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“I have something other people searching don’t.

See, I come from a family of treasure hunters.

My mom was part of this group of pilots that searched for wrecks off the coast of Florida and in the Caribbean as a hobby.

She met my dad and he got super into it…

but he was only interested in the legend of the Stolen Treasure and the Elephant’s Heart.

His obsession drove her away eventually.

When she left, she didn’t take her research with her.

Anyway, I have it all…aerial photos of the ocean in Florida and the Caribbean, a coded sea chart.

It took me a really long time to figure out her code, but I realized that she’d found evidence of a wreck that could be the San Miguel at the coordinates where we are going to search.

How she got that information, I don’t really know.

I vaguely remember my dad saying something once when he was on a bender about her being involved in some kind of reconnaissance aimed at searching for underwater anomalies. ”

As soon as I say it, I wish I hadn’t. Huck stares at me.

“Ted said you stole from him on the beach when you met…Were you on your own?”

I close my eyes. “My mom took off when I was fifteen. She was there one day and the next she was gone. I never heard from her again. My dad had problems before, but he wasn’t the same after that.

He said maybe she just didn’t want to be a wife or a mother anymore, but”—I sigh—“sometimes I wonder if that wasn’t the truth.

I never understood why she left the maps when the last big fight I remember them having was when he mentioned selling them.

I think maybe she wanted to leave her old life behind.

It’s silly, I suppose, that I keep thinking about it. ”

“No, it’s not. Have you tried looking for her?”

I nod. “Treasure’s not the only thing I’ve been searching for. She did a good job disappearing. A few years back, Teddy paid for this private investigator, who was supposed to be incredible, and even he didn’t turn up anything. She must not want to be found.”

“What about you and your dad? Are you two close?”

I shake my head. “Not really. He’s a complex man.”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess you could say he wasn’t around much and when he was, I wasn’t the focus.

We had a lot of debt, and he was always out trying to get people to fund his trips.

When he wasn’t grinding, he was drinking.

When I was sixteen and a half, he got this investor in Corolla and was planning a trip to search for the Heart.

That benefactor was even going to pay him a stipend.

Enough to rent a nice apartment near the beach and for me to come along.

My dad promised me things were going to be better…

different. He handed me a twenty and dropped me off at the pier for the afternoon so I could explore and grab some ice cream while he signed the paperwork for the rental and squared away things for our expedition. He never came back.”

Huck is still, absolutely silent beside me.

“A beach is nice for a while,” I say, trying to smile. “Then the summer sand turns scorching, and your skin burns, and twenty dollars doesn’t go very far. I didn’t even know the address of the apartment he’d rented. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t met Teddy.”

Huck’s eyes are wide.

I wait for the exclamation. When I told Teddy this back then, he must’ve said holy shit about forty times. I actually got worried that he was having some sort of short circuit.

Huck does not say holy shit .

“Both your parents left you?”

His question catches me so off guard that I don’t know how to respond.

“I’m sorry, I just…I didn’t realize—” The boat pitches a little, throwing us off-balance. Huck grabs for the galley table and knocks over his can of ginger ale. I’m relieved that he has to look away from me to sop up the spill. “Stella, I didn’t know.”

“That I don’t have a family?” I say. It’s been true for so long, that I realize this must hit him harder than it hits me, but I’m not totally unscathed. “Yeah, well. Why would you? We don’t really know each other that well. And I have Ted, and Zoe and Gus. So, I do fine.”

Huck doesn’t speak for a long time. His brow is deeply furrowed.

“I’m really sorry, Stella, I—”

“Don’t do that,” I cut him off. I don’t want to be pitied even more than I don’t want to hear Huck apologize.

The tough exterior I’ve spent the last ten-plus years crafting—and rebuilding after last year and Iceland—isn’t as impervious as I led myself to believe.

If we start this conversation, I may not be able to maintain my defenses.

“Got it,” he says. “You know, I did find one cool thing that could be related to the treasure…There was this old book in the library at Columbia that featured some pictures of different shipping documents from the time period of your wreck. I was able to connect with a translator through my publisher who helped me with some passages. It looks like it could contain some interesting information about the sinking of the San Miguel .”

I lean over his shoulder to peer at the annotated photocopies. “Actually, I haven’t seen this,” I admit, lifting the printout to examine it more closely.

“I don’t know how relevant it is,” Huck says. “I just wanted to contribute if I could. You know I love to research.”

