“Of course,” I said.

If she’d been any other mother, I would have asked her to do the same for Maddy. I’d tell her what I’d seen down in my basement. But this woman weaponized sex, and she was proud of it. She might be concerned, but she also might laugh and give Luca a gold-star sticker. I didn’t know if she was protecting the sweet kid that Luca seemed to be or actively raising a predator to follow in her footsteps.

Now she was filling out his forms, putting in his fake name. He was complicit in this much at least. He answered to “Luca” like a pro. But if he was trying to keep his mother out of jail, I couldn’t blame him. Most kids would do the same. That went double if the two of them were on the run from the man who had pounded her pretty face and her whole body black and purple, until it was as ugly as raw meat.

Every instinct, every minute I had spent with him, said Luca was troubled but not rotten. He was also likely new to this. After all, Roux had three full sets of fake ID. He had only one, and the “Luca” passport had been shiny-new and free of stamps. I believed he’d been protected, kept separate from her career until now. Then something—an arrest warrant, an attack, or a marriage gone so sour that it turned deadly—put them on the road with whatever possessions they could pack up in a hurry.

And Roux loved him. That was obvious. Maybe she wanted better for him than for herself. Most mothers did. As she finished the forms and rose, I decided I had to say something.

“Can I talk to you, mom to mom? About Luca?” All movement in her body stopped, as if I’d hit a button. I had her complete attention. Roux’s stillness, the preplanned absence of any tells, was her tell in and of itself.

“Okay,” she said. Light, but I heard wariness behind it.

“Don’t let the kids wander off together, even if you’re just in another room.” There was pleasure, only the smallest twinge, in saying it. Earned, I thought, considering how she’d dumped on my girl. Maddy tomboyed around in no makeup and outsize, floppy clothes, and Roux had acted as if Luca were too beautiful and shining to even notice she was female. I wasn’t sure what was going on between the kids, but he definitely knew she was a girl. Even so, Roux was staring at me blankly, as if I’d spoken in Latin. I clarified, “Things have heated up between Luca and Madison.”

She shook her head, instantly dismissing me. “No. You misunderstood her. He’s not into her that way. He told me.” That made me laugh, in spite of everything. The real deal, from my belly. Roux’s eyebrows rose. “What?”

I said, “You, the cagiest, most suspicious bitch on planet earth, you believe a teenage male who says he’s ‘not interested in a girl that way.’” Her gaze turned speculative, even concerned. “I’m not basing this on anything Mads told me. Things have gotten physical. I saw them.”

“How physical?” Her voice was sharp.

I gave her the same version I’d told Davis, loath to be more honest with this woman than with my own husband. “Everyone had their clothes on, but there were some wandering hands.”

I could practically see the wheels turning behind her eyes. Her gaze went to Maddy and Luca. They’d loaded the bags, and now they were standing on the deck together, yammering back and forth, pointing at an enormous pelican who had lighted on a nearby pylon.

Luca did genuinely seem to like her, the way Tig had liked me once upon a time. Maybe, in Luca’s head, they were only friends, but something else might well be growing in the depths of him. It had happened that way for Tig. He’d told me so last night, and in spite of everything I felt a little flush of pleasure. Tig would be sleeping now, paying for his late night, but I thought he’d text me as soon as he was up. It scared me, how much I was looking forward to that. Waiting for it, even. A bright spot in a brutal day.

Roux folded her arms, and her eyes on Maddy and Luca went as cool as a shark’s. Her face remained as serene as ever, but inside I could almost feel her balance shifting. She slid me a sideways, questioning glance. She knew as well as I did that teenagers talked. They told each other things they’d never tell adults.

She must be wondering what Luca might’ve spilled. Wondering if I had a way to get that information out of my girl. My dread of the day intensified. All at once I didn’t want her in the same ocean as Maddy. I kept my face as serene as hers, though, as if such a thing had never occurred to me. As if we were just two moms, neither of whom was ready to pick out our granny names.

In the end she shrugged and handed me the paperwork, saying, “Okay. Consider me on alert. God. What a puppy.” She rolled her eyes. “I told him not to get attached.”

I left to help Jay and Winslow with the final checks and to decide a destination. Maddy and the Babbages sat in on that conversation. She was still set on the English Freighter, named for the enormous cargo ship that had been sunk there to form an artificial reef. I suggested an easier site. The English Freighter’s stern was in a trench eighty feet down. Maddy kept pushing, though. The bow rested at fifty-five feet, on a plateau with plenty of life, perfect for Luca. I knew why she was pressing. Last time we were there, we’d seen a bull shark. Luca was wild to see one. The Babbages chimed in on Maddy’s side, reminding me I had only one student to watch out for. Everyone else was an advanced diver with multiple certifications, and dive conditions were near perfect. Calm seas and sunshine. I gave in.

“The English Freighter it is.”

We were ready to go, but Roux and Luca weren’t on board. She’d called him out to the picnic table, and they were locked in an intense conversation. She was dressing him down pretty good by the looks of it. She put a firm hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off, shaking his head in an emphatic no.

I wondered exactly what he was denying. She wouldn’t mind a crush; all kids got them. But she’d care passionately if Luca had been spilling secrets. He turned his back on her and stomped toward the boat, still shaking his head in adamant denial. Maybe he really hadn’t told Maddy anything. If they were being chased by the man who had beaten his mother so brutally, he might well have kept his mouth shut. When I confronted Maddy this afternoon, treating her exactly the way Roux was treating me, demolishing her trust in me, would it be for nothing?

Luca came aboard, sitting down by Maddy at the back of the boat, squarely in the sunshine. Roux followed, her face deliberately blank, manually leaking the tension out of her body like it was so much air. The Babbages had all chosen seats under the canopy. Instead of joining Luca, Roux went into the shade and took the open seat by Mark, giving him a brilliant smile.

We set out, and I chose a spot between the two groups, trying to eavesdrop in both directions. The kids leaned over the side on a dolphin watch, hoping some would come and give us an escort. They liked to play in the wake. Maddy was in high spirits. Luca seemed to be as well, but he kept stealing little sideways glances at his mother. The fight had looked like a whopper. I’d need to make sure his head was fully in the game before I took him under.

Roux, for her part, seemed oblivious that she had ever borne a child named Luca. She gazed up at Mark Babbage, asking him how he got into scuba. He was a good-looking fellow, tall and broad and athletic. He and his brother had grown up on the coast of Texas, he was saying, and they’d both been diving since they were kids. They’d met Leslie on a scuba trip to Roatán, and she was as rabid about it as they were.

“What about your wife?” Roux asked him.

“She never got into it,” Mark said, and then his smile turned wry. “That’s one reason she’s not my wife anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Roux said, not sounding it. “I’m separated myself. I know how hard that is. So what do you do when you aren’t diving?”

“I’m a lawyer,” he said, and almost instantly her body angled itself toward him. He was already turned so far her way that his back was to his brother. I knew then that we’d lost Roux for the duration. She was pathological, unable to stop seeking marks and stories and lawyers. This must have been how she’d looked at Tig, how she’d gotten him talking. I didn’t like to think about her hands on him, her claws working into him.

“Want to buddy up? I don’t want to watch kids doing skill checks,” she said, smiling up at him. “I want to go all the way down to the stern.”

“Heck yeah,” he said.