Page 75 of Fated

“Is that what I said?”

“Not before the wedding. But after. After the swim ...” He shakes his head. “Look. We both have things we regret. It was a hard time.”

I think about what Robert said. How he claimed Amy drowning would destroy McCormick because he’d already killed his two best friends.

“Because of your best friends?” I ask, and McCormick’s chest stiffens beneath me.

Behind us, at the edge of the grass, the wind rustles through the palm leaves, rattling and hissing. I shiver at the sudden cold gust. At my shiver, McCormick’s tension eases and he pulls me close.

“Every marathon swimmer has a crew,” he says, his voice faraway, as if he’s holding himself away from the pain of what he’s revealing. “They’re in kayaks, with you the entire way. They’re your support, and you rely on them for sustenance, hydration, navigation, record-keeping, first aid, life support. Everything. You have a crew on the land checking weather, currents, and you have your crew in the water. I always, from the first, worked with Scott and Jay.”

“Scott and Jay,” I repeat.

McCormick nods and blows out a breath. The breeze, still sending a cool wind, tugs at my hair and sends it over McCormick’s hands.

I shift in the sand. The fine powder, once comfortable, is now cold and hard.

“Twins. Dee’s grandsons. Me, Robert, Scott, and Jay were inseparable. Every swim, they were there with me. Scott and Jay in the kayaks, Robert on land. I had this idea. It’d been eating at me for years. I wanted to set the record for the longest current positive swim in history. I’d leave from the eastern coast of Florida, catch the Gulf Stream, and fly through the water. If you ride that current you can swim faster than humanly possible. A hundred kilometers in just over ten hours. I wanted to swim three hundred kilometers. It’d take a little over thirty hours. I was high on the idea. Robert wasn’t sure. It wasn’t what I did. It wasn’t what I was known for. The Atlantic Ocean had large swells, rouge waves, storm bursts could crop up. We hadn’t trained. Scott and Jay thought we were ready. I did too.”

“So you swam.”

“I swam. We hired a boat with a twelve-person crew. A captain, deckhands, paramedics. Scott and Jay switched off every few hours with crew on the boat. Everything was going well.”

An itch crawls over my skin like an ant tracking over my bare arms. I shiver and McCormick rubs my arms.

“Go on.”

He drags in a breath. “A storm burst when we were a hundred kilometers out. Robert was on the radio, screaming at us that it was coming. He called in the coast guard. The boat crew was as surprised as we were. No one saw this coming. A thirty-foot swell came out of nowhere. It was this giant fist that reached into the sky and then crashed into us. I went so far into the depths I didn’t know up from down. I picked a direction and swam and kept swimming until I thought I’d die under the water. I was down for two minutes. I kept count in my mind, knowing my limit was two forty. When I got to the surface the rain was slamming so hard I couldn’t see. Waves hit from every side. I caught flashes of the kayaks. The emergency beacons. I fought to reach them, but when I did?—”

He cuts himself off. His hand, resting in the sand, curls into a fist.

“They were gone?”

But McCormick doesn’t take it as a question. He takes it as a statement of fact.

“Scott was gone. I couldn’t find him. He was nowhere. Just swallowed by the ocean as if he never existed. If he’d been taken down as far as I had there was no way he would’ve made it back up. Jay, he was still in his kayak. The crewed boat was at least five hundred meters off. It was cresting on the waves and slamming down. I could barely see anything through the rain. I thought if I could only get to Jay we’d make it.”

A wave hits the sand, crashing loudly against the beach, and I flinch at the noise.

“I made it to Jay, grabbed his kayak. He clutched my hand, shouted over the rain, ‘Scott?’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t find him.’ Then another wave rose above us. Jay looked up and”—his voice cracks—“he looked so afraid. I gripped his hand, ‘Don’t let go,’ and then the wave hit. He didn’t let go. I did. I couldn’t keep ahold of him. He was ripped from me. And ...”

“It’s okay,” I say, resting my hand to his chest. “It’s okay.”

McCormick stares out over the water, his dark eyes glinting in the moonlight. “I treaded water for three hours before the storm died. I treaded for three hours knowing my best friends were gone and it was my fault. For three hours I barely kept my head above water.”

He looks down at me then, lines bracketing his mouth. “You know all this though.”

I shake my head.

He grips my hand. “I think sometimes I never actually made it out of the water. I’ve been treading ever since. Just barely keeping my head above the waves.”

I nod. Take my arms and fold them around him. Run my fingers through the curled ends of his hair. “Why’d we come back to the island?”

He wraps his arms around me. “Because I didn’t want the thrill or the fame anymore. I wanted to give back to Dee what I’d taken. I wanted to give back to the island that had raised me. I wanted my daughter to be safe. I figured I did life my way and I only had regrets. I was going to try life another way.”

“I wasn’t angry about coming back here?”

“You were furious,” he says, his hand stilling on my back. “It’s when you started calling me McCormick.”

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