The Shippers(81)

I gave the moment a chance to change its mind.

When it didn’t, I slowly, carefully, tiptoed down to go examine the body of my phone.

Case gone, screen shattered. Pieces of phone everywhere. Beyond dead.

I gathered all the pieces up tenderly, like we might go to the hospital and have them surgically reattached, and cradled them in my palms.

At that point, I was still thinking Cooper would be there any minute.

With no phone, I had no clock. A thousand hours went by—or maybe that was just boredom bending time—and when the bright midday sunlight started to shift into the muted light of afternoon and Cooper still hadn’t shown up, I started to worry that I might miss the boat. Literally.

I finally decided to undo the bolt, look around outside, and, if the coast seemed clear, haul ass back to town. I still had to pick up Ashley’s dress, after all. And get back to the ship before four o’clock sharp.

But guess what?

When I finally worked up the nerve to open that door … it was locked. This time, from the outside.

I had locked Pork Pie out—but I guess he had locked me in.

When the door didn’t open, I slapped it, and kicked it, and threw myself against it over and over.

But nothing. Not even a budge.

And that’s when I sat down on the stairs and started to panic.

This was bad.

I was locked in the lighthouse, and I had no way to call for help, and no way to get out.

I wasn’t just going to miss the boat, and my sister’s wedding, and any chance at ever making up with Cooper …

I was going to die.





Twenty-Seven


YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT. Cooper never showed up.

But guess who did?

My dad.

Of all people!

I was weeping with abandon, crumpled on the bottom steps—going whole hog with full-body sobs after losing all hope—when there was a knock at the door. And then I heard my dad’s voice, muffled through the metal. “JoJo? Are you in there?”

I stood up. “Dad?”

“It’s me, honey. Open up.”

“How did you find me?”

“I tracked your phone’s GPS.”

“But my phone died,” I said.

“Last known location,” my dad said.

“You can do that?”

“It’s easier than it should be,” my dad said.

“Dad,” I said, starting to cry again. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Let’s go, sweetheart,” my dad said. “We need to get back to the boat.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m stuck.”

“Define ‘stuck,’” my dad said.

“Somebody locked me in,” I said. “I might have to die in here.”

It tells you a lot about my state of mind that it did not occur to me that my dad could let me out until he did. I heard a clank and then a chunk and then my dad swung the iron door wide open.

“Dad!” I shouted, so overjoyed at the sight of him standing there holding Ashley’s dress that I hurled myself over the threshold and into his arms—with so much force that my dad tumped right over, and we both hit the ground.

It was the first hug I could remember giving him since I was a kid.

And it was nothing short of a doozy.



* * *



WE MADE IT back to the boat, but just barely.

We cut it so close, my dad asked the cab driver taking us back to the dock to “step on it” three different times. We cut it so close, my mother called to say they were paging us over the ship’s loudspeaker to report to the purser’s desk and account for our whereabouts. We cut it so close, we ran—actually ran—up the gangway, the dry-cleaner plastic of Ashley’s dress fluttering over my dad’s shoulder like a kite.

Technically, we were late. There’s an all-aboard time for a ship about to disembark, and then, forty-five minutes later, there’s an actual pulling-away-from-the-dock time.

We made it with two minutes to spare on the second one.

They were paging us again as we arrived.

Guess who else they were paging?

Cooper.

“Passenger Cooper Watts, please report to the purser’s desk to confirm your return.”

Cooper wasn’t on board?

I looked around, like maybe I could locate him, just as my mom and Ashley showed up, demanding to know what had taken us so long.

“We ran into some traffic,” my dad said, giving me a little wink, like that was all they needed to know.

Ashley took her dress and cradled it. “Thanks, Dad,” she said.

“You got it, squirt,” my dad said, like a guy who’d just saved the day.

Which he really had, I realized. He’d grabbed the dress, saved my life, and gotten us both back to the ship—all in record time. But here was another thing I was noticing about my dad: He wasn’t a guy who liked to take credit for things.

My mom was squinting at my dad like she could tell there was more to the story, and then, as we all started to make our way back to the main deck, she noticed him limping a little.

“What happened to your leg?” she asked then.

My dad glanced at me. I’d maimed him a bit with that hug earlier, that’s what happened.