Page 95 of Swept Away

She hardly drinks these days. After going cold turkey during pregnancy, she decided never to go back to the heavy drinking—No more bad decisions, she’d said, then she’d put her hand on her belly and said,Not that I could ever regret this.

“His family only released one photo of him, and they didn’t call him Zeke, they called him Ezekiel, and…His hair was short inthe photo, he didn’t have a beard…He didn’t look like that. He wasn’t on social media or anything, and…He didn’t look…I didn’t realize it was him.”

“You didn’t realize he waswho, Penny?”

I’m gripping the back of the nearest chair. I can sense that whatever’s coming, I’ll need something to keep me steady.

“That man. Lexi…” Her voice drops to a hushed, awful whisper. “He’s Mae’s father.”

Afterward

Zeke

I lift myface to the sky. I can’t believe this is the same sun that beat down on us on the water. This one’s so much…gentler. The tame sunshine of pub gardens, SPF 50, ice creams.

Everything here is so ordinary it’s crazy. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m just blown away by all the normal stuff that’s been going on without us. Mobile phones, cars, the hum of a plane overhead…It’s so neat and controlled, as if I’m standing on a toy marina and invisible hands are arranging all the pieces.

Lexi’s off with her family, and mine are here, around me, hugging me, talking fast, all smiling wide. I realize that I love them, obviously I do, even if that’s hard, and I hold them tightly and force myself to tell them, because you don’t know when you’ll get to do that, you don’t know that you’ll get another chance.

“Love you all,” I say, choked. “I love you all.”

I look at my mum as I say it. When I last saw her, I didn’t know that she’d betrayed my father, torn our family apart, kept that secret from us all. I suspected it, but I didn’tknow. It feels different to look her in the eye when I have the whole story.

She’s got smudges on her glasses and tear tracks down hercheeks. Her trademark neat bob is a fuzzy gray mess. She’s staring at me as though I’ve come back from the dead, and she looks so exhausted, sohuman.

A long time ago, my mum messed up. Something we have in common at last—I’ve done that plenty. As I pull her in for another hug, I feel her frail, shaking shoulders and think,I’m not letting resentment lose me another parent.

“Love you, Mum,” I whisper.

She doesn’t say it back—we’re not that kind of family, never have been—but she squeezes me even tighter.

“I am so glad,” she manages. “Just so glad.”

“You gave us quite the scare, little brother,” Lyra says. She’s got her arms around me, too, from behind. I can’t remember the last time my sister hugged me.

“Welcome back, Ezekiel,” says Jeremy. “Welcome home.”

Welcome home. I’m so relieved I might collapse under it.We did it, I think, as my mother checks me over with her hands on my upper arms, demanding answers about injuries, lifting her head to summon over a paramedic.We got home. We got Lexi home to Mae.

I’m sitting in the backseat of Jeremy’s latest fancy car, with Mum beside me, a bottle of lemonade in my hand, and Joy Williams singing out from the radio. Every part of this is wild to me. The song, the lemonade, my mother. I feel that thiscan’tbe real. Not in an I-can’t-believe-it sort of way; more that it’s all too good to be true.

“Oh, Ezekiel,” Lyra says from the front passenger seat, breathing out slowly. “You always did love the drama, eh?”

I swallow, that vast grateful feeling in my chest shrinking slightly. How long has it taken for my sister to recast my traumatic experience as me making drama? I check the clock. An hour. Nice. All those huge emotions I felt on the pontoon have ebbed a bit. Theidea of telling my family I love them already seems kind of strange again, the way it would have before I went to sea.

Jeremy’s taking me to the hospital—Mum’s insistence, even though the paramedic said there was no sign of infection in the wound on my stomach. I wish I was still with Lexi, but I think she went off somewhere for some quiet time with Mae, and I’m not surprised she’s forgotten about me for the moment. I want her to enjoy every single second of being home with Mae, and if that means the two of us have to be apart for a little while, I’m cool with that. Still, it felt wrong leaving the harbor without her, like leaving a bit of myself behind, and now that I’m here with Mum, Lyra and Jeremy, I’m feeling weirdly like…I’ve gone back in time or something. I don’t know. I just feel odd.

“We are so happy to have you back,” my mum says. “Aren’t we, Lyra?”

“Yeah,” Lyra says, checking her blunt fringe and then snapping the visor back flush to the car roof again.

At twenty-nine, she’s exactly who she was at ten: hard-edged, hard-nosed, always the first person to speak up or step forward. She would’ve done well on the water. Better than I did.

“It is great to have you back,” Jeremy says, as though he’s welcoming me home from a trip to Florida. My high-handed big brother, always in formal mode.

I’m happy. I think I’m happy. I must be happy, mustn’t I? I’mback. I just wish I’d seen Lexi again before leaving.

“You’d better take the B roads to the A1, Jeremy,” my mum says. “There was a crash near Warkworth last time I looked.”

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