She sat on the velvet bench at the foot of my bed, one cracked heel resting on her knee while she scooped my eight-hundred-dollar face cream out of its jar with two fingers, rubbing it into her skin as carelessly as if it were cheap drugstore lotion.
“Don’t just stand there, Vanessa,” she said. “Your brother is overwhelmed. You can sleep with the crew.”
I remained in the doorway, staring at the scene as if some hidden camera might suddenly appear and reveal this was all a joke. The pale curtains, the chrome fixtures in the bathroom, the hum of the generators beneath the floor—those belonged to me. Yet the people inside the room felt like ghosts dragged in from a life I had spent three years trying to escape.
I couldn’t speak. My throat had closed too tightly, and anything I might have said would have been useless.
So I turned, brushed past my father without touching him, and walked out onto the aft deck.
The Miami heat hit me immediately—heavy air full of salt, diesel, and the faint smell of sunscreen. I gripped the rail and forced myself to breathe.
Leo was standing near the gangway, twisting the brim of his cap in anxious hands. He was nineteen, new to full-time yacht work, and still carried that earnest look of someone trying desperately to do everything right.
“Miss Vanessa,” he said the moment he saw me. His shoulders lifted helplessly. “I’m so sorry. They said it was supposed to be a surprise anniversary visit. They knew your name, your company, that you were gone this morning. Your father told me if I called you, he’d make sure you fired me.”
I studied him for a moment. He was only a few weeks away from securing a permanent contract, and my father had clearly sensed exactly how to intimidate him.
“You handled it the way any nineteen-year-old would have,” I said. “Go take your break.”
“I should’ve called anyway.”
“He gave you a reason not to,” I said. “That’s what he does. Go.”