“That is one thing I know about you, yes. I also know you didn’t put your scopolamine patch on like we told you to.”

“It was so calm before; I didn’t think I needed it.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to find that thing and pop it on before it gets worse. We’re getting some decent-sized swells from the feel of it and you’ll find yourself reliving that whale-watching trip for the next few days.”

“You seem okay,” he says.

“Well, I’m me, and you’re you. We couldn’t be more different.”

Huck’s expression changes, as if he’s hurt by my jab.

I turn my attention back to the printout and peer at the translated text while I tame my temper with a couple of deep breaths like Zoe advised before I left.

It was her go-to tactic for maintaining her cool in a tense courtroom.

That and picturing the opposing counsel in their underwear, which felt counterproductive to say the least.

“This is relevant,” I admit. “Super interesting, actually. See, several of the other ships in this fleet have already been found off the coast of Florida, but farther north than where we are headed. They were traveling back to Spain when a massive storm hit, throwing several ships off course to avoid the dangerous weather, and others foundered. After it happened, a recovery effort was launched out of what is now Cuba. There’re records of that search, which we’ve been able to go through, so we know that the San Miguel was not found even though the sea was searched from St. Augustine all the way down south closer to the Cuban coast and the Keys.

Based on this, it looks like de Melo chose to head south to avoid the storm.

And it makes sense. He would’ve left a bit late to pick up the secret treasure without being detected, and might not have made it very far before the storm set in.

They sent an independent boat to search this area instead, but they only recovered some raw gold dust—probably from the mine.

This supports the possibility that the wreck we have on the coded map is the San Miguel , and that it wasn’t found during the initial search. ”

I retrieve my mother’s map from my bag and lay it out on the table in front of us. Wordlessly, Huck shifts his materials to make room.

“Is this hers?”

I nod. The map shows the Atlantic, with red marks indicating the wrecks that have already been found, other debris fields.

The routes the envoy was taking based on our research are marked in pencil.

I have to lean close to Huck to reach the map, where I trace a different route, a southerly one, with my finger.

He smells clean and woodsy; that familiar citrus and cedar scent fills my nose and stirs up memories I have to push down.

“So, if they went this way, and the storm came in, we might expect that the ship either tried to harbor in this area or it sank. Here’s Key West,” I say, pointing to the land mass and then moving my hand over to the zone marked aggressively by yellow highlighter, “and here’s where we’re going to search. ”

Huck turns to face me. “What do you think the odds are that we’ll find something there? High, right? Based on your research and this, it seems like you’ve found the right spot.”

“It’s not that simple,” I say, rising.

“Why not? It was last time.”

I take a long pause before I speak. I need to choose my words carefully.

“Well, that wasn’t underwater. And honestly, we got really lucky.

Here, there are a ton of variables that we can try to account for, but we don’t really have a good way to model to ensure that we’re in the right spot.

Basically, we’ll deploy a magnetometer and mark all the hits that we get.

We take that information and our research and synthesize it to determine which search areas have the highest odds of being our treasure.

We might be in the right spot, but everything could be too deep for us to find with the tools we have.

Or we might theoretically be in the spot where the initial sinking occurred, but the currents and other things have made a huge debris field that means we only find a few small things and everything else is spread across a huge zone on the ocean floor.

We just don’t know. It doesn’t help that we’re looking for something that isn’t metal.

That’s more challenging. From what I was able to ascertain from records, this area hasn’t been searched by professionals, at least not anyone who has applied for a permit.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been searched at all, but there’s no record of any finds big or small. ”

Huck nods, thoughtful. “Then it’s possible that nothing’s been discovered even though someone may have looked?”

“Yeah. It happens. Even good treasure hunters can miss what they’re searching for.”

The amount of eye contact between us is overwhelming and maddening. He doesn’t get to look at me like this, not now. I turn my attention to folding the map and tucking it away.

“Well, those treasure hunters didn’t have you.”

I think the words are meant as a compliment, but there’s an undercurrent of sadness in his voice; it chips into my defenses a bit.

“I don’t always get it right,” I manage to say, my voice quiet. It’s honest. I take a deep breath to pull myself together. “You might remember Skógafoss, where I dragged everyone out in the middle of the night and we came up with nothing.”

Huck fixes his gaze on me. “I wouldn’t call it nothing.”

His words, his ice-blue eyes, all of him…they’re pulling me back in. And I can’t let that happen.

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice…

I collect the last of my sandwich. “I should get back on deck.”