“I never went on a cruise. Okay? Happy? This is my first. I lived as a kid on a mercy vessel for a good chunk of my early life. Formative years. That’s the only ship I knew. It was my home for months at a time over the years. My community was a disparate group of volunteer medics—nurses, surgeons, doctors—from around the world. Mostly religious people trying to do good. Kids from rural villages were my friends. I helped my mum. My dad traveled with vaccines to distant villages by dirt bike with a guide.”
Lillith listens with a strange, hungry expression growing in her eye.
“But of course you know that world,” Poppy adds. “You worked all over Africa. You know what it can be like.”
“And your parents?”
“I’m really not that keen to talk about it.”
“Your past? Or your parents?”
Poppy has a hot sense Lillith already knows. So she needs to be careful. She reaches for her water, sips, clears her throat again, and dabs her mouth with a napkin. “I probably said too much last night—the wine, the cocktails, you know? It went to my head.”
Lillith smiles. Not in the patronizingyou idiot for drinking too much againkind of way. But gently. And it feels confusing.
“Go on,” she urges. “Tell me about your parents. Your mom was a nurse?”
She nods.
“What was she like?”
“She was kind. Always busy. A lot of time for all the sick kids.”
“And for you?”
“She tried to balance it. But I was alone a lot. My true friends were books, mostly. The ship had a small library. I read everything in it.”
“This is why you carry a huge bag of books everywhere you go?”
“Support books, I suppose. I—I always have some with me. There was a lot of change in my life. The book characters were a constant. I revisit them whenever I need to.”
The waiter brings them coffee—one for Avi, too.
“And your dad?”
“More absent than my mom. He worked on tropical diseases. Did a lot of research.”
“What were their names?”
She hesitates. Saying their names out loud will bring pain back. She has so much unresolved grief.
“The truth, Poppy,” Lillith reminds her gently.
“Catherine and James.” She doesn’t give surnames. She still needs to hold some part of them private, close. Like a security blanket. They’re hers. Not to share with some rich woman who’s turning out to be very weirdly eccentric.
“And they died in a plane crash?”
Now Poppy balks. She doesn’t want to admit she lied. Yes, it was a crash. But nothing exotic like a plane over blue African hills with lush jungles. Just a horrible multi-vehicle pileup on the outskirts of Manchester, where they’d gone for a conference. Her childish and imaginative mind turned their deaths into something a real heroine might experience. More exotic. More dramatic. Worthy. So instead of answering, she looks away.
Lillith reaches for her hand again. Emotion floods Poppy’s eyes. She keeps her face turned away.
“Did you love them?” Lillith asks softly. “Were they good to you, Poppy?”
The question slices her to the raw, beating heart at her center. She removes her glasses and swipes tears away, feeling ridiculous—a boring, middle-aged woman sniffling over parents buried in a long-gone past. Who even does that?
“I really don’t know why you want to know, Lillith, or what you want with me.”
Lillith’s one-eyed gaze probes Poppy’s features, searching. Needy.
