Page 5 of No One Aboard
Tia set her empty daiquiri glass on the chart house. She toted Rylan to the railing, then shoved him backward into the marina water without warning. She needed to talk to him. Alone.
Rylan surfaced, spluttering. “Hey!” he shouted, whipping his head around to see if they were going to be chastised by the dockworkers. There weren’t any nearby. If there had been at one point, they’d already turned a blind eye to Rylan and Francis doing a quick skill dive under the ship. Most marinas forbade scuba diving or swimming at all in case of a boating accident. But the dockworkers knew the Camerons. Francis’s company, Unwind Yachting, maintained half the boats in the marina.
Tia cannonballed in after her brother, sending a soupy wave into him.
He made a face and spit. “What was that for?”
Tia swam to his side and poked his head. “Just to make sure you’re still alive in there.”
Rylan pushed her hand away. He treaded water, those gentle eyes of his trained on her.
Tia glanced back at their family yacht. Her parents were still flirting on deck. Alejandro Matamoros, Francis’s best friend, business partner, and renowned culinary mastermind, was below, she knew, cooking up a feast. MJ, the first mate, would arrive tomorrow, along with Ernie, a longtime sailor and family friend. There would be seven of them in the end, sailing from their meet-up spot in Connecticut to the Camerons’ Palm Beach home. Francis and Lila had hired a crew to charter their boat all the way to New Haven just so they could fly in and sail it back down themselves.
Tia faced her twin. “When this is over, the vacation, our birthday, all of it...”
She sucked in a breath. There was no going back now.
“When all of it’s over, I’m leaving, Ry. I’m leaving, and I want you to come with me. We’re about to turn eighteen. We graduated. We can do this.”
Rylan’s face drained of color. He looked as white as the hull of the ship.
Tia took him by his shoulder. “You don’t have to decide now. I know it’s big, but I’ve thought it all through and—”
“No,” Rylan whispered.
Tia shook him slightly. “Rylan, just think about—”
“I can’t,” he murmured, and the tremor in his voice made Tia’s stomach turn.
She hadn’t expected this. He always went along with her plans. But he had spent more time with Francis and Lila the past year than he had with her, and leaving them behind forever was huge. Tia would need to ease him into it.
“Tia,” he said, strained, in response to her silence. “You just got here. Can we talk about this later? Please.”
“Fine. Of course.” She let him withdraw and swim back to the ladder.
Maybe in this moment Rylan couldn’t imagine the worldthat Tia could outside the one built by the Cameron family. But tomorrow,The Old Eileenwould glide out from the harbor and into open sea. One week later, she’d dock in West Palm Beach, and the seven of them would disembark. And after their birthday celebration on June 5, Tia and Rylan would be gone, and a world outside the Camerons would be far more than imagined.
Chapter 3
Rylan Cameron
Call sign: Minnow
The Day Before Departure
Francis Rylan Cameron sat on the floor of the primary suite’s bathroom, drawing in his sketchbook as his mother applied cream to her elbows and face. Rylan had his knees drawn up to his chest, one pencil in his hand and another between his teeth.
He was drawing Tia. She was underwater, hair splayed behind her, hand outstretched toward a school of powder-blue tangs.
Lila glanced down at the drawing. “It’s lovely, darling,” she said, and her hand, featherlight, rested for a moment on Rylan’s head.
He leaned into it and kept working, pencil gliding over paper, an underwater world taking wispy shape beneath his touch.
It calmed him to draw like this, a hobby he had first taken up eight years ago when Francis purchasedThe Old Eileen. Tia encouraged him to get a coloring book so he could distract himself from seasickness, and it had worked. Now his sketchbook was filled with renderings of his family, of fish and porpoises, of white sailboats and buried treasure, and, most recently, the sister he’d been missing for the last nine months.
In this sketch, Tia was swimming ahead of him toward the blue tangs, not bothering to look back.
Running away.
