Todd answered on the fourth ring, but he was at school dropping off his kids and couldn’t be there for fifteen minutes, and that . . . that was when Piper realized she was going to miss the Della Ray leaving. It was scheduled to leave two minutes ago. Her heartbeat slammed in her eardrums, and her movements turned sluggish. Brendan wouldn’t leave, though. He would wait for her. He would know she was coming. And if she didn’t show up, she had to believe he would come find her. But she couldn’t leave Abe. She couldn’t. She had to make sure he was going to be all right.
She called Brendan, but it went straight to voicemail. Twice. The third time she called, the line disconnected. Fingers unsteady, she pounded out a text message, her panic increasing when he didn’t answer immediately. God, this couldn’t be happening. She’d found out early on how terrible cell reception was in certain parts of Westport, especially the harbor, but technology couldn’t be failing her so completely right now. Not when it was this crucial.
Todd didn’t make it there in fifteen minutes. It took him twenty.
By that time, they’d gotten Abe to his feet and moved him to a bench. He seemed tired and slightly embarrassed about the fall, so she told him about the time she’d tried to slide down a stripper pole after six shots of tequila and ended up with a sprained wrist. That made him laugh at least. Todd arrived in his truck looking concerned, and Piper helped Abe into the passenger side, wads of balled-up paper towels pressed to her chest. She made him promise to give her a call later, and off they went, disappearing around the corner of the block.
Piper was almost scared to look at her phone, but she gathered her courage and checked the time. Oh God. Half an hour. Half an hour late.
She started running.
She ran as fast as her feet would carry her toward the harbor, trying to hold on to the faith. Trying to ignore the voice whispering in the back of her head that Brendan kept a tight schedule. Or that he’d given up on her. Please, please, don’t let that be the case.
At Westhaven Drive, she whipped a right and almost knocked over a restaurant’s specials board set out on the sidewalk. But she kept running. Kept going until she saw the Della Ray in the distance, traveling out to sea, leaving a trail of white, sloshing wake, and she stopped like she’d hit an invisible wall.
A deafening buzz started in her ears.
He’d left.
He was gone.
She’d missed him and now . . .
Brendan thought she’d chosen LA.
A great hiccupping sob rose up in her chest. Her feet carried her toward the docks, even though going there was useless now. She just wanted to make it there. Making it was all she had, even if she would have nothing to show for it. No kiss. No reassurance. No Brendan.
Her eyes were overflowing with tears by the time she reached the slip of the Della Ray, her surroundings so blurry, she almost didn’t notice the other women standing around, obviously fresh from waving off the boat. She vaguely recognized Sanders’s wife from the first night she and Hannah had walked into No Name. Another woman’s age hinted at her being the mother of one of the crew members, rather than a significant other.
Piper wanted to greet them in some way, but her hands were heavy at her sides, her vocal cords atrophied.
“It’s Piper, right?” Sanders’s wife approached but recoiled a little when she spotted the tears coursing down Piper’s numb face. “Oh. Honey, no. You’re going to have to be a lot tougher than that.”
The older woman laughed. “It’s a good thing you didn’t show up here with that face, making your man feel guilty.” She stepped over a rope and headed toward the street. “Distracted men make mistakes.”
“She’s right,” Sanders’s wife said, still looking uncomfortable around Piper’s steady waterfall of tears. The boat was just a dot now. “Especially if you’re going to be with the captain. You need to be reliable. Hardy. They don’t like to admit it, but a lot of their confidence comes from us. Sending them off isn’t an easy thing to do, week after week, but we do what’s necessary, yeah?”
Piper didn’t know how long she stood and stared out at the water, watching a buoy bob on the roll of waves, the wind drying the tears on her face and making it stiff. Fishermen wove their way around her, guiding tourists to their boats, but she couldn’t bring her feet to move. There was a hollow ache in her stomach that felt like a living thing, the pain spreading until she worried it would swallow her whole.