Page 93 of Swept Away

“Please never, ever say sorry to us,” Lexi says, her mouth full of protein bar. “You saved our lives. We will love you forever.Forever.”

Gareth smiles. He’s in his fifties, maybe, the sort of average-looking guy you’d overlook on a bus.

“Just what we do,” he says, glancing back toward the cockpit, where his fellow volunteers stand.

Gareth, Kiki, Madur, Steve, Paddy, Ash—they don’t know me and Lexi. They had no reason to save us. They volunteer to do thisjob because they want to help people. I don’t know if there’s anything bigger or braver than that. I keep saying, “Thank you, thank you,” but it seems to embarrass them, so I’m trying to rein it in.

“Oh my God,” Lexi says, suddenly clinging to my arm. “Oh my God, Zeke, look!”

At first it looks like a shadow on the horizon, a thickening cloud. Then it grows and lengthens and darkens.

“It’s land,” Lexi says. “That’s land!”

Gareth smiles beside her. “Not just any old land. Gilmouth harbor.”

I’m crying again. The world’s waiting for us. I can hardly believe it still exists.

“Whatever happens when we get back,” Lexi says suddenly, her grip tightening on my arm, “I don’t want us to lose this.”

“I’ll give you a minute,” Gareth says, slipping off and leaving us alone on the deck.

“I love you,” I whisper, laying my hand over Lexi’s on my arm. “I meant what I said when we got off the houseboat. There’s literally nothing that could happen on dry land that would change how I feel about you.”

She swallows, eyes brimming. “Same. And me neither.”

I kiss her gently on the forehead, breathing in the smell of salt and sea and Lexi.

“Oh my God,” she says, pulling back a little and shaking her head. “You’re going to meet Penny and Mae. You’re going to come around to our flat. Which isn’t really my flat anymore. I need a flat. Shit, I need a flat.”

I laugh, pulling her snug against me with one arm. “We can go shopping for food. I’m going to make you black truffle pasta sauce. I’m going to make youdessert. Oh my God, I’m going to get a McDonald’s.”

“We can watch TV. What do you even watch on TV? Do youwatch TV?” She looks up at me, briefly terrified. “You’re not one of those men who spends all day watching sport, are you?”

“You two holding up OK?” Steve calls out to us from the helm. “There’s a bit of a crowd on the dock, apparently, but the coastguard has made sure that your family are there to greet you, and the rest of the rabble are behind the barriers, all right?”

Your family. It surges through me. Mum. Jeremy. Lyra. Myfamily, real and alive andthere.

Lexi’s doubled over, crying into her hands, her half-eaten protein bar dropping to the deck between her feet. “Oh my God,” she says. “Mae. I get to hold Mae.”

Lexi

It’s like anout-of-body experience, perhaps because I have one single focus as we step off this lifeboat. Everything else is dreamy and strange, too bright and loud. There is only Mae.

Her face as she sees me across the pontoon.

Her pigtails bouncing as she starts to run.

Her perfect little arms as they are thrown around my neck, and the smell of her, that indefinable essence of Maeness.

I sob into her shoulder, breathing her in, feeling every single gram of gratitude that a body can hold.

“Auntie Lexi! Auntie Lexi!” Mae says, hugging me tighter than she’s ever hugged me before, sinking into the firm padding of my life jacket.

I will never, ever, ever take it for granted that I get to be loved by this precious little girl. I pull back to look her over: the quizzical pale brown eyebrows, the freckles on her left cheek, her hair trying to weasel out of its long curly bunches. I’m dimly aware of Zeke behind me, of the people rushing to hug him, of the real world at the edges of my vision, but I don’t have space in my brain for all that. Not yet. Just Mae.

“Look,” she says, bouncing excitedly, radiating joy. “Look what I made!”

She’s drawn me a sign:Welcome Home Lexi, I Love You, it says, and I cannot think of a single more beautiful thing.

---