Page 18 of Swept Away

“This?”

“Yes, this barren expanse of ocean—are your family not sea-dwelling mermaids?”

I laugh. Her lips press together for a second, as though she’sirritated, but I reckon actually she’s pleased. I’m starting to think that reading Lexi is kind of like reading something in code. All the gestures the rest of us use mean something different for her. So far, I’ve figured out that when she does lift the corners of her mouth, it’s not a smile, it’s more like an eyebrow-raise. When she frowns, she’s not angry—she’s thinking. And when she avoids my eyes, I reckon it’s not because she doesn’t want to look at me. It’s because she doesn’t want me to see what’s in hers.

“I meant Northumberland.”

“Yeah. My brother and sister—Jeremy and Lyra—and my mum, all my cousins and aunts and uncles…they stuck around the Alnwick area. They’re all within half an hour of one another.”

“And you’re down in…”

“London,” I say, just as she says the same word. “How did you guess?”

“You look like you’re about two inches away from a man bun.”

That makes me properly belly-laugh. I reach for my hair, tugging experimentally at the ends of my curls.

“Yeah, you’re not wrong. And you? Did you grow up in Gilmouth?”

She nods, setting her bowl down under the deck chair and lying back. “How did you guess?” She gestures toward herself. “Small-town vibes?”

“No,” I say, after a moment. “You just seemed at home. When we met.”

She blinks quickly. I don’t know what that means yet.

“Well, yeah. That pub where we met, it was mine, once.”

“You owned the pub?”

“I inherited it from my mum. I got the pub, Penny got the houseboat.”

“Wait, is Penny your sister?” I say, frowning. She saidfriendbefore.

“No,” Lexi says, in a tone that makes me think she’s had to answer that one a lot. “She lived behind the pub garden. But herhomelife wasn’t great. When I was…maybe seven, and she was about five, she started hanging out with us at the pub—she used to climb over the back fence. We were best friends. My mum raised her, really. When Mum died, Mae—Penny’s daughter—hadn’t even been born yet. The dad was a prick who didn’t want anything to do with her, so…” She shrugs, moving to stand. “That’s how I ended up owning the pub. Not what I’d planned, but with Penny and Mae to support…Anyway. It’s complicated.”

“You helped support your best friend and her kid? That’s pretty huge.”

Her face goes tight. She turns away from me. I get the sense I’ve touched on something important, something that’ll help make sense of Lexi, but even before she speaks, I can tell she’s going to shut me out again. It was like this last night: I’d catch little flashes of a Lexi she keeps hidden, then she’d go back under.

“I’ve not finished checking the boat over for any damage,” she says. “Here. I’ll wash up.”

I feel her pause behind me as she opens the door.

“Dowe wash up?” she asks.

“Hey?” I say, turning around.

“Well, if we’re trying to save water…”

I swallow. For the first time all day, I’ve not been thinking about being lost at sea.

“I’ll just leave it in the sink,” she says. “Someone’ll be along to rescue us in a minute anyway.”

We’ve said that to each other alottoday. I reckon a solid fifty percent of conversations have been along the lines of,Don’t worry, we’ll be rescued. We’ve tossed it back and forth like a ball. Her turn, then mine.

She heads inside. I listen to the clatter in the kitchen and close my eyes. The one thing we’ve not said to each other is,We might not be rescued at all. But that sentence has been going round and roundin my head since the moment I stepped out onto this deck this morning, and I’d be willing to bet Lexi’s feeling exactly the same.

The sunset’s epic, a vivid satsuma-orange. There’s just nothing in the way of it out here—it’s all sky. The sea turns bright as the sun sinks, shining like it’s candlelit.

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