Page 5

M issy shifted, awake yet again in her uncomfortable spot on the hospital cot beside her father. The hospital staff had brought the cot in for her, after she’d begged to not leave him. They’d wanted her to get some quality rest at home and to ensure that she wasn’t suffering any further ill effects from her ordeal, but, as long as her father was on death’s door, she wouldn’t do anything for herself. There was just too much trauma involved in watching somebody you loved suffer, like he had suffered.

When the doctor came in, he raised an eyebrow when he saw her awake and asked, “Did you get any sleep at all?”

She shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“In other words, no,” he declared, with a nod.

She smiled. “Did anybody really expect me to leave him?”

“No, I sure didn’t,” he stated, with a smile. “If it had been my father, I would be here too.”

“Exactly,” she murmured. “So, how is he?”

“He’s holding his own. He did have surgery to open up the pressure on his skull from that bleed on his brain. Over time it had built up and had definitely become an issue. We got that cleaned out, and the pressure on his brain released, so we’re hoping that he will pull through, but honestly you need to be prepared for anything. There’s no way to know yet.”

She just nodded as the doctor made a few more notations and then turned to face her.

“What about you?” he asked Missy.

“I’m fine,” she replied, “obviously tired and stressed, but I’m okay.”

“Good,” he said, “and being okay is a large part of it, but you also need to ensure that you aren’t hurting yourself further by staying here and looking after him.”

She smiled. “Even if you ordered me to leave, I wouldn’t,” she declared. “He’s all I have in this world, and I spent far too long watching him sink every day, without being able to do anything to help him.”

“I get it,” he noted, “but my concern still stands that you don’t do anything that will put yourself into further trauma.”

“You mean, outside of watching my father die?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, “outside of watching your father fight for his life. Don’t shoot him down too early. He’s always been a fighter, and I can’t imagine he would be anything less at this stage either.”

She smiled. “I gather you know him?”

“Yeah, I sure do. I was jealous as hell at every one of those fishing derbies. He had a supersecret fishing spot, and he would head out early in the morning alone, never tell anybody, always coming back with some of the biggest fish ever.”

“Of course.” Missy had to laugh. “He held those derbies as the biggest events of his year. Everything else could go by the wayside, but, as long as he got to do his derbies, he was good.”

“And you know, as a crazy fisherman myself, I totally understand.”

She nodded. “I gather you’ve never been to any of his special spots?”

“Nope, I sure haven’t. He’s not one to share,” he pointed out, with a chuckle.

She smiled and didn’t say anything. Interesting that Trey knew where to look, but nobody else did. She hadn’t realized just how competitive her father had gotten over his fishing spots. It didn’t mean that the spot they had gone to was one of the ones that he had kept secret for the derbies, but it could have been, in which case it would make sense why nobody found them. He may have paid the ultimate price for that secrecy.

She sighed as she settled back. A few minutes later a trolley came around, and she was given a tray of food for breakfast. She smiled her thanks and stared down at the very unappetizing food in dismay. Funny, it wasn’t very long ago that she would have been absolutely screaming for joy to have this, but the minute you recover the tiniest bit, you sure look for the better things in life, and hospital food just wouldn’t cover it.

While she sat here, staring at it, trying to figure out what to do, somebody cleared their throat at the door. She looked up to see Trey standing there, holding two cups of coffee and a small bag. Her face lit up, and she carefully put the hospital tray off to the side and headed toward him. “Oh, I could give you a big hug right now,” she said, as she eyed what he carried. “Please tell me some of that is for me.”

“Absolutely,” he stated, with a chuckle. “In my experience, hospital food was never great.”

“I was just thinking how spoiled and terrible I am because it wasn’t very long ago that I would have been thrilled to have anything on that tray, but now? It just seems awful.”

Trey nodded in understanding. “I’ve been there and done that too. I spent way too much time in hospitals myself,” he shared, with a smile. He held out one of the cups of coffee for her. “I did have to guess how you like it, so it’s black, but in the bag are a couple creamers and some sugar too, just in case.”

“I don’t need the sugar.” She sniffed the lid and groaned with relief. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she muttered. As he held out the bag, she peeked inside and smiled. “Breakfast sandwiches too?”

“I didn’t even think I was coming to the hospital, but then I woke up this morning, and I just couldn’t stay in bed. I have Schooner out in the parking lot, if you want to come say hi.”

