“Smarty-pants,” Georgia murmured, impressed. They stepped onto the long wooden pier that jutted out into the dark water of the marina, wandering past a half dozen good-sized yachts. Most were dark and quiet. Light spilled from a few others. Through the glass sliding back door of one she saw a paunchy man doing a crossword puzzle at a table. The wooden planks creaked under their footfalls, and the slap of the water against the hulls of the boats was the only other sound.
Cole looked a little embarrassed by her praise. “It was Aunt Justine who fostered a love for nature and care for the earth in me. At school I was naturally good at what I chose to study, and I was also motivated. I really wanted to make a difference in the world. By twenty-six, I was on track to a career that would make Captain Planet proud. I got my master’s degree at UCLA and my PhD from Berkeley. While I was doing my research for my PhD, I traveled to Europe and Asia—France, Korea, Japan. And I uncovered some really exciting scientific data during those research trips that no one else had stumbled on yet. It was potentially a huge breakthrough in the area of biotechnology and clean energy. It got me a lot of job offers, but more significantly, it brought me an angel investor. A tech billionaire named Bruce Hannigan wanted to back my research. He told me to assemble a team and gave me free rein to continue my work down in San Diego where there is a lot of algae and biofuel research already going on. It was a dream come true.”
“Sounds like it,” Georgia said. She knew nothing about his area of research, but it sounded impressive. They passed a sleek red sailboat, and a black Lab barked a greeting at them from the deck, tail wagging.
“My research had the potential to change how we use biofuels, to develop new ecologically responsible biofuel technology that could change the landscape of energy,” Cole explained. “We were working on developing a new kind of clean energy. It was exciting and cutting-edge. And then I met Amy.”
His tone of voice changed, suddenly wistful. He stared out across the dark water pensively as they passed a slew of moored boats. “She was my angel investor, Bruce Hannigan’s oldest daughter. She was the daughter of a billionare but the most normal, well-adjusted person I’d ever met. She worked at Chick-fil-A in high school, and when I met her she still drove this old whitebeater Toyota Camry she’d bought with the money from that job. She worked hard and didn’t take things for granted. She was whip-smart and funny, such a firecracker. She’d been crowned Miss California right out of high school, and she used her platform to champion girls in STEAM careers. She wanted to be a social worker. We just clicked.”
Cole came to a halt under a light pole on the pier and Georgia stopped beside him, afraid that if she even swallowed he’d stop talking. She wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything about Cole and Amy and what had happened to bring him to this place. She’d seen a photo in one of the articles about the crash. Amy had been very pretty, an all-American blonde with a wide, winning smile. As wholesome and sweet as apple pie.
“Amy was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Cole said, and his voice held a rasp of longing. He looked down and scuffed the toe of his shoe across the rough, weathered boards of the pier. “She normalized everything for me—the intense world of research and development and biotech and the California lifestyle, the money and the politics and the big business. She made me feel like I didn’t have to be consumed by my work. I’d been pushing hard since high school. I barely had a life outside of research—no hobbies, no free time. She gave me a reason to change all that. She liked to go hiking, and we’d sometimes slip away and road-trip up the coast, see the redwoods, camp under the stars. She made life fun again, and it had been a lot of years since I’d had that.”
He sighed, more of a groan, and shook his head, then walked on, past piers that branched off the main arterial, like tree limbs off a trunk, past dozens of sailboats and tugboats and Pacific trawlers.
“Everything was great for a while, and then I won the Pierce-Morton award. It’s a globally recognized award, given every two years for outstanding advances in sustainable technology innovation. All of a sudden, I was in the public eye. It got crazy fast. Job offers were flooding in. There was an article in theNew York Times.”
“I saw that one,” Georgia confirmed, skipping a little to keep up with his long-legged stride.
“I got mentioned inTimemagazine.”
“Not the best photo of you, but a good article,” Georgia commented.
Cole paused and shot her a skeptical look. “What did you do, google my entire life story?”
“Pretty much,” Georgia admitted. “It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet if you really poke around.”
“Then why am I even telling you this?” Cole scowled.
“Because I still don’t understand how you got from algae innovation’s golden boy to incognito oyster farmer,” Georgia explained.
Cole grimaced and paused by a tugboat calledThe High Tide. “Success ruined me,” he said bluntly. “For a guy who just likes to be left alone to geek out and research, the high-profile publicity was a nightmare. I started experiencing pretty severe anxiety, and my doctor put me on meds to calm me down and help me function. I felt trapped in the spotlight. All these people clamoring to see advances in our research and the product, people trying to buy the company, offer me jobs, interview me, steal our research. It was a circus. I felt like an animal in a zoo. I wanted to leave San Diego, go somewhere quieter where I could do research and not be hounded. I had been offered an interesting opportunity in Korea and was seriously thinking about it, but Amy wanted to stay. San Diego was her home.” He exhaledin exasperation. “I felt trapped. I loved her. We’d gotten engaged a few months before I won the award, and we were starting to plan the wedding. She was the best thing about my life, but we didn’t have the same vision for our future. I can see that now, but at the time I couldn’t. I couldn’t think about leaving her, and she couldn’t think about leaving San Diego, and I was burning out and starting to spiral.” He paused at the end of the pier and Georgia stopped next to him. He peered out at the dark, calm water, but she could tell he wasn’t really seeing what was in front of him. He was somewhere else entirely.
