Page 77 of A Line in the Sand
“No, nothing’s wrong. At least I don’t think it is.” Molly shook her head. The phone trembled violently in her grasp. She squeezed it so hard that her knuckles turned white. “I just got a message from the grant committee.”
She glanced up, fixing her gaze with Max’s.
“Already?” He ran a finger lightly along the inside of the collar of his tuxedo shirt, as if he couldn’t breathe. Other than that subtle telltale gesture, he seemed completely calm. Confident. Composed.
More composed than Molly felt, that was for sure.
“Go ahead and open the email. Read the good news so we can celebrate.” He nodded toward the phone, which suddenly felt less like a communication device and more like a stick of dynamite in her hand.
She wanted to look, but at the same time, she didn’t.
“Molly, come on. You’ve got this.” Max winked.
He was right. Why was she panicking like this? They’d done it. All five dogs had shown they had the potential to identify and alert to the scent of sea turtle eggs. With more time and resources, she could recruit a real team. The data supported everything the aquarium wanted to accomplish. Moreover, her project was far more innovative than anything she’d seen in the boring scientific journals that were always lying around Max’s office.
I’ve got this.
Her hand steadied, and she tapped the envelope icon so that the email from the grant committee flooded the screen. Molly’s heart rose to her throat as she began reading.
***
Dear Ms. Prince,
Thank you for applying to the North Carolina State Grant for Ecological Protection. While we found your proposal innovative, the committee has unfortunately chosen to deny your request for funding. We wish you the best of luck with your endeavor and thank you for your commitment to preserving the ecology of the Carolina coast.
Molly read it again, just to be sure, as her heart took a serious nosedive. But no matter how many times she went over the words, they never changed.
She’d failed. They weren’t getting the grant money. She’d talked Max into putting his faith in her “innovative” idea and now they’d missed out on the chance to do something normal and boring—the sort of thing that grant committees paid millions for.
Her knees were on the verge of buckling. The angelfish and seaweed waving on the walls abruptly went from seeming dreamlike and lovely to being garish and wrong. Molly pressed her hand to her stomach. Bile rose to the back of her throat, and she felt like she might be sick.
Max had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t listened. And now she was going to have to look him in the face and tell him that the aquarium’s troubles were far from over. Sea turtle release parties on the beach and dances at the senior center couldn’t keep them afloat forever.
But when she lifted her gaze to Max’s, the look on her face must have spoken for itself. Before she had a chance to say a word, his expression slammed closed like a book.
***
Max was shell-shocked.
Was that an official medical term? If not, it should be. Although somewhere in the back of his consciousness he was aware thatrealshell-shock was a battlefield condition, certainly more serious than what he was experiencing. But he couldn’t seem to shake the word out of his thoughts.
Shell-shocked. He imagined hundreds of shells, sun-bleached and worn by the tide, salt, and sea. That’s how he felt, all right. Battered, bruised, and wholly insignificant in the face of everything he loved most in the world—this place, these people, thislife.
“We didn’t get it,” Molly said woodenly.
He nodded. He’d known it was coming, obviously. He’d watched the color drain from her face as she’d read the email. He’d seen a whole array of emotions pass through her lovely emerald eyes, all of them heartbreaking.
Why couldn’t he seem to make himself say anything? This wasn’t her fault. He was the director of the aquarium—the decision maker, thesaviorhis uncle had hand-picked to turn things around. The blame for anything and everything that went wrong rested squarely at his feet, including this.
Especiallythis.
Max swallowed hard. He could barely look at Molly. The hurt in her expression was just too much, so he pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes, and tried counting to ten like they did sometimes in yoga…until he realized that yoga was one of the reasons he’d gotten himself into this mess. Yoga, Scrabble, passing out cigars. All of it. For the first time in his professional life, he’d dropped the ball. He’d allowed something other than work to come first, and look what had happened.
Not something, someone. There’s a difference.
What difference did semantics make, though, when he’d ended up letting her down like this? And Uncle Henry, too.
“Max, I’m sorry,” Molly said. She looked wide-eyed and lost, and Max felt a fresh wave of guilt wash over him for making her feel like there was something wrong with wanting to take Ursula everywhere she went. If he could have produced her puppy out of thin air and placed the sweet little dog into her arms right then, he would have done so in a heartbeat.
