Chapter 1: Boarding

The kitchen smelled like the pot roast Brenda only made when she felt bad about something, and she’d had it in the oven since the middle of the afternoon. I knew that smell the way you know a weather front coming in — bad news, dressed for company.

She waited until we were sitting down to tell me. “They moved the Reyes trial up.” She said it to the potatoes, not to me. “It’s going to run right through the cruise.”

“They can’t put somebody else on it?”

“Not this deep in. You don’t swap the reporter out in the middle of a trial.” She looked up then, and there was the guilt the whole afternoon had been building toward. “I already called about my ticket. This close in, we just lose the money. I’m sorry, Frank. I know how much you were looking forward to it.”

“These things happen.” I gave her the face to go with it, the good husband taking it on the chin. It came easy — it always did, that face. Under the table our knees weren’t touching. They hadn’t been in a long time, and neither of us seemed to miss it.

The company had booked the trip months back, when it was still going to be the two of us — a couples’ deal, spouse included, cabin covered, team-building on the open water. I’d spent three weeks quietly dreading it: two weeks of Brenda on my arm at every dinner, every railing at sunset where a man’s supposed to want his wife beside him. Now it was just me. Twelve nights on a ship the size of a small town, my whole department too busy drinking to watch me, a couple thousand strangers who’d never learn my name. A wedding ring that would sit as easy in a drawer as it already sat most nights on the nightstand. I ate two more bites before I trusted myself to look up, and the relief was still there when I did — low and warm and entirely mine, and not one person at that table had any idea it had come.

Valerie’s head came up off her phone. She’d spent the afternoon at the pool and hadn’t bothered to change out of it — a bikini top under a t-shirt washed soft and thin, the strings knotted at the nape of her neck, her hair dark and still damp at the ends and half out of the elastic that was trying to hold it. Fifteen years old, and she’d grown into more of herself this past year than a man wants to be clocking across his own dinner table. I clocked it anyway, and made myself look at the potatoes. “Wait. You’re not going now?”

“I’m still going. It’s work. Your mother’s the one who can’t.”

“So you’d just — go by yourself? For two whole weeks?” She said it like I’d announced I was running off to join the circus.

“That’s generally how work trips go, sweetheart.”

She chewed the inside of her cheek, slow, the way she did when she was working up to asking for something and hadn’t decided yet whether she’d get it. Fifteen and stuck home for the summer with nothing but the pool and a phone that never stopped lighting up, and her best friend Mia’s family had just done a week in the Keys, and I could watch the whole calculation run behind her eyes before she said a word of it.

“Could I come? In Mom’s spot?”

“You’d be bored out of your skull. I’m in sessions half the day. It’s a boat full of my coworkers.”

“I don’t care, I’d have the whole ship. Mia’s cousin went on one, there’s like nine pools and a rock wall and a place that does soft-serve all day.” She was selling it now, fast, the words tumbling over each other. “I wouldn’t even be in your way. I just — I never go anywhere, Dad.”

The truth I didn’t say out loud was uglier and simpler than her being bored. She’d just cost me the whole thing. Twelve nights of a ring sitting in a drawer and nobody keeping count of me — some woman two decks down who’d never learn my last name, three drinks in at a pool bar, gone before the ship even docked — traded for chaperoning my own kid around a cruise ship instead. Some sour part of me wanted to tell her no for exactly that.

“Might be good for her,” Brenda said, before I’d landed anywhere. “Get her out of the house. And honestly I’d feel better about the two of you having the time, since I’m the one bailing.” She reached over and squeezed Valerie’s hand. “Long as your father doesn’t mind.”

Two against one, and one of the two was already texting under the table — I caught OMG upside down before she tipped the phone away, some message to Mia that would set a hundred more buzzing back.

“Fine,” I said. “You can come. But you stick with me — no wandering off on your own at the ports.”

She was up out of her chair and around the table with her arms around my neck before I’d finished the sentence, the damp warm length of her pressed against my shoulder, thanking me into my ear, smelling like chlorine and the coconut stuff she put in her hair. I let my own daughter hug me — felt the new fullness of her against me, the part of her that hadn’t been there a year ago — and I thought about the cabin.