Page 63 of Blue in the Deep Blue Sea

Still, he didn’t say a word.

Deep down, part of me still believed I’d died. And that he had too. And this was some twisted version of the afterlife where Oliver Sinclair was actually a nice guy. Where he was actually nice to me.

Maybe Isabella had a plan for us. Maybe she’d seen what we needed before we ever could.

1. Shark

16

SQUALO

The storm finally calmed down, but instead of the sun, night crept in. The sea is at its most dangerous after dark. That’s when the predators feed. And knowing we still hadn’t saved ourselves, that the hardest part was only beginning, pressed on me more than anything. I wasn’t thinking only about myself anymore. She was here too.

She couldn’t sleep either.

She lay beside me while I paddled us further away from the yacht. There was nothing left now. No one had survived. I had only managed to gather a few pieces of bread still sealed inside the plastic the cooks had frozen, a few small juice boxes, and one bottle of water. Everything else had either been ruined or sunk with the yacht.

The night sky still held a scattering of gray clouds, but the stars shined through.

I looked down at her.

Her lips were dry. The tip of her nose was still red from crying, and her eyes matched the color, thin capillaries spread across them from the salt water and endless tears. Her chest rose andfell too quickly, each breath giving away the frantic rhythm of her heart. She was still scared.

One hand gripped the fabric of my linen pants. The other clutched the rope along the edge of the raft.

Every now and then she blinked, but mostly she lay there in silence, staring up at the stars. Her jaw would tighten as she fought to steady herself. Then, little by little, the anxiety would creep back in, though not as fiercely as the night before, when I’d found her crouched against the terrace railing on the sun deck, holding on.

I pulled the paddle into the raft and set it beside me. My muscles cramped from hours of paddling, the pain spreading through my arms with every move I made. Reaching for the left side of my linen shirt, I tore off a narrow strip of fabric, only a few centimeters wide, just long enough to tie around.

“Do you trust me?” I asked after a whole day of silence.

She looked at me. Normally, I would have expected her sharp tongue to fire something back, but she was so broken she only nodded.

“Close your eyes,” I said, helping her sit up a little.

She did. The moment her eyes closed, I wrapped the strip of linen around her head and tied it gently over her eyes.

Her fingertips brushed the linen. She licked her dry lips before quietly asking, “What’s this for?”

“You can’t be afraid of something you can’t see,” I said, easing her back down.

“Thank you,” she whispered, her breathing beginning to slow.

I tried to close my own eyes, to surrender to exhaustion, but I couldn’t. The moment I did, I saw blood everywhere. Sharks chased me through the water, always just behind me.

I leaned back against the raft’s inflated backrest. As I settled into it, something dug into my right trouser pocket. I reachedinside and pulled out a crumpled, soaked piece of paper and a set of keys.

The key.

I had completely forgotten about the one Gianni had given me the night he disappeared. It still felt almost unreal that he might be my brother.

I hadn’t believed a word Bianchi had said. And everything I had wanted to uncover had sunk to the bottom of the sea with them.

The crumpled paper was a letter from Blue, dated 1996, written when she was only fourteen. It was tattered and soaked. Maybe that was a sign to throw it into the sea and leave the past where it belonged, but my mind needed to know what she had written.

She had slipped the letter into my school locker and never mentioned it again. Maybe because I had ignored it. I knew that if I read it and someone else found it, we’d be teased all over again.

After the day I found the letter, I didn’t see her for a week. When she finally came back, she was wearing long sleeves in the middle of a hot, sunny spring. I never asked Gianni what was going on. He was fighting his own battle with addiction, and somehow I knew he hadn’t noticed what was happening to her either.