“And,” the woman goes on, leaning one elbow on the bar, “if you’re traveling with a guy, that ups the percentage to a solid ninety-two.”
It’s her joke, and the inviting smile that accompanies it, that makes Caroline launch into her whole story. It’s only when she’s said it out loud that she realizes how silly it all sounds. How minor in the grand scheme of things.
But the woman isn’t looking at her with pity or condescension. She gets it. Caroline can tell. It’s something in her eyes, in the way she nods at certain details, like Ainsley’s stupid fucking Instagram captions—Fit to be Thai-ed!!!—or the even stupider lie Tanner told.
“Anyway,” Caroline concludes, “now I can either waste the rest of my money going home, or I can … I don’t know. Go back to him, and get over it. I mean, I could try to get by on my own for the next three weeks, then meet up with him when it’s time to fly back.” The thought of having to deal with Tanner in any capacity is preemptively exhausting, but Caroline knows that’s probably her best bet. Make her last few hundred bucks last as long as she can, and hope Tanner doesn’t cancel her ticket.
But fuck, she hates that. Putting that power in his hands when what she really wants to do is ditch him entirely.
The woman nods again before glancing over her shoulder. “Or,” she says with a shrug, “maybe there are other options?”
“Like what?”
The woman shrugs again, then smiles. “There are always options. Particularly when you let go of the version of yourself that got here in the first place. You can cling to the before, or you can try to live in the after, you know?”
In the after.
Caroline isn’t sure what it means, but she likes the sound of that.
She likes this girl, too.
By the third beer, she’s not a stranger anymore, though. She has a name, an unusual one that Caroline has never heard before.
She also has a boat.
And that night, when Caroline steals back to Tanner’s room at the hostel, she knows that she does have options. Her new friend has just shown them to her. She’ll take Caroline on her boat, sail her anywhere she’d like to go. Caroline just needs to do one thing first.
She finds the money clip in a drawer, underneath his underwear.
She picks it up, sliding it into her bag, then slips back out into the night, toward the bar and her friend, and her freedom, and it surprises her how easy it is. How there was a before, when she was sad and miserable and trapped—and now, just a few hours later, there’s this glorious after.
Caroline steps into it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the book I’ve been wanting to write since I was twelve years old and first came across a copy of And the Sea Will Tell in my local library. I can still see the turquoise cover, the leering skull. To finally get to write my own “boat murder” book is a （slightly macabre） dream come true, and I am so thankful to everyone who helped make it happen!
Holly Root has been my agent for more than a decade, and I hope she will still be talking me off ledges and helping to steer my ideas into port for decades more to come. This book particularly benefitted from her excellent notes early in the planning stages, and I am so grateful for her expertise.
Sarah Cantin understood this book from the first pitch, and then pushed it to be so much better and more ambitious than I’d ever hoped for. This might be the most complicated novel I’ve ever written, and were it not for Sarah’s editorial genius, I think it—and I—would have fallen to pieces many times over. Thank you so much, Sarah, for all your work and for never stopping me from using roughly 354 nautical puns whenever I emailed you about the manuscript.
Thank you also to Sallie Lotz, whose notes are always so smart and whose eye is so sharp.
The entire team at St. Martin’s Press is a dream to work with, and I am beyond fortunate to have them at the helm. My books and my career are in such good hands with all of you.
Thank you, as always, to my friends, especially, in this case, Ash Parsons, Kerri Mu?oz, and Vicky Alvear Schecter, all of whom heard about this book in its earliest stages and cheered me on. Hopefully by the time this one is out, we’re all back at the convent again, walking mazes and scandalizing nuns.
And of course, for my family. I love y’all.