Page 18 of Endless Depths

The rescue swimmer from the Coast Guard arrives, and helps Javi get Cole onto a backboard. Javi took over the Ambu bag, but inside my head, I’m still chanting,one-two-three-four-five-six breathe. Cole, please don’t leave.

SIX

Cole

SIX MONTHS LATER

Footsteps sound on the dock.Morgan always knows where I am. Sometimes I worry a siren concocted him, but that’s just him. He senses my moods, knows when I need him, like he was put on this earth to keep me safe.

He drapes his jacket around my shoulders, still warm from his body heat, scented with the cologne I bought him years ago because it suited his soul—briny seafoam, petrichor laced with sea salt on my tongue, the promise of a fearsome storm. I focus on the hazy reflection of the dock light on the water, even though I know I’ll drown in a wave of homesickness whether I look at him or not.

Sometimes I think I miss him more when we’re together than when we’re apart, but then he leaves and that’s always worse. He’s right here. I know, but that’s over.

“What are you doing here, Sunshine?” He clears his throat and amends, “Cole.”

It takes a while to break a habit. I get it. I kicked him out three months ago, and every morning I wake up to an empty bed and wonder where the hell he is.

“I feel closer to him here,” I say.

Shadows cloak the windows of the wheelhouse. I haven’t stepped foot on theBriar Anterossince she returned. She’s ashaunted as I am. The end of the dock is close enough for now. Baby steps.

“Finn’s birthday is next month,” Morgan says.

“I know.”

“Five years is a big birthday.”

“Morgan…”

“He keeps asking when you’ll come home.”

I pick at a sliver of sun-bleached wood splintering from the dock. “What do you tell him?”

He’s silent long enough that I cast a look over my shoulder. From this angle, his long body is as tall and impenetrable as a wall of water, even with his head bowed and his face hidden in his hands. He’s the strongest man I’ve ever known, and I broke him.

“I tell him you’re…” He inhales a shaky breath, then lowers his hands. “I tell him you wish you could be here, but you have to fish.”

I rip the splinter from the dock and toss it into the water. “That’s messed up.”

“It is.” He plunks down beside me. “But a lie is kinder than telling him his uncle is twenty minutes away, and refuses to see him, that the only living connection he has to his daddy abandoned him.”

That’s why I don’t come around the family anymore. It hurts too much. Them. Me. I don’t want Finn to see me like this—drowning in self-loathing, a complete waste of the life Seb sacrificed.

“Seb isn’t on the boat, Cole. He isn’t in the Bering Sea. You can find the parts of Seb you miss with Finn, who really needs you.”

“I can’t.”

“Just come to the birthday party. Shay wants you to come too.”

I laugh mirthlessly. “I doubt that.”

Shay hasn’t spoken to me since I skipped Seb’s memorial because I couldn’t say goodbye, or be around other people when Iwas still struggling to accept my limp, let alone board a ferry and cross Puget Sound so soon after nearly drowning.

“Shay wants you there. I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“I don’t know. You lie to orphans,” I tease.

I smile despite my sadness. Smiles are weird like that. You smile when you’re happy, but also when you’re sad; you can force a smile, or hide behind one. A smile can be welcoming or sinister. I’ve gone without smiling for so long that the only time I smile is accidentally, and it hurts, especially when Morgan is the culprit.