“I absolutely want to come say hi.”

Together they walked outside, and, as soon as Schooner saw her, he went berserk trying to get out of the vehicle. She waited until Trey quickly opened up the door to let him out, then handed him her coffee and let the dog have a few minutes of running around, doing zoomies.

When Schooner finally calmed down, she laughed and cuddled him. “See? We didn’t desert you, buddy.”

“I think he knows it,” Trey added comfortably, “but the hospital wasn’t exactly the place to keep him.”

“No,” she murmured, “it’s not.” She looked over at him and smiled. “So, now you’re a lifesaver again.”

He frowned at her, and she pointed at the coffee. He chuckled. “I don’t want to say anything bad about the hospital, but it is hospital food, and I figured that you were still here, though I did call to confirm it.”

“Of course you did,” she said, with a smile, “but there is no other place I’ll be, not until I know how he’s doing.”

“And can you tell me how he is?”

“I just spoke to the doctor. They did surgery to relieve pressure on his brain last night,” she shared, with a shrug. “It sounds as if he can potentially recover, but the doc emphasized that, with all my dad’s been through, something could easily go wrong, and we could lose him. I know I should have listened more closely and asked more questions, but honestly I’m just so grateful that somebody else is here to make whatever decisions need to be made. I feel as if decision fatigue hit while we were stranded out there in a big way, and, for now, I just want to know that he’s being taken care of by the professionals.”

“He is,” he assured her.

“I do know what they’re doing,” she stated, with a smile, “and it’s not as if I’m trying to hand over my responsibilities.… I’m just so grateful that they’re doing something for him.”

“Of course,” Trey agreed. “So now maybe you can ease up on yourself and quit feeling so guilty for not being able to get you guys rescued.”

She looked up at him, and the tears immediately came to her eyes. She wiped them on her sleeve and grumbled, “How did you know?”

“Because you just finished your education as a vet, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed, “and that’s the trouble. I’ve just completed my exams, but I still have a year of residency, and I was supposed to do that with Dad. Now, I wonder, could I have opened up his head and done something for him on that rock? Believe me, I went through that possibility time and time again, and, if I had really thought I could do something, I might have considered it. Yet I also knew that I could kill him. Plus, I didn’t have any equipment, and I didn’t have any medicine to fight infection or any anesthesia. I didn’t have any way to test exactly what was even wrong with him, so, from my perspective, everything I looked at as an option seemed more harmful than good. But, man, being out there alone like that, not able to help?… I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

“So, it’s a good thing then that you’re a vet and can spend a lifetime helping guys like this one.” At that, Trey pointed to Schooner, who was basically sitting on her feet, so she couldn’t leave without him.

She laughed, then bent down and gave him a big hug. “I would absolutely love to do that,” she confirmed, “though it would be doubly hard if my father wasn’t with me going forward. Not to mention he signed for me to do the residency with him, so I can’t even complete my training without him. I would have to leave and do that somewhere else, before I could even come back and take over his practice.”

“So, in that case,” Trey noted, “we won’t even contemplate that possibility, and we’ll just assume that he’ll make it and that you’ll be working together in no time.”

She looked up at Trey and smiled. “And again that voice of cheerful confidence,” she murmured. She studied him for a moment. “Didn’t you go through an accident or something?”

“If that’s what you call it,” he said, with a hard look. “Let’s just say I got injured while in the military, and I’m no longer in the service because of medical reasons.”

She looked him over carefully, without trying to make it seem she was checking him out, but he seemed healthy enough. “I don’t really know what happened,” she confessed, “but you seem fine.”

“I may look fine, but I do have a prosthetic.” Surprised, she looked him over another time, and he smiled. “That’s just life.”

She nodded. “I would think a prosthetic might be the least of the issues.”

“It absolutely is,” he agreed, with a gentle smile. “Military service can be tough, and, when you go through everything we went through, a prosthetic is not the worst thing.”

“Isn’t it amazing,” she stated fervently, “how a traumatic event completely changes your perspective? I’ve barely had a chance to even realize I survived, but I know—without a doubt—that I’ll look at the world differently from here on out. And, with my father’s life still hanging in the balance, life seems incredibly fragile.”

