But Francis hadn’t been with her that day, nor had he asked where she’d gotten her gift.
Had he looked through her credit card statement?
Lila and Francis had never been the kind of couple to combine their finances. Why should they? They were each raking in millions in their thirties when they’d wed.
But, of course, they technically had the same password manager. It wouldn’t be hard for Francis to access Lila’s credit history if he wanted to.
Butwhydid he want to?
Lila searched her husband’s face, and he met her eyes with a smile. Lila returned it and pulled her cover-up tighter around her body.
What had he been looking for?
Just then her phone trilled from where she’d set it on the table. Lila scooped it up and put it to her ear without glancing at the caller ID. She hoped it was her film agent, calling about that audition coming up after the trip or maybe even about another gig she could book.
“One moment,” Lila said to her family as she walked to the front of the boat, the part that pointed compass-like out of the marina and toward the open sea.
“Hello? Brett?”
“No, sorry, Lil. It’s me,” an older, far less exciting voice replied. Ernie Carmichael, one of Francis’s old yachtingemployees who helped crew forThe Old Eileennow that he was retired.
“Ernie!” Lila gushed to mask disappointment. “Are you on the jet?”
“No, uh...”
Something was wrong. He sounded nervous. Frightened, even. And why on earth was he calling her instead of Francis?
“What is it?” Lila cupped the phone to her ear and glanced back at Francis and the twins. They were too far to hear anything.
“I’m not coming,” Ernie said at last.
“But... the trip is tomorrow, and everything is prepared.” Lila switched the phone to her other ear. “Ernie, I don’t think we can sail without you.”
“Sorry. But you’ll find a way. Tell Francis for me, will you?”
Before she could reply, the line went dead, and Lila was left standing on the bow alone.
“I mean, he sounded really upset,” Lila said to Francis later that evening, a pair of hairpins between her teeth as she set her hair in its nighttime pin curls. “I finally heard back from his wife, and she said Barbara’s been living with them, Ernie’s mother. She has Alzheimer’s. Terrible. Anyway, she tripped over one of the mastiff puppies, and Ernie doesn’t want to leave Donna to take care of his mother’s broken ankle without him.”
“Yes, yes, it makes perfect sense,” Francis murmured, in deep concentration as he trimmed his nose hairs.
The couple was side-by-side in the primary suite’s head. Lila didn’t much care for ship language—how the bathrooms becameheadsand the kitchen agalleyand so on, but then again, there were a lot of things she didn’t quite care for that she put up with anyway. For her family. For Francis.
Lila made eye contact with her husband in the mirror.
“Are we still going to be able to set sail tomorrow morning? You and Alejandro and MJ will have to take on more work. I haven’t even told MJ about Ernie yet. Alejandro said he’d wait up for her tonight and explain when she arrived.”
“We’re still going to sail.” Francis set down the scissors and examined his reflection closely. “I checked to see if the crew we chartered to bringEileenhere was available, but they’ve all moved on to new assignments. So then I called a few friends and Howard—you do remember Howard, don’t you? He bought a new superyacht last fall.”
Lila slid another hairpin between her curls. “Of course I remember Howard, Francis. I remember all of your friends.” She hadn’t necessarily meant it as a jab, but it was true that Francis struggled recalling her girlfriends’ first names, whereas Lila could have rattled off twenty of his closest friends at any given moment, not to mention the names of their wives, children, and designer Yorkie-poos.
Francis continued, unperturbed by (or perhaps oblivious to, in his Francis way) the remark. “Yes, well, Howard’s had his fair share of incompetent deckhands. There was that one he caught sneaking around the family safe, and that kid who couldn’t tell dish soap from Salt-Away...” Francis shook his head. “But anyway, he recommended a young man who worked for him last spring. The boy knows motorboats and sailboats alike, he was respectful and hard-working, and he should still be in the area. And best of all, Alejandro knows him.”
Lila paused and glanced up at her husband. “Oh?”
“Yes, they have some kind of distant relation. Second cousins? Or maybe a long-lost nephew? Regardless, Howard gave me his number.”
Lila plucked the last hairpin from the counter and found a place for it at the nape of her neck, collecting the wispy babyhairs that had escaped her improvised updo. Her days of fashionable hairstyles were numbered, she knew. As soon as they set sail, the wind would see to it that even the tightest of braids or smoothest of buns were undone in a tangled instant.
