Chapter 5: Recognition

I got up the way I get up and crossed to the coffee maker with nothing on — and the second my back was to her, heard her come off the mattress fast, the sheet dragging with her. She’d been awake the whole time — lying still, waiting for me to get up and turn away, so she could get herself out of that bed without doing it under my eyes.

By the time I turned around with the pot she was already up and backed into the corner by the bathroom, my old work shirt yanked on over her sleep things, arms crossed hard. Watching me. Not the mortified flinch of the first night — something colder than that, and further back. She’d put the whole width of the little cabin between us while my back was turned, and she meant to hold it there.

“Coffee?”

She didn’t answer. She just looked at me — at the plain naked fact of me standing in the galley like it was any other morning — and I watched her jaw set, and watched her decide, one more time, not to say it. She’d said all of it last night, thrown it at me shaking, and I’d stood in the dark and talked her down off it inch by inch until she let me, and she’d gone to sleep letting me. Sleep had handed it all back. Whatever I’d built over her in those hours had come apart while she was under, and here she was rebuilt around the truth of it instead — wary to the bone, a wall at her back, done pretending for me that it hadn’t happened.

I’d counted on more give than this by morning. There wasn’t any.

I could have sat her back down and run the reasonable routine again — nothing tore, you’re fine, I had it the whole time — but I could see how it went before I started: her nodding to make me stop, the wall back up the second I quit. I’d pushed too hard on that sand, taken too much at once, and there was no talking her back from where that had put her. Not by me. Not today.

She dressed in the bathroom with the door locked — she’d never once bothered to lock it before — and came out already dressed for the pool, swimsuit and shorts, her phone up in front of her, thumbs going. I caught the name at the top of the screen before she turned it away from me. Alexis. Of course. The one person on this whole boat she’d let anywhere near her this morning was the blonde two decks up.

I poured my coffee and let her be. Whatever I’d done to her out on that beach, it wasn’t mine to undo — I could see that plainly, and I could see she’d take comfort off that phone a long time before she’d take a word off me. So it would come from the friend, or it wouldn’t come at all. And some cold, working part of me had already started to wonder which way the friend’s kind of comfort ran — toward getting her clear of me, or toward getting her used to it.

The aft bar kept later hours than the rest of the ship, and by eleven it had thinned down to men. I had a scotch I wasn’t drinking and a clean line across the lounge to the low couches under the black window, where Valerie sat with Alexis, the two of them bent over a phone. Val had her shoes off, one foot folded under her, the hem of her dress ridden up over her knee. She wasn’t looking for me. A week ago she’d have found my face in a room every couple of minutes, checking. Now she’d forgotten I was in it.

“Yours is the one in the blue.”

He took the stool one down from mine without asking for it. I’d seen him Tuesday at the front of the session room, the whole floor angled toward him when he opened his mouth — Charles Halloran, regional, a name people said carefully. He set a short glass on the bar and didn’t look at me when he spoke. He looked where I’d been looking.

“Those two found each other fast,” he said.

“Second day, about.” It came out level. Keeping it level about her was a thing I’d had a year and a half’s practice at by now.

“Good. She travels better with a friend.” He tipped his glass an inch toward the couches. “Alexis. The blonde.”

The blonde had Val by the wrist now — fair-headed, the same pale coloring as the man beside me, so there was no missing whose she was — turning her hand over to show her something, and Val was laughing with her lips shut over the braces the way she did. Halloran watched them. Watched Val, when Val leaned into the light. His eyes went down her once, slow, and came back up and stayed there — not the quick glance a man gives a friend’s kid before he looks away, but a look that dug in and didn’t leave.

“She’s going to be a lot of work, that one,” he said.

The back of my neck went tight. He’d looked at her the exact way I looked at her — down the throat, down the body, back up to the face — except he was a stranger, and she was my daughter, and he’d done it a foot from my elbow. My hand went to the scotch and stopped on it.