Page 107 of Swan Song

As Coco slips below the surface, she replays her favorite movie scenes in her head.

The hotel-bed scene in Lost in Translation.

Armageddon: The crew singing “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as they board the spaceship.

“O Captain! My Captain!” in Dead Poets Society.

Finding Nemo, the scene with Crush the turtle. Also the fish tank in the dentist’s office. Just keep swimming, Coco thinks. Her lungs burn; she lets her breath go.

Rocky running up the art museum’s steps.

All of Barbie.

And, of course, the final scene of The Player, which has long served as the touchstone for Coco’s artistic vision. She has a purpose. She is a screenwriter.

Coco fights her way up, breaks the surface, gasps for air.

There is no story here, Bull said. But he was wrong.

40. Friday, August 23, 6:15 A.M.

“Kacy!” The Chief’s voice booms and Kacy startles from a dream. She was in her apartment in San Francisco waiting for DoorDash. Alerts came onto her phone: Your driver is seven minutes away… Four minutes away… Your driver has arrived! Kacy opened the door, and a teenager handed over her food, and Kacy somehow intuited that it was Little G. He had lived, he had grown up. And when Kacy turned to Isla to say, Look, Little G survived after all, he’s here with our beignets from Brenda’s! she realized the person sitting at her kitchen table wasn’t Isla. It was Stacy Ambrose.

“Kacy!” Her father is in the doorway of her bedroom, using his police-chief voice. She’s in trouble, but why?

She opens her eyes. “Daddy?” Her father is in his pajama bottoms and a Cisco Brewers T-shirt; his hair is a mess. What time is it? Then Kacy remembers about Coco and sits up.

“They found her,” the Chief says. “On the south shore of Tuckernuck. Tate Cousins was out running and she saw something washed up on the beach. She thought it was a seal, but then she realized—”

“Dad,” Kacy says. “Is she alive?”

“She’s alive,” the Chief says.

Coco is admitted to Nantucket Cottage Hospital and treated for dehydration and exhaustion. As soon as the Chief gets the okay from the nursing staff, he and Zara go in to question Coco about what happened.

“I’m not sure,” Coco says. “I don’t remember.”

“Can you walk us through what you do remember?” Zara says. “Starting with when you all left to get on the boat. Who was the last one out of the house?”

“Leslee,” Coco says. “I went out to the boat early with the trays from the caterer, like usual. The guests came in stages on the dinghy. Leslee was the last one out of the house. She was in her white dress, because the vow renewal was a surprise and she wanted to make a walking-down-the-aisle entrance. It worked. Everyone on the boat applauded.”

“When you set sail, everything seemed okay at Triple Eight?” the Chief says. “There were no alarms going off?”

“Alarms?” Coco says.

“Triple Eight burned to the ground,” the Chief says.

Coco’s jaw drops; her eyes widen, then fill with tears. The Chief has been at this job so long that he considers himself a human polygraph: He knows when someone is lying, when someone is acting, and his gut tells him Coco isn’t. But maybe Zara is right, maybe he’s too close to the situation to be a good judge.

“You didn’t know this?” Zara sounds skeptical.

Coco shakes her head, wipes under her eyes with her free hand; her other arm is attached to an IV. “What happened?”

“The fire inspector is still investigating,” the Chief says. He received a call from Stu Vick: It looks like the fire started in the primary suite. That house was a tinderbox, all that old wood, no insulation to speak of, just pockets of air that fed the beast. I’ll let you know if we find an accelerant.

“Once you were on the boat, what do you remember?” Zara says.

Coco was serving drinks, passing the hors d’oeuvres. She didn’t know many people on the boat; they were mostly new friends that Leslee had made. Bull and Leslee renewed their vows on the bow, Coco served the champagne toast, the sun set, Lamont turned the boat around.

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