Page 56 of Falling Overboard

Let go of him,my brain was chanting, registering how embarrassing this was. My arms were reluctant to move but I finally managed it. I took a step back so that I’d stop crowding the poor man. “Acting out?”

He turned his gaze toward the ocean, visible from our vantage point. “I blamed myself after Harper was gone. I thought that I should have reached out more, checked in with her. Maybe I would have figured out she was using again and could have done something. But I was busy with life and school and I’ll always regret that I didn’t. And my way of coping was to get blackout drunk as often as I could and drop out of law school.”

I heard his voice break, saw him swallow a couple of times, watched the way his jaw set.

“Law school?” I asked, wanting to change the subject, as it seemed like talking about that time in his life was hard for him. “Isn’t the law like, all memorization?”

“That and arguing.”

He had that last one down, at least. “You have a hard time remembering names.”

“Case law is different.”

“How?”

“It just is,” he said with a shrug. “That’s how my brain works. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“That’s how I feel most of the time. I know I’m being irrational and I know the things I worry about aren’t going to come true but it’s just what my mind does.”

He nodded, his gaze still on the horizon. “But to answer your question, my dream is to open a residential treatment center to help people like Harper.”

That seemed pretty spot-on for him. And it had the effect of further weakening my poorly constructed defenses. “Did you go back to law school?”

“No.” There was something heavy there, something he left unsaid.

“Well,” I said brightly, “you’ve come to the right place. To earn money and to maybe find potential investors for your residential treatment center. We’re dealing with the wealthiest people in the world and you might be able to make some connections. I know a lot of yachties who have gone on to some great jobs or started their own businesses because of the friendships they made with the owners or the guests. Or you could take the path one of my former chief stews did.”

Hunter raised his eyebrows as a question.

“She married the owner of the boat. He is forty years older than her, and she’s very happily spending as much of his money as quickly as she can.”

“Is that your plan? To find a rich guy to marry?”

The question felt completely insulting. “I’d rather french-kiss an electric eel than end up with somebody rich. Rich people took my nonna’s bakery.” Which was a whole other story I didn’t want to get into—how furious I felt at the bank executives who foreclosed on her bakery without even giving me the chance to make things right.

A strange expression crossed his face. “But you spend your days serving the rich.”

“The irony is not lost on me. And I do worry sometimes that it makes me a bit of a hypocrite. But a prospective date telling me he has money would send me screaming in the opposite direction. Rich people are the literal worst, and I know that even more now because of my job. I’m going to save up everything I need and then I’ll reopen her bakery.”

Another pause. “So you’re not looking for an investor, but why don’t you take out loans?”

“I’m never going into debt,” I said firmly. “I saw what it did to my nonna and my mom and I’m not going to put myself in a position where a bank can take everything I’ve worked so hard for.”

“Given how you feel, you really did pick the worst possible job to go into.”

“Like I said, I recognize that. But the money we can earn here is ridiculous, and I’d be a fool to miss out on that. I’m hoping to earn fiftythousand dollars in tips by the end of this season. And I try not to think about the ‘rich’ part with our guests and focus on what works for me. I like taking care of people. I think it’s why I like baking so much. It’s a way to take care of someone with sugar and chocolate.”

We were close to the beach that was the turning point for our walking tour. I started down the path again and he was close behind me.

“I can’t believe you were almost a lawyer,” I said.

“Not quite. There were a lot more steps before that point.”

“It explains why you’re constantly contradicting me.”

“I don’t do that.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw him grinning. We broke through the grass line and it emptied onto a quiet beach. There were only a handful of people there. The sand was white but littered with gray rocks.

---