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Stefan rolled his eyes. ‘If you must.’ He took her back to his office and turned on his computer. Olivia noted that the internet was just as slow for Stefan as it was in the library. When it connected, he called the email up on the screen. It seemed legitimate. Once again, she felt out of the loop. But maybe he had written to her too, while she’d been out kayaking.
‘Do you mind if I check my inbox while I’m here?’
‘Fine.’
She opened her Gmail but there were no new messages from Aaron. She chewed on her bottom lip, trying to hold back the swell of emotion rising in her chest. Why wouldn’t he keep her informed?
She stood up from the computer. ‘I’ve got some things to do. Would you mind telling Janine that I’ve gone back to the cabin?’
‘Sure. And, Olivia, try to loosen up. Maybe drink some champagne.’
Olivia’s eyes widened. ‘What did you say?’ Was that a threat? A reference to the champagne that had been meant for her and Aaron? But before she could question Stefan further, he had already walked off, back towards Janine.
She fled back to the cabin, glad to find it empty. She needed some time to think, to get her mind around what had happened over the past two days. Had it really only been that? It seemed like she’d be on the ship for a week.
She dragged out the suitcase and carefully folded her clothes away into the drawer that she had been assigned. She didn’t need much – there wasn’t great cause for dressing up on board, but she needed to find her best outfits to put together for drinks with the VIPs the following night – an evening earlier than planned since they made such good progress through the Drake Passage.
Her coats and fleeces she hung up in the wardrobe. She noticed Aaron’s jacket was in her small day bag, somehow mixed in with her clothes from their lastdinner in Ushuaia. She brought it close and breathed in his cologne. She ran her hand down the front, but there was no sign of the ring box any more – Aaron must have it with him. But as she straightened it to place it on a hanger, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor.
I know what you did. And I’m going to make you pay.
22
Olivia snatched up the note and balled it into Aaron’s jacket pocket as she heard someone coming into the cabin.
It was Annalise. She stopped in her tracks when she caught sight of Olivia’s face. ‘You OK? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘It’s nothing.’ Olivia hurried to put Aaron’s coat on a hanger, then squeezed it into the tiny wardrobe next to her things. ‘Just had a reminder of home as I was unpacking.’
‘You’re shaking.’
Olivia hadn’t realized. Now that she was aware of it, she could sense her breathing tightening inside her chest, her vision squeezing at the edges.
Aaron was in trouble, and she couldn’t help.
‘I think …’ But her mouth was so dry it took a moment for her to string the rest of the sentence together. ‘I’m having a panic attack.’
Annalise moved into action swiftly, helping Olivia over to the bed and grabbing her a glass of water from the bathroom. Olivia lay back down on the mattress, trying to count her breaths until the feeling passed.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Annalise asked. ‘Is it the boat thing?’
Olivia blinked. It made sense that Annalise thought that was the trigger. But she hadn’t told the story ofwhat had happened to her dad to anyone in a long time – even Aaron only knew the bones of it. Tricia knew everything, of course.
But maybe talking about it with a total stranger would help. Get it out in the open, so she didn’t have to be scared of the memory any more. At the very least it would be a distraction from the note.
She sat up in the bed, sipping from the glass Annalise handed to her. ‘It might be hard to believe, but I spent my entire childhood on the water.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘My dad used to work as a yacht captain. Well, once I came along he didn’t do it full-time but he’d made a few good connections and so was often trusted with moving people’s boats from one port to the next – you know, from the Mediterranean in the summertime to the Caribbean in winter. Or from Australia up to the Pacific Islands. Whatever the owners wanted. He’d do the transitions solo, then Mum and I would fly out to meet him for a holiday on the boat for a week or two.
‘Honestly that sounds pretty idyllic.’
‘It was, for a long time. And he taught me a lot about sailing, of course. We had our own little boat up on a loch in Scotland. By the time I was sixteen, he trusted me with handling myself in pretty much any situation on the boat. But then—’ Her voice cut off with a choke. ‘We were in the Caribbean, off the coast of St Lucia. We were on this really fancy yacht, just the three of us. It was called –’ she hadn’t said the name out loud since the night it had happened, even though she’d often seen it in her dreams – ‘theClarissa.We’d had an amazing time, and Dad was really starting to trust me. But Mum wasfeeling under the weather and needed some rest. So he asked me to stand watch on our final night.’
She closed her eyes. The sound of the water lapping against the porthole took her right back to the moment.
That had been the only sound in the darkness during her watch. How she’d longed to put her headphones in and blast out some tunes, but that was against the rules of keeping watch. She needed all her senses sharp.