When I enter my rooms early the next morning, I’m startled to find that Kearan never left. He’s standing right where I saw him last, staring at nothing in particular in the corner. Dried tearstains cover his cheeks before disappearing into his short beard. His face is red, like when he used to drink, though I know he hasn’t touched a drop since he quit.
I realize now that I’ve checked on the well-being of every member of the crew except one person.
“Sorry, Captain,” Kearan says when I enter. He moves to leave.
“Wait.”
He halts in place but doesn’t turn around.
I find my courage. “How are you?”
“You don’t have to do this with me.”
“I asked you a question, sailor.”
He turns. “I feel like shit, Captain. There’s nothing I want more than a drink or five. Don’t suppose you could have Jadine lock up the rum tonight for me?”
“You have more self-control than that.”
“Right now I don’t think I do.”
I don’t want to be stuck in this tiny room with him, but I can’t pinpoint why, and that frustrates me more than anything else. He’s different, I remind myself. Things don’t have to be weird around him.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Do you mourn the fallen?”
“Of course I do, but these wounds are deeper than that.”
“Tell me.”
He looks up. “Is that an order?”
I gentle my tone. “Tell me, if you want to. I’d like to understand.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m your captain, and I care about your well-being.”
“You’re exhausted and ready to drop.”
“Not anymore.” I realize the words are true as soon as they’re out. My body might be ready to never move again, but my mind is alert. Ready to fix another problem.
“Captain—” Kearan starts.
“Are you scared to tell me?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t think you actually want to hear my petty traumas.”
“Yet I’m telling you I do. You going to call me a liar?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then out with it.”
He heaves himself into the chair in front of my desk. It looks too small for him, but he doesn’t complain. He’s probably used to everything being too small for him.
“You were there when I told Alosa I had sailed this way before,” he starts.
“I remember.”
“I wasn’t alone. There was a girl.”
“Parina,” I say.
Kearan looks up, startled to hear her name from my lips.
“You talk in your sleep,” I say by way of explanation. When I was ordered to watch Kearan aboard the Ava-lee, I saw him do and heard him say all kinds of things. But one name he always repeated. At least, he did before he quit drinking. I’ve never heard him say her name since then.
“I thought she was the love of my life,” he says. “How fanciful we can be when we’re seventeen.”
I don’t point out that I was seventeen just over a month ago, but he seems to realize his error immediately.
“I meant no disrespect. We all age differently, and I was … different then.”
“None taken.”
“Good. Like I said, I thought she was the love of my life, but she … started taking on with a different lad on the ship. I caught her at it, and I ended things. That was hard, but not so hard as when she died.”
“She died on your last voyage out this way?”
“Went missing. Disappeared off the ship. Now I know what took her. What … ate her.”
He sighs heavily, fighting another bout of tears, I expect, and I try to think of something comforting to say.
“It would have been quick,” I reassure him. “It seems the creature snapped necks before it took its victims. That way they couldn’t scream. She didn’t feel a thing. Wouldn’t have even been scared before the light was snuffed out.”
“That is … surprisingly comforting to know. Thank you.”
I relax at the words, relieved I didn’t make his suffering worse. I dare to say more. “You shouldn’t care for a woman who discarded you. You should let her go.”
He laughs once without any mirth. “Should have known you’d say something like that, but you see, I can’t let it go, because I’m the reason she was on that ship. I convinced her to go with me.”
“You can be as persuasive as you like, but a person is still going to make their own choice in the end. Unless I’m to believe the girl had no say in the matter? Was she some docile thing who did whatever you wanted?”
“No.”
“Then stop fretting. You were young. You couldn’t have known. And she made her choice before she died. It wasn’t you.”
“I was trying to get her back.”
“Do you think you would have succeeded? Or that even if you had, her attentions wouldn’t have strayed yet again?”
After a long pause, he says, “No.”
“Then don’t mourn her. She didn’t die because of you. She wasn’t on that ship because of you. If she truly cared for you, she wouldn’t have chosen another man over you. So she wasn’t on that ship for you. She was there for herself. She chose someone else for herself. What happened afterward was an accident.”
Kearan swallows. “Those words are about as soothing as a blunt knife.”
“And just like a blunt knife, they still get the job done.”
He rolls his eyes, and some of his normal coloring returns.
“You really turned to drink because a woman died? And one who treated you like rubbish, at that.”
His gaze narrows. “That’s not why I started drinking.”
“Then why?”
He doesn’t answer right away. “I did lose Parina. That hit me hard. I came back from the voyage without pay. Then I found out my mother had passed. Some ridiculous cough that wouldn’t go away.” He looks up. “I had nothing. No money. No one left who cared for me. Nothing but a house with a fine stock of ale, courtesy of my good-for-nothing father, who’d quit the world a few years previously.
“So I started drinking to cover up the pain. I took on with Riden’s father’s crew when I grew too hungry for the drink to be enough.”
Confusion settles within me. “And then you stopped because of me?”
He grins. “I may have exaggerated that a bit. It wasn’t just you. It was Alosa’s crew, where I could see myself part of something bigger again. Not a family, exactly, but something like it. It was Enwen, who stuck with me all that time, even though I never deserved it. I still don’t deserve it, yet he keeps trailing me around like a lost puppy. He goes around insisting I call him my best friend, as if we’re a couple of little girls. Grown men don’t go around calling each other their besties.” He catches himself digressing and pulls himself back on track. “And then there was you, who gave me an excuse to stop in that moment because my easy access to rum was gone.”
“Drink is not an answer to pain,” I say, because I don’t know what else I can say to help. I’m entirely out of my element. Kearan just gave me his entire life story, full of pain and loss. I’m unused to being entrusted with such vulnerabilities. I add, “We can’t change the fates of those who are gone. We can’t unmake decisions—our own or others. All we can do is keep living, ourselves, and if you hate yourself, then live for others.”