Chapter 3

I sat in a gas station lot for two hours before I could drive.

Then I went to the only door I had left.

Mags Doyle lived in a salt-eaten clapboard house on the New Bedford wharf, with nets on the porch and forty years of tide charts stacked like sandbags against the walls.

She opened the door, looked at my bag, and didn't ask a single question.

She just stepped aside.

The way she had when I was nineteen and sleeping in the harbormaster's shed.

The second the door shut, I broke.

Ugly. Loud. On her kitchen floor with my forehead against the stove.

Because Mags was the one who fought me hardest, six years ago, when I quit eleven months short of my master's license to marry Nico Castellano.

She'd texted me on my wedding day.

"Maren. Broke is temporary. This is not."

"That man doesn't love you. He docks you."

"Everything you give him will be invisible to him."

"And if you live with your hand out, you'll live with your head down."

I married him anyway.

Because the Rossis held Tiago's debt, and the only name in New England that could buy it was Castellano, and the price was me.

I sold eleven months of my life and bought three years of his.

I'd do it again.

I just wouldn't be quiet about it this time.

Mags let me cry for eleven minutes.

Then she put a mug of terrible instant coffee in my hands and spoke like she was assigning a watch.

"I'm going to hope you didn't lose your hands."

I looked up.

"I've got a boat," she said. "Doyle Salvage and Rescue. Two hundred miles of coast, no Coast Guard station within ninety minutes, a fleet of draggers that sink in weather because nobody funds a rescue out here."

"You'll sleep on the boat. Twenty-hour shifts. Capsizes, fires, men with hands in winches, kids who fall off scallopers."

"It's the worst job on the water."

She looked at me over her glasses.

"In or out?"

I couldn't speak.

I hadn't touched a wheel in six years. I'd held wine glasses correctly for six years.

Her eyebrow went up, and her voice sharpened into something I'd missed like air.

"What? Been a rich man's wife too long? Can't take real work?"

I laughed with tears on my chin.

"I can. For myself, I can take anything."

"Then be at the dock at five. This isn't a healing journey, Maren. It's a job. Nobody gets to be heartbroken on my boat."

The first two weeks nearly killed me.

My hands shook. My knots were slow. I threw up over the rail after my first body recovery and Bram Kelleher, the captain, handed me a water bottle without a word and never mentioned it again.

But the water remembers you.

By week three I could hold a line off a burning dragger in a six-foot swell.

By week five I was running night watch alone.

Week six, a scalloper rolled off Cuttyhunk, four men in the water, one nineteen-year-old with a crushed pelvis and no pulse when we hauled him. I worked on him for eleven minutes on a wet deck and he was breathing when the helicopter took him.

Bram found me afterward, sitting on a coil of rope with someone else's blood in my hair.

He's a man who says maybe forty words a shift.

He said: "Figured you'd quit in a week. You didn't."

I grinned like an idiot. "Everyone's been carrying me. I never would've—"

"Maren?"

The voice cut across the dock like a nail file.

I turned.

Giada Ferro stood at the edge of the pier in white cashmere and heels that had never touched a plank, a leather folder under her arm, looking at our boat the way you look at a dumpster.

Her eyes moved over Bram's oilskins, the dented hull, my hands.

Her mouth curved.

"So this is why you were screaming about divorce."

"Same instincts. The second you leave, you crawl straight back to people like this."

The way she said "people like this" made my vision go white at the edges.

We'd been awake nineteen hours. We had just kept a boy alive.

"Giada," I said evenly. "Are you a bloodhound? I move, you appear."

Her smile flickered.

Then the air behind her changed.

A car door shut.

Expensive shoes on wet planks, unhurried, like the dock owed him something.

Bram straightened. Two of my crew went still without knowing why.

Nico Castellano walked out of the fog, six weeks of silence in a five-thousand-dollar coat, and looked at me the way a man looks at a chair that moved itself.

"Maren," he said. "Get in the car."

"We're going home."