Page 60 of Everything You Hate
“Because you’re the only captain on the island who knows the water well enough to get there without killing me.” She meets my eyes. “Bodhi’s words, not mine.”
I almost smile. “Get in.”
We don’t talk for the first twenty minutes. I keep the bow into the wind. She sits on the port rail with the journal open in her lap, one hand braced against the gunwale, reading. Her hair whips across her face, and she doesn’t push it back.
I keep my eyes on the water. I keep putting them back on the water. That’s the whole morning. A hundred small corrections, a hundred small failures. She’s a client. She’s a problem. She’s a woman who blew a hole in my town, and I want her so badly my hands ache on the wheel, and there’s no version of that math where I come out looking like anything but a fool.
The wind’s already stronger than NOAA promised. Ten, maybe twelve knots. Nothing concerning. Yet.
No Name appears on the horizon as a dark smudge. Gull Shit Rock. Two acres of exposed granite and stunted evergreens, a place that exists solely to make larger islands feel hospitable by comparison. From a distance it looks benign. Up close it’s all teeth.
“You ever been there?” she asks. First real sentence she’s offered.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it like?”
“Unpleasant.” I adjust our heading. “No dock. No shelter. The east side has a cove that’s marginally less suicidal to land in, but the tide runs hard through there. Get the timing wrong, and you’re swimming.”
She nods like I’ve given her useful information instead of a warning. “That’s where we’re going. The east cove.”
“Figured.”
The wind picks up. Fifteen knots now. Whitecaps on the water ahead. I check my phone again. NOAA hasn’t changed the forecast. Clear until evening, my ass.
We reach the island forty minutes later. The east cove is exactly as advertised: a narrow inlet cut into the rock, maybe thirty feet wide, water the color of steel. The tide’s running out. Bad timing. We’ve got a two-hour window before the inlet becomes impassable.
I kill the engine twenty yards out and drop the anchor. The chain rattles through the hawsepipe. The boat swings into the wind and holds.
“We’ll take the dinghy,” I say. “You’ll get wet.”
“I’m fine with wet.”
“Everybody’s fine with wet until they’re cold and there’s no dry clothes.”
She shoulders her backpack. “I brought a change.”
“Well, at least you’re learning.”
The dinghy is a twelve-foot inflatable with a fifteen-horse outboard. I lower it over the side, climb down, start the motor. Scarlett follows, more graceful than I expected. She settles on the bow seat with the journal zipped into her backpack and both hands gripping the rope.
The run to shore takes three minutes. The water in the cove is choppy, wind-driven, slapping against the rock walls on either side. I beach the dinghy on a strip of gravel barely wide enough to call a shore. Scarlett climbs out without waiting for help. Her boots sink into the gravel. Water washes over the toes.
“Two hours,” I say. “Tide turns at eleven-thirty. We’re not here when it turns.”
She’s already moving. Up the gravel, onto the rock, following some internal map I can’t see. I secure the dinghy and follow.
No Name is worse up close. The rock is slick with spray. Wind funnels through the cove at twenty knots, carrying salt and a damp cold that gets into your bones and stays there. Evergreens cling to the higher ground, bent and stunted bydecades of exposure. Nothing grows straight here. Everything leans.
Scarlett stops at the mouth of the cove. The journal is open in her hands. She looks from the page to the rock face, back to the page, then points.
“There.”
A fissure. Not a cave. A crack in the granite, maybe four feet wide at the base, tapering upward into darkness. Scrub growth and a tangle of storm-wrack half hide the opening. Driftwood, kelp, the usual debris the sound delivers to inconvenient places.
I wouldn’t have seen it. Not without her pointing.
She climbs. I follow. The rock is treacherous, worn smooth by water and wind, and twice I catch her elbow when her boot slips. Twice I let go slower than I need to. She doesn’t thank me. Doesn’t pull away. She finds her footing and keeps going.