“As it should,” Trey stated. “We can get pretty flippant sometimes, thinking that everything is good. Then, all of a sudden, something like this happens, and you realize that you didn’t have any real respect for what you had, and you didn’t appreciate it all, and you didn’t have any gratitude for the things that really counted. Now that you’ve seen how easy it is to lose everything, it helps you rediscover the things that really matter.”

She smiled. “I can’t argue with that.” She looked at Schooner beside him and bent down to give the War Dog a big hug. “My God, he was so great to have out there, and just… knowing I wasn’t alone was a help, you know? And then all I could think about was how he would do so much better if he wasn’t sitting there with us.”

“Did he take off on you?”

“Yes,” she said, with a laugh. “He left a couple times, but he always came back, and, as disgusting as this may sound, he even brought me a rabbit or two.”

Trey smiled. “Schooner was trained in survival tactics. So some of the War Dogs have more training in that area than others.”

“It blew me away,” she admitted, “and I ended up making a rabbit stew that lasted for days. I gave him the bones because I needed him to have food too.”

“That’s good.” Trey nodded. “With that level of bonding, he would have done his best to keep you in food as well.” He reached down, gave Schooner a very big hug and a good scrub. “You did good, buddy, really good.”

Schooner barked and jumped back and forth, running around as if looking for a tug-of-war toy or something to play with.

“He’s always been so full of energy,” she said. “I never really understood what happened to him that he would be moved out of the military.”

“I haven’t looked at his record that deeply,” Trey shared, “but I can probably find out. It could easily just have been his age or the situations he’d been in.”

She looked down at the dog, then scrubbed the back of Schooner’s head. “He’ll be on Easy Street from now on.”

“And that’s because he did something that a lot of animals would have done, and that was to look after you, but he did it at a much higher level,” Trey explained. “With the training and experience these War Dogs get, they end up with a heightened instinct for survival, not just for themselves but for others too.”

“It never occurred to me that a dog would have been such a help.”

“Didn’t you grow up with pets?”

“I grew up with rescues,” she clarified, with a smile. “When your father’s a vet, you get used to having strays all over the house. And I was terrible, forever asking him to bring home animals, spending every day I could with him in the clinic. It was a given that I would end up being a vet too,” she said, nodding. “In a way that saved me a lot of turmoil that my friends went through, trying to figure out what classes and programs they should focus on as they determined what they might want to do in life. That never happened to me because, from a very young age, I planned on being a vet. And, more than that, I’ve always thought I would be a vet with Dad and would eventually take on his business.”

“You still might,” Trey pointed out. “Don’t give up on him yet. Your dad’s a tough cookie.”

She nodded. “So, hang on a second. I did want to ask you one thing.” She looked up at him. “I was talking to the doc here, and he mentioned that my father was well known for having some really excellent but very secret fishing holes, which is how they think he does so well in the fishing derbies.”

Trey laughed. “Are you thinking that the area I found you at was one of the spots he was protecting? It’s possible. I did go fishing with your dad some when I was in Boy Scouts.”

“Oh my goodness. I wondered what you were talking about when you told me that you’d been fishing with him. I couldn’t remember that at any point in time, but he did do several programs with the Boy Scouts, didn’t he?”

Trey nodded. “He did, and I did take to fishing quite nicely, so your dad and I did go out quite a bit for a while there. That may be one of the reasons I thought you guys might still be alive, since he was always so well prepared for almost anything.”

She pondered that and nodded. “I don’t recall much about that, but I do remember something about your being a very able fisherman. He was hoping that one day, when you grew up, you could end up going out together. Did he show you that place? Where you found us?”

He nodded. “That place and a couple others too. He may have forgotten and might not like it if I enter a derby and end up beating him,” Trey teased.

“I think, in a way, he would like it. I think he would absolutely love it. He always wanted a son, never had one, since my mom got sick and died when I was young,” she explained. “I think he was just full up with the business and meetings and the challenges of single parenting, so he never married again.”

“Maybe he was happy because he had everything he needed,” Trey suggested. “He had you, the memory of your mom, and the love of the work that he did.”

“Oh wow,” Missy muttered, turning to look in the general direction of her father’s hospital room. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“I think a lot of people forget that having children is a choice. So, when you already have a child you absolutely adore, and life shifts such as his did, maybe you don’t need to go through that process again. Maybe what you have is absolutely the very next best thing to what you had and all you could ever ask for. Thus, all you need to do is go through life and enjoy it.”

