“You’re texting.” Her sister moved closer to be heard. Unexpectedly, she snatched the phone.
“Hey!” She reached, but Jenni held her prize on the far side of her body. “That’s mine.”
“You’ve been holding out.”
She didn’t like her sister’s smirk, but to retrieve the phone, she’d have to stretch across her. In her tipsy glory, Jenni might enjoy kindergarten antics, but Grace was too old for public wrestling.
Rey
Still there?
She could read the newest message on the screen in Jenni’s hand. Each tap of Jenni’s fingers on the keys tightened her nerves until she thought she might snap.
This is her sister.
Rey
Hi Jenni! This is Rey.
“Him? You text?” Jenni giggled and typed too quickly for Grace to intervene.
Rey who?
The cruelty of her sister’s reply left Grace speechless.
She’d shared Rey’s explanation about the warlord and the fake engagement with Jenni, and sworn her to secrecy so Rey wasn’t embarrassed, but she hadn’t told her that she and Rey kept in daily contact. Neither had she publicly denied the engagement. When her mother brought up wedding plans, she supplied a generic answer and changed the subject. Salito was far from Seattle, and she had managed to avoid direct confrontations with her family. Now she realized that her silence could be interpreted as shame or embarrassment, and the evening soured in her mouth.
“O-ho, The Golden One has a surprise boyfriend.”
She hated that childhood nickname, but tonight the anger propelled her to grab her phone. Close enough to her sister’s face that there could be no mistake and no need to repeat, she said, “Your comment to Rey was unbelievably shitty. You’re drunk, so I won’t put you on the street in the middle of the night. But get your stuff out of my condo before I’m home from work tomorrow.”
While a pop refrain stretched endlessly, Jenni’s wide eyes stared at Grace.
Satisfied that her sister understood, she tucked her purse and phone safely next to her body and headed for the door.
Outside, July drizzle misted her cheeks.
Chapter 11
August
After three months, Reywanted to write more than the simple wordHito Grace, but there was always the chance this would be the time she mentioned a boyfriend. His rational mind grasped that she was on a research cruise in the Gulf of Alaska, hauling nets and counting fish, not bar-hopping or jogging with well-educated software programmers. But lonely men worried, anyone awake at 0100 worried a bucket, and a lonely man awake at 0100 could worry himself into superstitiously beginning his chat with the same word at the same time.
Grace
Hi back.
The rush of comfort from those two words filled him better than frijoles negros.
He loved his sister, and joked with Doc on Saturdays when she and Wulf visited from New York, but he’d never thought about a woman as often as he thought about Grace. When he ate breakfast, he wanted to share what he read in the newspaper, but Alaska was four time zones away. When he made progress in speech therapy, he imagined talking to her face-to-face. And when he tackled a new exercise or beat his previous record at chin-ups, he crafted how to tell Grace. She’d become part of his day.
Grace
Day 6 at sea.
More whales?
Her descriptions of the ship’s passage and what she observed had prodded him to buy a marine chart for his wall to mark her locations.
