Page 111 of Swept Away

I flush, ashamed. I don’t want to lie. But I desperately don’t want to tell Penny that I fell in love with the scumbag who abandoned her, either, and I can see she’s got an inkling, and it’s frightening her. Ihateseeing Penny frightened.

“We were mostly just focused on staying alive, Penny. I’m fine, OK?”

“You’d tell me if you weren’t?”

I feel a flicker of irritation. Every day I wake up and lurch to grip the sides of my bed, not because I think I’m in danger, but because everything feels wrong: the sea should be moving beneath me. I sometimes remember moments so starkly it’s as if I’ve been transported back to the rig or the boat or the storm. Do I have to tell her that? Shouldn’t she just know?

Iamfine: I’m coping. I’m not lying. But I can feel that Penny isdesperatefor me to get back to normal, and there’s only so much I can do to fix myself, especially when I can’t tell her that the really broken part of me is my heart.

“I’ll try the jumpsuit,” I say. “ButIwill pay for it if I want it. OK?”

“OK,” she says, with a shaky smile. “But I’m buying you some shoes. You need to stop wearing those grotty black boots, Lex. They look like you dredged them out of the ocean.”

“Well,” I say, “I kind of did.”

Her phone pings, and her eyes widen. “Oh, God!” she says.

“What?”

“Your memorial!”

“My what?”

Now everyone in the changing area is staring at us again. Someone emerges from behind a curtain, and I drag Penny into the empty cubicle, dumping the huge pile of clothes she gave me onto the bench along the back wall.

“Your memorial. It was this policewoman’s idea. They said it would help us all move on. So we scheduled it for next week. I don’t think anyone canceled it. I’ve just had an alert about confirming the flowers,” she says weakly.

“The flowers for my…funeral?”

“Memorial!”

“I actually don’t know that that is any less macabre, but thank you,” I say, gazing at myself in the mirror.

The lighting in these places is always awful—I don’t know why they do that. Don’t they want me to feel good in these clothes? But I’m lit by bright yellowish bulbs from right above my head, catching every dip and shadow as I wriggle out of my jeans and T-shirt.

My body looks back at me, soft, hard, strong, weak. Now I don’t just see what it ought to be, and what it isn’t. I see a body that got me through hell, no matter what shape it is, no matter how much weight sits on my hips. I look at the softness beneath my belly button and place a hand there for a moment, then slide it around to my waist, up to my breast.

“I’m sorry, is talking about your memorial turning you on, or…”

I drop my hand. “I’m just looking at myself,” I say. “Properly. Which I don’t think I have ever done in a changing room before.”

Penny smiles slightly, putting her phone down on the bench and sitting beside it.

“I like your face right now,” she says. “You’re looking at yourself like you’re amazing. I’malwaystrying to get you to do that.”

She is, this is true. Penny has told me I’m beautiful every day of my life.Morning, gorgeous!she’ll say when I come down the stairs.Night, beautiful!But it never sank in—it always just slid over me, like the words didn’t count.

“Out on the water,” I say, “it really stopped mattering. All the negative thoughts I have about my body, they just…I didn’t havetimefor them. They seemed so much less important, and after a few days of genuinely not thinking about myself that way, it’s like I got out of the habit.”

“I love that. That makes me so happy,” Penny says, but her voice is quiet and she’s looking down, fiddling with a coat hanger in herlap. “But I…I wish you’d tell me more about your time at sea. I just can’t imagine it. I hate that you’ve had this crazy experience and I’m here on the other side of it, with no idea what you’ve been through. It’s like there’s a big gap between us all of a sudden. There was never a gap before.”

I reach for the jumpsuit, fingering the fabric.

“I think maybe there was, Pen,” I say. “Lately.”

She looks up, hurt.

“Do you mean that?”

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