Desdemona Sewall
Chapter 1
I first met Desdemona Sewall in the student cafeteria on move-in day. The place had that bleak, institutional feel common to college dining halls—scuffed linoleum floors, hard plastic chairs, and the smell of steam-table vegetables that had long since surrendered any trace of freshness. My breaded chicken sandwich tasted like last week’s fried chicken and egg rolls, all cooked in the same stale oil left over from the previous semester. My mother and I sat at a small table by ourselves, eating in silence, as if we were trying to stretch the moment as far as it would go.
Mom had three days to get back to central Ohio before her school started. Third-grade teacher. Widow. Tough as coffin nails when she had to be—which was most of the time. She’d driven out here to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with me in the passenger seat and a cardboard box of my things in back. Then she’d turn around and drive all the way home alone. That was the plan.
My dad? He died when I was eight. He was scheduled to fly out for a business trip. The jet went down in a thunderstorm somewhere over Indiana. No survivors. I remember sitting in front of the TV while she got the call—her hand clapped over her mouth, the receiver dangling. Everything after that was just me and her. We leaned on each other because there was no one else.
I transferred to New Bedford College for my senior year. Funny how these things come about. I’d been obsessed with whales since I was a kid. Leviathans. Giants of the deep. They scared me, but I loved them. I read about them the way some kids read comic books—whale song, echolocation, the slow agony of extinction.
My junior year, I wrote a paper on the recovery of the sperm whale for Advanced Placement Biology. I poured every ounce of myself into it—every fact, every opinion my research had uncovered. The paper argued that international bans on whale-based products had finally started to make a difference: fewer whales were being taken, and fewer whalers were still plying the seas. My professor didn’t just like it—he sent it off to a real journal, and damned if it didn’t get published.
A month later, the head of the Marine Biology Department at New Bedford College reached out. First a letter, then a phone call. He asked good questions. I gave honest answers. Something must’ve clicked, because a few weeks later I got the offer: join the program. Join the research team. They had a ship—a converted Navy coastal patrol vessel that had a long, distinguished career and was now serving a second one as an ocean-going research vessel.
I said yes.
I didn’t know then that everything was about to change — not just my zip code or my major. I mean everything. But that part comes later.
During the phone interview, I mentioned I’d spent the summer working in a diesel engine repair shop—grease under my nails, the stink of oil in my clothes, and the constant chatter of the engine letting me know how it was doing. That little detail landed better than I expected. The guy on the other end of the line—the department head—paused, then chuckled. Said something about how they needed people who weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. A week later, I had a scholarship and a work-study grant big enough to cover tuition and living expenses.
That’s how I ended up in the dining hall, sitting across from my mother and poking at a sandwich that tasted like it came out of the warming tray at the convenience store down the street. We talked logistics—how I’d get around New Bedford, how far the campus was from the dock where the research vessel was tied up like some sleeping beast in the harbor. Up until then, we’d only had one car, and Mom needed it to get to school every morning. Third graders don’t exactly teach themselves.
Buying a second vehicle wasn’t practical. We could never afford it. Between what I scraped together working weekends and summers, and what she could spare without skipping her own bills, we’d barely managed to cover the state university I’d been attending before the transfer. New Bedford was another level entirely—more expensive, more intense, more everything.
To save money, I kept living at home. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was warm and familiar. I packed my own lunches, cooked my own dinners, and learned how to stretch spaghetti into a three-day meal if I timed things right. Most nights, I stayed up late reading about marine mammals, listening to old rock records, and wondering if I’d made the right decision—if chasing whales was worth leaving the life I knew behind.
I told myself it was.
But there are things you can’t see coming—things that don’t show up in course catalogs or campus brochures. And some of them were already in motion—silent and slow—just below the surface.
We were halfway through talking about my transportation options when she appeared—pale as candle wax and silent. I hadn’t seen her coming. One second the seat was empty, the next, there she was, standing over us with a cafeteria tray in her hands.
“Mind if I sit? Looks like everything else is taken. I won’t interrupt—I promise.”
That voice—soft, careful. Like she’d practiced it in the mirror first.
How do I even describe her? Picture Little Miss Suzy Sunshine after a couple of years locked in a funeral home basement. Goth, but not the loud kind—no black lipstick or fishnets. Just ... drained. Her skin was so pale I honestly thought she’d powdered herself for a stage play. Nope. It was all natural—ghostly white.
She wore a sundress in shades of gray and black, like storm clouds stitched together, which only made the rest of her look ghostlier. Alongside her food, she lugged a straw handbag the size of a beach cooler, and topping it all off was this ridiculous hat—something you’d expect to see on a chain-smoking blonde in a 1950s detective flick.
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