She stared at him and said, “You do say the darndest things.”

He chuckled. “I don’t know if I told you, but almost dying—”

“Right,” she agreed, “absolutely right, just like I did.”

He nodded. “You might find that, from now on, your mind-set will be focused on other things.”

“Maybe,” she murmured, “it does still feel very much as if I don’t really know what I’m doing and where I’m going right now, and everything is on hold for my father.”

“It’s on hold to a certain extent, but you can’t just sit here and put your whole life on hold. You don’t know how long your father will need to recover.”

“I appreciate the fact that you didn’t say if he recovers .”

“No, I won’t say that,” he stated. “I have seen medical miracles happen so often that I won’t write off your father. He has a strong will to live.”

“I hope so,” she whispered, turning to stare back at the hospital. “I feel as if I should go back up.”

“Go ahead. I just wanted to stop in and say hi.”

She looked up at him. “And bring coffee and breakfast sandwiches.”

“Which you haven’t eaten yet.”

“No, but I will,” she promised, as she turned toward the hospital.

“I also wanted to ask you something.” She turned and looked at him curiously. “Remember what you told me about potentially some deliberate vandalism to the boat?”

She nodded. “I know what I said, and I know what I heard my father say, but I just don’t know how to get to who it could have been or why—or if it was literally his pain talking or just something in the subconscious of his mind,” she replied. “I don’t have any reason to suspect anybody, and I have nothing outside of a terrible accident to even consider it, except an unexplained inkling that somebody might have done it. So, I’m not saying, ignore my words . I’m just saying that maybe there wasn’t anything there to begin with.”

“Got it,” he noted.

“But you won’t let it go, will you?” she asked, eyeing him closely.

Trey laughed. “I will think on it.”

“You do that,” she said. “I spent a lot of days thinking about it, and I didn’t get anywhere, but maybe you can figure it out. For the life of me, I don’t have a clue.”

“Just one other thing. Do you have any enemies?”

“Me?” she asked, staring at him in shock.

He shrugged. “Two of you were on that boat, weren’t there?”

“ Hmm . I hadn’t even considered that.” She wrapped her arms tightly around herself at the thought. “That’s…” Just like that, she was bereft over the question, unable to say anything else.

He nodded. “It’s terrible to even think of, I know, and I’m not trying to scare you. I’m just asking.”

“I suppose I do have enemies. I suppose everybody does. I just don’t know who that would be. This was my hometown for many years, although I haven’t even been in town all that long this time. I’ve just come back after my last term of schooling. I’ve always been heavily involved in the clinic. Yet I get along with everybody who works there, and I don’t know who would consider me an enemy.”

“Okay.” Trey nodded. “I just needed to ask.”

“I’m glad you asked,” she added slowly, “but it’s a very disconcerting thought.”

“It is,” he agreed. “It’s also one of the reasons why I wanted to bring it up. So, while you’re in there with your father, maybe you can think about it.”

“I don’t want to,” she stated immediately.

His smile was gentle. “I know, but, from now on, it’ll be something you’ll struggle to not think about.”

She winced. “Yeah, thanks for that.”

He grinned. “You’re welcome. Now head on up to your dad. I’ll take Schooner back to my brother’s place, and I’ll touch base with you later.”

She bent down and gave Schooner another big hug, watched until the two of them got into the truck, and then headed back to the hospital and her father.

Did she have any enemies?

What a question. She really didn’t even know, did she? She hadn’t had an answer for if her father had any enemies, and who was to say that now Trey was really asking a better question? Was somebody out there who might have sabotaged their boat because she was on it? Surely not, but it was a thought that disturbed her throughout the rest of the day and the night, as she waited for her father to show signs of improvement.

Trey walked toward the house, Schooner by his side. They had been down on the beach enjoying a walk, just the two of them out in the fresh air, away from all the looks, the phone calls, and the queries. How did I find them? Why had I gone in that direction? How had I known? Things like that. The deputy had come, and he’d given a statement, albeit brief, but a statement nonetheless. Then it had been relatively quiet in the house, outside of Elizabeth and Jackson fielding phone calls, mostly from well-wishers with congratulations and the regular gossipy shenanigans.

