“Okay,” I said.

But Tig was sketchy, a little. He knew a fellow who would crush a car without recording the VIN or reporting it. He kept a water pipe right on his living-room table. He had a good heart. He’d always had a lovely heart. He was loyal and kind. But he could be a little bendy on the ethics. A little situational in a way that Davis never was. But so could I, and I’d gotten even bendier since Roux showed up. Maybe I had more in common with Tig than I did with Davis. Still, I called him on it. Called us both out.

“If I’m not a bad person, what am doing creeping down to the basement to talk to you in the middle of the night. My husband is asleep upstairs. If this wasn’t wrong, I wouldn’t hide it.”

He gave a low chuckle. “I don’t know. All I know is, I’m glad you called. I keep thinking about you. Nine times an hour.”

“I’m married,” I said. I wanted to hear the words out loud.

“But I’m single, so mostly it’s you being terrible,” he said, and I let out a startled burst of laughter.

“Did you just throw me under the bus again?” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Too soon?” he said.

But too soon wasn’t the problem.

“More like too late,” I said. “I love my husband, Tig. I love my baby, and Mads. I love my life here.”

I didn’t say that life might be blown apart in a matter of days. But we both knew it. There was a good chance this family I’d made would fall to pieces. And if it did . . .

“We haven’t done anything we can’t walk back, Smiff,” he said. “And I haven’t been pining. We were close, yeah, but we were also fifteen. I don’t know if this, right here, you and me, is anything. All I know is, I want to text you every other minute. I want to call you. I know you’re married. But I want you to come back over.”

My whole body went still. My hand was wrapped around the phone so tight I was surprised the screen didn’t crack and shatter.

“I keep thinking about you, too,” I admitted.

“If that’s wrong . . . well, hey. I’m not a perfect guy. I never had a friend like you. Everything between us was always so easy. Back when we were kids, I didn’t think of you like that, you know? Not like a girlfriend. You were just Smiff. My Smiff, who had my back. I was happy when you were around. That night, before it all went bad, when we kissed, something changed. I thought it did.”

He paused, and I didn’t think he would say more unless I answered. I wanted him to say more.

“I thought so, too,” I said, an invitation to go on. He took it.

“I’d been with girls before. More than a couple, to be honest. I was with a lot more after. But it’s never been easy like that. Like we were. Never in my life. I haven’t been pining, but maybe, in the back of my head, I compared, you know? Then you showed up, and I can’t stop wondering, what if we’d never gotten on the road? What if we’d gone back to that mattress together? Slept it off. Where would we be now?”

I’d wondered that myself, but I couldn’t talk. My throat was clogged with tears.

He had no idea what he was saying to me, how much it meant. Back then I’d hated myself. I’d loathed my body so damn much, I’d thought no one could ever love me. But he had. Not in spite of. Not even though. He’d grown feelings for me simply because of who I was. Who we were together.

“I’m married,” I said again. But lots of people were married, and they wrecked it. I could see now how easy it was. It was little baby steps down a road. A text here, a phone call there. The person I was married to was busy, and I was under pressure, and we had this baby, which meant less sleep and less sex than we were used to. Plus, I was lying to him every minute. If my lies came out, I might not have the choice to keep my marriage. “I love him,” I said, and that was also true.

“Then don’t let me get between that,” Tig said. “Because we’re heading that way. I mean, you know that, right?”

“I know that,” I said.

We sat quiet, listening to each other breathe.

“I better go,” I said. And I had to. I had to hang up. Talking to Tig felt too good. It was a safety net. A haven, if I refused to pay and Roux destroyed me. I remembered that night, the night he kissed me, before it all went wrong. I could run toward him now if I chose. It would feel like it had on that dark road, when I stamped the pedal down. I knew then, for certain, that I’d been driving, not that it mattered now. But I remembered exactly how it felt to power us up and over the railroad tracks, dangerous and free, unsure of a safe landing. I could do it again. Tell Roux to fuck herself and let whatever happened happen. Be airborne. Let gravity decide how I came down. It was so tempting.

“You still play the guitar?” he asked, breaking the silence.

I was shaking my head, as if he could see me. As if he were close enough to touch.

“Not for years,” I answered.

“You could pick it right back up,” he said. “I bet it’d be so easy.”

I let that sit, too. It was difficult to talk at all, but in the end I said, “I gotta go.”

“I know,” Tig said. “I’m here, though.”

“I know,” I said, and I closed the connection.

16

I woke up with a headache hovering at the base of my brain, a low-slung throbbing of anxiety. It was as if I’d slept all night on the edge of a cliff, feeling myself teeter in my sleep. I popped a couple of Excedrin and ignored it as best I could. Maddy and I had to head out for the docks early, leaving Davis to sleep in as long as Oliver would allow.

Roux and Luca were going to meet us there. Roux’d figured, rightly, that I couldn’t work against her while prepping for a dive. I didn’t have a spare minute, helping Captain Jay and his middle son, Winslow, get the Miss Behavin’ loaded up and ready.

Miss Behavin’ was Jay’s smaller boat, a thirty-foot Munson that could comfortably accommodate ten divers. It was late in the season; we were running with seven today. The other group arrived first, a couple who introduced themselves as Tim and Leslie Babbage, plus Tim’s older brother, Mark. They were all experienced divers in their late thirties, down from Atlanta on a weekend trip to keep their certifications fresh.

Maddy was talking to Winslow and me on the dock, agitating for the English Freighter, a favorite dive spot of hers, but she stopped in midsentence, staring past me, her breath catching in her throat. I turned and saw Luca hurrying toward us. He was carrying two gear bags, the lean muscles in his arms flexing, and the wind off the ocean made his hair stream back like a baby Fabio’s. Winslow, who was forty-something and had two girls of his own, shot me an amused glance. I smiled back, but it was hollow. Luca’s eyes were on the boat. He was looking past Maddy to the day ahead, and all she saw was him.

Roux sauntered toward us in his wake, and the very sight of her jacked my heart rate, made me work to keep my smile in place. Not that anyone was looking at me. Both brothers, the married one and the spare, paused to watch Roux. Her pale pink bikini and her skin shone the same through a gauzy white cover-up, the colors and the sheerness conspiring to make her look more naked than naked. Even Captain Jay, who was pushing seventy, stopped to look.

Leslie Babbage smacked her husband’s shoulder, and that broke his hypnosis. He laughed and threw an easy arm around her, turning away with her to stow their gear.

The single brother, Mark, kept right on looking.

Roux was aware of his gaze. I could see it in the extra swing she added to her hips, the sly glance she sent me as I walked out to meet her with the liability paperwork.

“Men are too easy. All I have to do is show up and have tits,” she said, skipping the greeting to go straight to gross generalizations.

“How clever of you to have tits, then,” I said, deadpan.

That made her chuckle, but I could feel the prickle of something electric in the air between us. She was no more at ease than I was, and I was glad of it. If she was on edge, then there must still be a way for me to win her game. God, how I wanted to win.

There was an old picnic table on the walkway just before the dock, and she sat down to fill out the forms with made-up information. It rendered them useless, but there was nothing I could do about that. It was an added pressure pulsing at the base of my neck. The whole day felt like disaster coming, though it was warm and breezy-beautiful, a summer throwback with a high of eighty-seven. In Florida this passed for fall.

My feelings of dread, I knew, had little to do with today’s dive, and yet they colored everything. The weekend was being eaten up with boat trips and Roux and family obligations. I had almost no room to maneuver, and my time was running out.

Roux was flipping through the pages to find the signature lines. She paused to look up at me. “Take good care of my boy today.”