Windswept by Anna Lowe

to the Caribbean, but Seth and Julie — my cousin and his girlfriend, who were sailing the boat — got delayed bringing
Serendipity
across from Panama to here. So suddenly, we had another seven weeks to kill. A friend tipped me off about the short-term job in New York, so I took that to earn a little extra for this trip.”
    It was just like she’d said back then.
I’m only in New York short-term.
    Now it made sense: why she’d showed up out of nowhere at the pool where he swam laps, and why it’d been so hard to track her down after she left. Your average woman left New York for Philly or Chicago or some place like that, not a sailboat in the Caribbean.
    “Is it your cousin’s boat?”
    She shook her head. “It’s all of ours. My grandfather left it to all of us cousins.”
    He looked at her, wondering. When his grandfather died, he got a watch.
    “Where are you sailing to next?” he asked, for lack of a more intelligent response.
    “Grenada.” She pointed like she had an internal compass and the place was just over there. “Three hundred ninety-five nautical miles.”
    He was still getting his jaw back into place when Mia jutted her chin toward the salvage operations, changing the subject. “Would that be the kind of thing you take care of?”
    Ah, the long-avoided topic of his job.
    He considered the scene. “We don’t do salvage, but we’d secure the scene. Dive for evidence, check the hull. That kind of thing.” And if they were lucky, preventing this kind of disaster.
    She shook her head. “What’s it like, diving in New York Harbor? I mean, diving there regularly. For work, not for fun.”
    “It’s not like this, that’s for sure.” If New York had the crystal-clear water Bonaire did, everyone would want his job.
    “So why do you do it?”
    He’d heard the question a thousand times and had never really come up with an answer. Hadn’t ever really tried. Either people got what it meant to be part of an elite squad doing important work, or they didn’t. Mostly, they didn’t.
    He sure hoped Mia did. He searched for an answer. “I like how it’s different, every day. I like the challenge.”
    “Like being in the Navy?”
    He nodded. “Kind of like that.” A lot like that, actually. Just closer to home, which was his whole point in leaving the Navy. Six years felt like enough time to be in a constant flux of shipping out or shipping in, and the police dive squad seemed like it would be a good fit. And it was. It was just that he was a little…not exactly burned out, because a good soldier didn’t get burned out. He was just a bit…tired. Lately, he’d even been tempted to move on to Plan B: going civilian by taking an old Navy buddy up on the standing offer of a partnership in a dive salvage business down in the Florida Keys. Until Mia came along and put the spark back into things.
    Spark. A sense of pride and purpose. Mia had helped him rediscover those things. And he didn’t even realize it until she was gone.
    She motored on in the darkness, and when she spoke again, her voice was hushed. “I’m sorry about those guys. That accident.”
    He sucked in a long breath. So she’d heard about it. Hell, all of the East Coast had heard about the freak accident that cost two of his squad their lives. A one-in-a-million combination of equipment failure, hellish currents, and an unlucky tangle with debris on the river bottom. No one could have foreseen it except some evil fate who’d chosen to concoct exactly that series of insurmountable obstacles in exactly that configuration.
    He nodded. What else could he say?
    Looked like he didn’t need to say anything, because he could practically see the gears moving in her mind.
    Work has been a little…all-consuming lately. I’d rather talk about other stuff.
    Maybe it made sense to her now, what he’d told her back then.
    “Mia, I wasn’t trying to keep anything secret from you. I just… I just…” He couldn’t quite get it out.
I just