It still felt weird to Trey. Search and rescue had been a job he had done many times over in his military career, going in to help, in various places, for various people, of various nationalities, even completely different countries. He’d been involved in picking up immigrants at one point in time, who had been dumped into the Mediterranean Sea when trying to cross to get to peaceful lands, free lands.

Yet there was no such thing as a free land anymore, and Trey doubted that any of those people had a much freer life, even after all that effort. Rescue work was something he had done a lot of, and it still felt strange and uncomfortable to be thanked for it. If someone could do something to help another, then one should do it. It was as simple as that, and it was that creed which Trey lived by.

Back at his brother’s house, as he approached, Elizabeth looked up from the deck where she sat and waved. “I just put on a fresh pot of coffee.”

“I swear to God I could smell it down there.”

“I’m not surprised.”

As soon as he poured himself a cup of coffee, he rejoined her out on the deck, where she was busy peeling potatoes. He looked at her and asked, “You need a hand with those?”

“Nope, I’m fine. It’s one of the things that I like to do when I’m tired but not so tired that I want to go lie down. It’s a nothing job. I don’t have to think about it, but, if I don’t need the potatoes today, I’ll need them tomorrow.”

“Smart,” Trey noted. “If you know that you’ll need it anyway, why not?”

“Idle hands and all that, as my mother used to say,” Elizabeth shared, with a bright smile.

“That was my mother too,” he agreed, “not that I remember a whole lot about her.”

“Jackson doesn’t talk about her at all.”

Trey nodded. “It’s still a painful subject in many ways. When you lose somebody you care for, it’s hard, and there’s no other thing for it. It’s just plain hard.”

“I get that,” she said, “and I think, in some ways, being pregnant has triggered some of that for him.”

“It’s sure to have triggered some nostalgia over it all. She would have been a grandma soon, and that’s something that I’m sure she would have appreciated.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth agreed.

“What about your family?”

“I only have a few left, but they are in town,” she replied, “and they hover constantly, but this is their sixth grandchild. It just happens to be my first, so they’re not exactly leaving me much space.”

“Of course not,” he muttered, with a big smile.

They sat in companionable silence for a little longer, and then she asked, “Have you got any plans?”

He looked at her, not exactly sure what was going on, and asked, “You mean, like for the next five minutes, up to three or four hours from now?”

“For the next few weeks to the rest of your life,” she stated bluntly.

“Are you trying to get rid of me already?” he teased.

“God no.” She stared at him. “No,… not at all.”

“So, where’s the question coming from?”

“I guess I’m wondering if you’ll stay around or not. I know Jackson really wants you to stay.”

Trey frowned at her. “I haven’t really thought about it, you know?” he admitted. “I came here—”

“For the dog, I know,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes.

He shrugged, then shook his head. “And Missy and Silas.”

She immediately nodded, her tone turning contrite. “Sorry, that wasn’t fair. You saved Missy and Silas, which is huge.”

“We don’t even know that Silas will survive,” Trey clarified, “but even being able to get back to that work again gives me more sense of value, a sense of still having something to offer.” He hadn’t really meant to bring that up, but, when he looked over and saw the surprise and then the understanding on her face, he smiled. “I’ve had a lot of things to work out since my accident.”

“You’ll always have a place here,” she stated firmly.

He laughed. “That’s fine for short-term, but it isn’t exactly anything I need to do long-term.”

“Are you okay financially?… Since you’re not working?”

“I’m okay for a while,” he shared, “but I do need to sort out what I’ll be doing, and that’s partly what I was working on in New Mexico.”

“These people that you were with, you were doing a bit of everything that has to do with construction?”

“Kind of,” he replied. “It was more a hands-on therapy, in the sense of,… if your life has gone all to hell, and you don’t know what you can do anymore, then come over and help us help others. They were building houses for vets and people in need, and we all just pitched in.”

“As in free labor?” she asked.

“Yes, but not. We got free room and board. Yet it wasn’t so much about that as much as it was a chance to see other people who were doing better than you, people who had the same type of injuries and life experiences, yet who had come out on the other end and were not just surviving, but thriving,” he explained. “I’ll never think of that time as being without payment because, to a certain extent, we really did get paid. And in a way with something much more valuable than money.”

“So, they sold the houses you built or what?”

