Page 124 of The Triangle

I open my eyes and look at him.

Who can you trust?

I answer that final question. Because there is only one truth left in my life.

Just one.

And his name is Danny Fortnight.

So I say, “You.”

EPILOGUE - DANNY

LONG TIME AGO

The Cook Islands are something to behold. I looked that word up when we first got here. Behold. Because it came out and I didn’t really know what it meant. I just said it because I’d heard it somewhere. From someone. A book or maybe a movie.

Something to behold.

Something impressive and very much worth seeing.

Christine, even at age ten, was something to behold because she was impressive and very much worth knowing. A little girl with a stick and the desire to poke the pretty out of a beetle that wasn’t supposed to be blue.

When we sailed into Aitutaki’s main boat passage I held my breath and thought, This is it. This is the real paradise. I thought, I might never leave. I might stay forever.

Of course, we were coming off a job and even though we’d sailed into many a paradise over the last two years, we never stayed long. It was just meant to be a place to bask under the heat of the sun while the real heat died down back where we came from.

We stopped in Arutanga to pick up some supplies. Christine bought a yellow dress from an old woman selling them outside the fishing club.

She’s wearing the dress right now. Been wearing it every day. The ruffled edge of the hem flutters along her tanned-brown thighs as I watch her trace letters in the wet sand down near the surf.

Alec, Christine, Danny.

She traces it over and over again. And every few minutes the waves come in and she jumps back, cursing nature for sweeping her letters out to sea.

But she persists.

Alec. Christine. Danny.

“So,” Alec says.

“So,” I say back.

We’re lounging on chairs under an old palapa. The thatched roof has holes in it, so a stray beam of sunlight shines down on his arm.

“Wanna go to Europe?”

“Why not?” I laugh.

“I found another school for Christine.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I thought you wanted her in school?”

“I do, of course. But…”

“Yeah.” He sighs. “I know.”