Page 60 of These Summer Storms

She’d been furious.You’ve tolerated me? What about me? You haven’t spoken to me in years!

What did you think would happen?he’d replied.Did you think I’d laud you as a hero, too? Did you think I’d thank you for betraying me?

I would have thought you’d…She’d changed her mind. And the words.I’d have thought you’d be a better father.At the time, she hadn’t realized how it might have stung. But now, remembering that they were the last words she’d ever said to him—

She swallowed back the emotion that threatened. Reminded herself that it was Franklin who’d ended it.

Then we’re equally disappointed.

“He told me to leave,” she said, pushing her shoulders back. Lifting her chin, like she had whenever they fought. How often had she replayed his rigid, cold words over the years, holding her phone in her hand, wondering if she should call home. She never did, too distracted by the sound of them in her ears, the way they filled her up and resurrected her own rage. Her own unwillingness to bend.

Even masked behind aviators, she could see Jack’s surprise. “In those words?”

Get the hell off my island.

It had been quiet and dismissive, somehow worse than if he’d shouted it and dropped her in the nearest harbor himself. He hadn’t cared, and it had hurt. There’d been a part of her that had been grateful for that pain. For what came next. For the way it made her brave.

It had never occurred to her that it would be their last conversation. She’d never imagined he would die; Franklin Storm wasn’t the kind of man who died.

She nodded. “That was it.” The boat felt infinitely smaller in the wake of the embarrassing confession, and she didn’t like it. She looked to Jack, his lips pressed into a firm line, and a spark of that old anger flared again, this time for Jack.

“Was it worth it?” Jack interrupted her thoughts. “Leaving?”

“It’s always worth leaving when someone doesn’t want you to stay.” Her therapist would be really proud of that answer.

Griffin wasn’t worth it, but Alice’s freedom? The knowledge that she could thrive without them, that she could be more than Alice Storm Inc.? That was worth it. As for her family…was it worth them ignoring her? Forgetting her? Was it worth her father not having final words for her? No letter, no phone call, nothing.

A final punishment. No answers. Only questions. She watched the water for a long moment, filled with them, and finally turned to him. “That night. On the train. At the Quahog Quay.”

If Jack was shocked by the wild change of topic, he didn’t show it. It was his job not to be surprised. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t intend to sleep with you. Not at the start.”

“That’s funny, as you could have avoided it by telling me the truth about who you were.” He’d barely opened his mouth to reply when she raised a hand and said, “It’s my fault for insisting on no names. I brought on an irrevocable case of vocal paralysis.”

“No.” His reply came curt and unyielding. “By the time you said no names, that was fine with me.”

Her brows shot up. “It was?”

He did look at her then. “What do you want me to say, Alice? That I wanted to fuck you?”

Yes.The response shot through her—surprising and unexpected andreal. Alice was not the kind of woman men wanted to fuck. At least, she wasn’t the kind of person men told they wanted to fuck. And if someone had asked her a week earlier if this was the kind of thing she would have liked to hear, she would have said,Absolutely not. No thanks.

Apparently, she would have been wrong.

Luckily, the question was rhetorical. “Okay. I wanted to fuck you. And I knew that if I told you who I was, that wasn’t going to happen.”

Her jaw went slack, but he was still going. “Maybe I was sad, and maybe I was angry, and maybe I was in shock, and maybe, in the moment, I wasn’t interested in facing real life. And neither were you. You wanted it as much as I did.”

He was right. Her grip tightened on the smooth edges of the boat. She’d wanted it. And if she let herself, she still did.

As though he heard the silent confession, he said, “Like I said: You should expect more from people.”

Her gaze fell to his hands, strong and sure at the helm, that compass with its beautiful lines inked across his forearm. It was the first time she had seen it in the light, and so it wasn’t until that moment that she noticed that it wasn’t only a compass. There, embedded in its fine-lined face, was an equally fine-lined sextant—an ancient sailing tool, used to navigate the sea using the stars. The kind of thing only someone who’d sailed for a lifetime would care enough to have permanently inked on their skin.

Who was this man? And why was he here, with her?

This man who noticed her. Who asked questions and made silent space for her to answer them, luring her into bad decisions. He wasn’t good for her.

“When I expect more from people, I’m disappointed,” she said to the water. “I expected more of my family. Of my siblings. Of my mother. Of my father. More of Griffin.” She looked to Jack. “Of you.”