Page 81 of The Captain
The door to the aisle banged open before I could answer. McGuire came fast, hairline damp, uniform creased into importance. The faces behind her—two sailors I didn’t know—had the wary look of men who expected to be told to stand somewhere and take the weight of someone else’s moment.
“Doctor,” she said, and then, to her credit, she didn’t make a speech.
“Your Marine is okay,” she told me, like a human being who has watched other human beings fall apart and has learned to give the one sentence that matters first. “He’s on a Coast Guard chopper. He’ll be through those doors any minute.”
I stood up too fast and the room tilted, then righted. The sound I made could have been a laugh or a sob and was probably both. Papa’s hand found the back of my shoulder for exactly two heartbeats and then left me to do this alone.
McGuire kept talking, details stacked like sandbags. “We don’t fully understand what the platform was emitting,” she said. “Low-frequency interference, possibly broadband harmonic content. Whatever it was, it spiked again during the operation. We saw what looks like at least one more pulse.”
My stomach dropped like an elevator with a cut cable. “So there may be more strandings,” I said, already hating my own calm.
“There might,” she said. She didn’t pretend otherwise. “But that was the last pulse. It’s done.” A beat. “It won’t happen again.”
I had the absurd urge to hug her.
“Okay,” I said, because that word is a raft when you can’t find land. “Okay.”
“You’ll have time with him here,” McGuire went on, already sliding into the next problem because that is a kindness, too. “We can chat later, if you’d like. Salvage is underway. For now—he’s coming.”
I heard the door to the front slam the way a good wind slams it. Boots. A voice in the outer hall I would have known underwater.
“Camille?”
I didn’t run. Running would have broken the spell. I walked fast, like a woman who has decided to meet her life with her spine straight.
The aisle seemed three miles long and half a step wide. Tamika was at the end of it, mouth open, hand over her heart. Miguel stood hip-deep in the pen and let go of the sling line to clap once, wet, loud. Becca cried with her whole face and then tried to wipe it away and made a mess of mascara.
My Marine filled the doorway like he was made for it. Wet hair. Wetsuit peeled to his hips, a blanket thrown over his shoulders. A bruise along his jawbone like a fingerprint of the sea. Eyes hunting me and then finding me and then not leaving me ever again, if I had anything to say about it.
I didn’t think. My body knew the math and solved it. I crossed the last yards and put my hands on his face like it belonged to me, and he said my name exactly right and then again, like he’d been bargaining with the dark using that word.
“I’m here,” he said, breathless, laughing, wrecked. “I’m here.”
“You’re late,” I said, and then I was kissing him, salt and metal, and the room clapped again because people like to be present when the world does the decent thing.
He pulled back enough to get breath and looked at me like he was learning my face for the first time all over again. His hands were shaking—he didn’t try to hide it. He tucked one against my cheek as if he could steady himself on my bones.
“The ocean and I …” He swallowed, and there was Lily in the motion—her ghost, her gift, the way his eyes go soft and break you for him. “We have a complicated thing. It took everythingfrom me and then it gave me you.” He laughed once, helpless. “It let me out tonight. I know what that means.”
“Say it,” I said, because I wanted to hear him build a bridge out loud and walk me over it.
“It really is my turn,” he said, the words coming simple and all at once. “Lily told me and I’m not arguing with a child who knows better than I do. I’m living. I want to do that with you.”
My mouth made a sob out of a laugh again. He wiped it with his thumb, gentle, and then let his hand drop.
He didn’t kneel. He just stood there, blanket sliding, rivulets of water finding collarbone and falling, and placed the full weight of his battered, beautiful certainty into the air between us.
“Camille Allard,” he said, saying my last name like a vow. “Will you marry me?”
Somewhere in the doorway, a sailor made a sound he’d make later fun of himself for. Tamika whisperedoh, hell yeslike she was trying not to get in trouble for ruining the moment. Becca put her fist to her mouth. Miguel saidayin a way that meant about five good things. McGuire looked at the ceiling like a woman remembering a better day and letting herself smile, anyway.
My father did not move for a long second. Then he made the tiniest of exhalations.
“Yes,” I said, obviously, because there was not a bone in me that didn’t already belong to the yes. “Yes.”
I said it again because sometimes you have to say a thing twice to hear it settle into the rafters. He cried then, wet and unwilling, and I did, too, and we made a small spectacle in a room that has seen worse.
Papa stepped forward, quiet, like a man approaching a wild animal with the right kind of respect. He put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder, then both hands on both of us, and said in a voice Ihad only ever heard when he looked at my mother while she was sleeping, “Je ne peux pas attendre de marcher ma fille jusqu’à l’autel.”
