takes me a bit to find the words. “I’m finding my place here, I guess. I love my classes, and my dorm-mate is really nice. But it’s taking me a little longer than I expected to feel normal.”
Emmy snorts. “Nobody’s normal. Nobody is okay. Everyone’s losing it in their own way, Hannah. You’re doing fine, all things considered.”
I lift my head. “You sound like your brother.”
Her eyes shine. “Thank you.”
Rain sprinkles the top of the table, and I jump into action, grabbing my books and the study sheets I’d spread out across the wood.
Emmy helps me gather it all and stuff it in my bag. I suggest we move this reunion to my dorm, and she slings an arm around my waist as we cross the campus. “So what’s the plan for spring break?”
“No idea. I’ve been trying to think of something to do for Jackson, but I’m coming up blank. I’ll probably stay on campus. We can find something to do around here if you’re planning to stay the whole week? Maybe go to the beach or something?”
She flashes me a mischievous smile. “What if you came to Italy with me instead?”
I stop under the awning over the front entrance of my dorm and drag her to the side so we’re not blocking the doors. “You’re finally going?”
Emmy skipped right over Italy when she started her world tour. She said Ben ruined it for her. In fact, she crossed out the whole country on her chaotic travel wall behind her bed.
Emmy takes a deep breath and shrugs. “I don’t want him to have it, you know?
He took so much. He almost took you. Why should he still have any power over me or my plans?
The memorial my parents are throwing is going to be a whole thing, with people looking somber and skirting around what happened so they don’t make my parents more upset than they already are.
That’s not how I want to remember my brother. ”
My throat closes up, and I hug her so tightly, she squeaks.
“But,” she says, pushing me away with a laugh, “Only if you’ll come with me. I don’t think it’s somewhere I want to go alone anymore. If you’d rather not, that’s fine too. We could go somewhere else instead.”
I imagine us wandering ancient buildings, eating amazing food as this dreaded anniversary passes right by us, and I can’t think of a better way to honor Jackson. Nothing would make him happier.
“Italy sounds perfect. But I have one condition,” I say, pulling her into the dorm and out of the rain.
“Name it.”
I hold out my wrist, still wrapped in our frayed friendship bracelet, and she presses her matching one against it.
“No boats.”