Page 45 of Swept Away

He’s uncomfortable—with the question, not his wound, I think. I wait.

“We clashed quite a lot,” he says eventually.

He begins absently stroking my hand beneath his as he talks; I’m not even sure he knows he’s doing it. I’m slightly ashamed to note that I feel each movement of his fingers low in my belly.

“I was one of those teenagers. A difficult one. She’s quite…I don’t know. Helicopter parent. Always hovering, always pushing me. She was an academic before she retired—she studied plant cells, it was all super technical. That’s how she sees the world as well, in black and white, and I’m kind of…gray, aren’t I?”

I tilt my head. I know what he means, actually. I remember how hard I found it to define Zeke when I first saw him at the pub, with his old-soul eyes and his cool necklaces and his self-help book.

“I was pretty disappointing for her, I think,” he continues. “But she was as patient as she could manage to be with me. She was a good mum, basically.”

“Was?”

Zeke opens his eyes, looking disturbed. His hand stills on mine.

“Is,” he says. “No, is, sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

I get it: people have started to feel past tense to me, too. It’s hard to imagine a world outside of the confines of this boat.

“I was only four when they split up, so I don’t really remember Dad at home—he’s always been on this houseboat,” Zeke says.

I wonder what that must feel like—not just the strangeness ofbeing on this houseboat again, but the feeling of only really having known your parents apart. My dad walked out on us when I was seven years old. I visited him and his new girlfriend a few times before everyone decided it was better for those visits to stop. I watched him go from the father who lived with me to the person who sent me presents in the post, and then cards, and then nothing at all. It’s not hard to trace the impact he’s left on my life, and every guy who has walked out on me or Penny since has only made me more convinced that you can never count on a man to stick around when things get hard.

“I still haven’t got a clue why he left the houseboat to me instead of Jeremy,” Zeke says. “But the minute all the probate stuff was sorted and I’d turned eighteen, I came up to Gilmouth, sold the boat, drank too much, and left the next morning without looking back.”

A thought occurs. “You must’ve met my mum,” I say, shifting my wet hair to the other shoulder. It’s dripped down me, and the fabric of the T-shirt sticks to my skin, cool in the day’s heat. “If you sold her the houseboat?”

He turns his head to look at me. His gold-brown eyes are almost orange in the sun, fire-colored.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I must have, briefly. We met in the marina. I can’t remember the woman’s name, but she was maybe…fifties? She had a cool hat on, a pink beret.”

I tear up, then blink, shocked to find the emotion so close to the surface. Mum’s been gone for more than four years now, and it’s rare I cry about her death. For a good six months, I couldn’t seem to cry about it at all. I pull my hand out from under Zeke’s and rub my eyes.

“She thought this boat was so cute,” I say, then clear my throat as my voice comes out strangled. “She thought everyone in the world would want to stay on it—when she first listed it to rent, shetried charging a fortune.” I laugh wetly. “We make a bit of money on it each month, but I don’t know if we’ve ever earned back what she paid you for it.”

Zeke’s hand flickers on the flannel, as if he wants to reach for me but holds himself back.

“Anyway. So weird you met her. I kind of like that she knew you, in a way,” I say, then I frown, surprised at myself. “What was it that made you want to buy the houseboat back now? Why not sooner?”

He gazes out to sea, thinking. “Last month, me and Jeremy went for a pint together for the first time in…I don’t know, years, probably. We do talk, we’re part of each other’s lives, but it’s complicated. We hardly ever manage to catch up properly without arguing about something. And wenevertalk about Dad. But this night in the pub, I don’t know what it was—Jeremy seemed more open than usual. We ended up getting a bit drunk together and telling each other all the secrets we’d found out as kids. I told him Dad smoked sometimes, out on the deck, when he thought I wasn’t watching. He told me Dad believed the moon landing wasn’t real. I told him Dad put in a fake insurance claim on his van. He told me he knew I always thought Dad wasn’t my dad, and he thought I was right.”

My mouth falls open.

“You always thought your father wasn’t really your father?”

My mind has gone straight to that logbook.When he finds out, he’ll never come back to this boat.

Zeke nods. “As a kid, I was sure of it. Dad said something once when he came to pick us up—I won’t tell him, all right? I promised you that. After that, I looked for evidence of it everywhere—proof my mum cheated, anything that might tell me who my real dad is…”

He smiles slightly.

“I just never belonged, and it turns out I wasn’t the only one whoknew it. Jeremy suspected the same. He was an expert at figuring out Dad’s hiding places. When we went for that pint, he told me he always knew Dad hid stuff on the boat, and if I really wanted answers, I should’ve looked there. So I googled it. Your mum and Penny didn’t change the name of the boat—it was easy to find. And it looked just the same. Knowing Dad, he would’ve hidden the truth somewhere only he could find it. I thought, odds are, whatever it is might still be on there, if the current owners didn’t do more than add a bit of paint and some new cushions.”

“How could you afford it?” I ask. “A houseboat, cash?”

“My granddad left us each some money when he died. I’ve been sitting on mine. Waiting for something.” He shrugs. “Something that felt important enough, I guess. Something I cared about.”

“I sometimes wish my mum had sold up and left me the money rather than leaving me the pub,” I say, then I bite my lip.

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