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How could I have been so wrong about him?
I thought August was a good man who just didn’t see the goodness in himself.
That thought falls out of my head when my alarm goes off, the one that tells me it’s time to get up and get dressed and go spend the day worshipping my childhood idol, trying to learn everything I can from her.
That alarm is the reminder I need.
I’m not just doing this for August.
I’m doing it for Clara Marshall, too, and I can’t bear the thought of abandoning her.
No, maybe I can’t salvage her lost love for Inky the Penguin. Maybe I can’t convince her to keep plugging away, or to weather the court fight either.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t try.
A story about the night the Titanic sank comes to mind. We mostly hear about the people who died on that ship.
The tragedy, the horror.
Kate Winslet telling Leonardo DiCaprio to draw her like one of his French girls.
What we don’t hear about is the heart-wrenching story of bravery behind the ship that picked up the survivors, the Carpathia.
The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away when it got a distress signal. Too far to help. Too far to get there in time to save people as the massive ship sank, broke apart, and doomed over a thousand people to their icy graves.
But over seven hundred people lived.
All thanks to the Carpathia’s captain, Arthur Rostron, who saw that impossible chance to reach the Titanic in time. He thought he couldn’t do it.
He did anyway.
Everyone on board stepped up to help, prepping the ship to receive survivors while Captain Rostron shut off everything to divert power to the steam engines. Hot water, central heating. All of it. The engineers, stokers, and firemen pushed the engines beyond their capacity.
For hours, the RMS Carpathia surged through the night, through icebergs and fear and desperation.
They made it to the site of the Titanic’s sinking in just over three hours.
How, no one is honestly even sure. Even with their superhuman efforts, what they did shouldn’t have been physically possible.
The first time I read the post summarizing it on Tumblr, I cried like a baby because it felt like it could only have been the sheer need to save those people that moved the Carpathia so fast, pushed by the hopes of everyone on board. We may never know how they did it.
But we know that far more people would have died that night if Captain Rostron hadn’t decided he couldn’t just let the survivors go.
I’m not Captain Rostron. Maybe it’s arrogant of me to even think I could push past impossible odds to succeed.
But if there’s even the tiniest chance to be the Carpathia to Clara’s Titanic ...
I have to try, don’t I?
And August and I, well, we don’t have to see each other for that.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, when I walk into the office and feel everyone staring at me.
They’re not. I know they’re not.
August may have been a ginormous dick last night, but he wouldn’t humiliate me by telling everyone what happened. He wouldn’t even breathe a word.
But I step off the elevator just as he steps out of his office, deep in conversation with Deb and awake far earlier than he has any right to be, considering his sleeping habits.
