Page 74 of Captured Solace

She leaned forward, her jaw jutting and her mouth tensing. “I think you’re caught up in whatever men get caught up in when they can’t tell their wives what it is that they do.”

“That’s a mouthful,” I said lightly.

“I’m not wrong, am I?”

I shook my head and leaned back. “You’re not wrong. But you’re not right in implying I should have told her. Or that I was wrong in keeping my work from her. I have to protect my wife.”

“You keep calling her your wife like you’re not separated,” she said, her brow rising in a sharp arch.

I cleared my throat and looked down at the countertop. “I didn’t want to give her up, fuck, I didn’t.”

“Then haul your ass back home and fix this.”

“It’s not that simple. I can’t trust her anymore.”

“I know men like you all too well. You’re surrounded by people you think you can’t trust. Maybe it’s not that you don’t have anyone you can trust, it’s that you choose not to trust anyone. Did you even give your wife a chance to really explain herself?”

“I didn’t need to hear anything else.”

She rolled her eyes. “God, you men are thick.”

I shook my head, getting to my feet. She watched me empty my glass and light another cigarette and take out my wallet. I laid a stack of bills on the table and pushed it across the counter.

“That should cover everything, plus the therapy. Now, can your husband sell me a trawler tonight?” I said.

“Don’t buy a boat when you’re drunk off your ass.”

“I’m buying a fucking boat,” I said, looking around. “I just separated from my wife, let me have my fucking midlife crisis. Now, where did your husband go?”

It was after midnight and I was so drunk I could barely walk when I finally fell into bed on my newly acquired two-cabin trawler. Hovering somewhere between fully inebriated and nauseous, I lay on my back, feeling the waves rock beneath me and watching the stars pulsate overhead. Perhaps Savannah was right, perhaps this was my fault. In my drunken state, it was hard to sort my thoughts into anything coherent.

But I did know for certain that I fucking hated how cold my bed was without Sienna.

It was noon when I stumbled out onto the deck and promptly vomited over the side of the boat. My entire body ached and my stomach roiled, raw like I’d had battery acid instead of alcohol. I stripped off my shirt and wiped my face with it, leaning against the railing. My God, I was getting too old to drink like that. I felt like death warmed over and my head pounded like an open wound.

“You okay?”

Squinting, I turned and found Savannah sitting on a bench by the opposite railing. She had a paper bag beside her and she was dressed to the nines in a blouse and dress pants with heels.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, squinting at her.

“Well, I felt a little guilty because I sold you a very expensive trawler while you were almost blackout drunk,” she said, standing. “So I brought you a hangover cure and an opportunity to return the boat.”

I accepted the paper bag, holding it by the top so the hot grease seeping through the bottom wouldn’t burn my fingers. “No, I still want the boat.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Viktor, I left Louisiana because of something I did and…I regret that. You can’t just run away from every place and person you wronged. What’s your plan anyway? Live on this boat?”

I shrugged. “Why the hell not?”

“Have you always done this?”

“Done what?”

“Avoided the most obvious thing you need to do?”

For a moment, I wanted to admit all of it. That I’d bent to my father’s will even after he’d killed Yulia and my unborn child. That I’d taken on his legacy and my dead brother’s responsibility. That I’d allowed myself to be locked into a world I hated, a world that molded me into a man I’d never wanted to become. Instead, I just shrugged.

“Alright then,” she said. “I have to go.”

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