“The research was promising,” he continued quietly, “but we needed time and money to develop it. I just wanted to go away, find somewhere where I could think. Everyone wanted results, and all I could give them were promises that we were doing the best we could. And that wasn’t enough. Even Bruce was getting antsy. It felt like the walls were closing in. I was working all the time, desperate to somehow get ahead of things, but I couldn’t seem to do it. I was always one step behind.” He was riffling his hands through his hair, looking distraught. She could see his jaw clenched in the dim glow from the overhead lights on the pier.
“You don’t have to tell me more,” she said quietly, alarmed by his obvious distress, but he shook his head.
“No, you can’t stop the story here.” He shut his eyes. When he spoke, his voice sounded flat. “I have to finish it. But I don’t blame you if you don’t want to have anything to do with me when you know everything.”
“Try me,” Georgia countered softly.
Cole looked at her, his face doubtful, then continued with his story. “My mom had passed away a few years before, when I was doing my research in Japan. It was pretty quick, a heart attack, and I didn’t make it home in time. That really ate away atme. She was so proud of me, and I knew she understood why I wasn’t with her when she passed. I was on a 747 over the Pacific, flying as fast as I could to get to her in time, but I didn’t make it. Even though I knew I couldn’t have done anything differently, I still felt like I’d abandoned her. So when Aunt Justine got her diagnosis, I felt like my entire life was crashing down once more. She was in the late stages when they diagnosed her. It was terminal. There was nothing they could do. She was my only living relative. The day I got the news, I’d just had a huge fight with Bruce. He’d told me if we didn’t have something tangible soon, he was considering pulling our funding. I went from that meeting to getting the call from Justine about her diagnosis. It just all felt like too much.”
He trailed away, his voice going jagged at the end of the sentence.
“I’m so sorry,” Georgia said softly. She could hear the pain underlying his words, as though it had happened only recently, not five years before. She reached out instinctively, wanting to put her hand on his arm, to offer comfort, but then stopped, unsure. He stood woodenly next to her at the end of the pier, staring out across the black water. The moon was high in the sky, making a trail of light over the surface of the sea. “I don’t remember exactly what happened, but from what the police and doctors pieced together later, they think I took several times the amount of the anxiety meds than I was supposed to. And then followed that up with a few shots of Jim Beam neat. I didn’t even like whiskey,” Cole admitted, laughing mirthlessly. “I just wanted to dull the panic and the pain. I was so angry and scared thinking about losing the funding, but truly, I was shattered inside thinking about losing Justine.” He paused. Somewhere nearby a dog barked and out in the water, a sealpopped up and looked at them for a moment, then dived back down below surface.
“By the time Amy found me at the lab, I was pretty cognitively impaired, but neither of us really realized how much.” Cole’s voice was quiet, confessional. “Later she said she knew something was off, but figured it was the stress and anxiety, maybe lack of sleep. And I didn’t realize how not okay I was. She convinced me to come home.” Cole swallowed hard. “She’d made pasta carbonara. She wanted to show me wedding invitations she liked. I finally agreed to go with her, and then I made a really terrible mistake.”
He squeezed his eyes closed as if to keep from remembering. When Cole spoke again, his voice was hoarse with regret.
“It was July twelfth. Six forty in the evening. Not even dark yet. It was only a few blocks to our apartment. We’d rented an apartment close to the lab so we’d see more of each other, even if I was working crazy hours, which I always was. When we got to the car, she had an urgent message from work, so she asked if I’d mind driving home. I should have said no, but neither of us realized how under the influence I was. We got into her Camry. I remember Ed Sheeran was playing on the radio. She loved Ed Sheeran. She wanted to dance to “Perfect” at our wedding. We left the lab and she was on her phone, emailing work. Two blocks from our apartment, I drove her Camry into a telephone pole. It was a stupid accident. Entirely my fault. The doctors suspect I may have blacked out for a moment. I went through an intersection and lost control. I was fine, just a little bruised and sore, but Amy wasn’t. Her side of the car was the one that hit the pole. She was paralyzed from the waist down. She was in the hospital for a month, and she never regained sensation in her legs.”
“Oh, Cole,” Georgia breathed. She’d read about the accident and Cole being cited for a DUI, about Amy’s injuries, but it was different to hear the story from him, to see his face twist with grief and remorse.
“I took the best part of my life, and in one careless moment I destroyed it. I destroyed her life and I destroyed us.” His voice sounded so raw, his expression anguished as he gazed out over the quiet harbor. “I will never forgive myself for what I did to her,” he said bluntly. “All the best parts of my life ended that day.”
Georgia had so many questions. What had happened after Amy came home from the hospital? Amy had lived, so why were they not still together? But as she glanced at his face in profile, seeing his ravaged expression, she did not press further. It was still so fresh for him, she could sense. Years may have passed, but in some way, Cole was still back in the wreckage of that accident. She laid a hand on his arm, offering wordless comfort. He glanced down as though surprised to find her with him.