“The houses weren’t for sale in the usual sense. They were for vets who couldn’t afford housing, who didn’t have a place to go, or those who needed adjustments made to their houses to adapt to their new physical circumstances. In those cases we often just helped because that’s what you do. They were all in the same boat as I am, and anything I could do to make their life a little easier made me feel as if others were out there to make my life a little easier too.”

“And yet you don’t appear to be physically handicapped or needing any of those kinds of modifications.”

“Right now, for the most part, no,” he agreed, looking over at her. “But what happens in the future?”

She frowned, then went back to her potato peeling.

In truth, she had never stopped. She was so comfortable with the task that she was doing it blindly, while her mind worked on other issues.

“But that goes for anybody,” she said finally. “Any of us could have an accident. Just because I’m pregnant, that doesn’t mean that the baby will be born without any issues. But, when life gives you lemons… I think it’s a lesson we all have to learn. You do your best to make lemonade.”

“I agree,” he stated, with a smile, “and finding Missy and her father and the War Dog went a long way to that end.” At the sound of Missy’s name, Schooner, who was stretched out beside him, lifted his head and gave a rough chirp, almost half a bark.

Trey laughed at the dog. “What was that about, buddy? I mentioned just her name, huh ? Are you pretty close to her? How about Silas?”

At that, Schooner immediately woofed again. Trey was about to say something, when his brother walked outside to the porch.

Jackson looked at him and smiled. “See? Look at that. You’re home two days, and you’re already a hero.”

Trey laughed. “Hardly.”

“You went straight to a location nobody else knew about, and I think some of us were out in that general area.”

“I was wondering about going back out there, trying to secure the boat, until we could go back again,” he shared. “Do we have any floats we could fill to keep it safe and raise it up, then drag it back to the harbor?”

Jackson frowned in thought, then said, “I guess it would be a good thing to do, instead of leaving all that debris out there.”

Trey hesitated, looked over at Elizabeth, and added, “Silas also mentioned something to Missy while he was delirious, about how he seemed to think that it was no accident, that the boat had been deliberately sabotaged.”

At that, Jackson’s eyebrows shot up, and Elizabeth gave a shocked gasp. “Well, hell,” Jackson muttered, as he stared off toward the ocean. “What are the chances there would be any evidence of that, especially after it was bashed around as much as it has been?”

“That’s what I don’t know,” Trey admitted, “and another reason I was thinking about bringing it back.”

His brother eyed him sideways. “Are you doing this for yourself or for Missy?”

Trey shrugged. “How about for the truth? How about for Silas, who may or may not ever open his eyes again? How about for all his practice and all the patients that he’s worked with and done so much for over the years?… When you think about it, an awful lot of good will is felt toward Silas. He’s done a lot of good things for the community, and, if there is any evidence of somebody deliberately sabotaging his boat, that puts them on the wrong side of the law. So, if we can prove it and get them brought to justice, I think we need to do just that.”

“That could have been in fun, not deliberate sabotage, you know,” Jackson pointed out.

Trey frowned at him. “How do you sabotage a boat in fun and it not be deliberate?” he asked curiously.

“I don’t know. I’m just saying that if giving him the wrong maps or telling him to go somewhere because the fishing was good, things like that,… that’s not sabotage, is it?” he asked, shaking his head.

Trey got up and looked at the two of them. “I’ll go talk to Old Rob.”

“Rob?” Jackson asked.

“Yeah, he’s the pro at bringing derelicts back, right?”

“This is hardly a derelict,” Jackson noted, “if she’s floating at all.”

“I don’t know that she was floating so much, as she was up on the rocks,” he pointed out. “She was floating but taking on water. Yet she was at the shore, so we could patch her, pump out the inside, and potentially bring her home again.”

Jackson nodded thoughtfully. He looked over at Elizabeth and asked, “How long until dinner?”

“Probably about forty minutes. Why?” When Jackson hesitated, she just nodded. She knew him all too well, and it showed. “Go talk to Rob,” she declared dismissively. “You’ll be useless if you don’t.”

Jackson laughed. “Only because Trey put that idea into my head,” he countered, turning to look at Trey, who was already heading to the street. “At least we’ll see what the possibility is of bringing her back.”

“You know how much having that boat back would mean to Silas, if he survives,” Trey added, with a shrug.

“Yeah, most guys would want their boats back,” Jackson agreed, as he fell into step behind him.

“It was his dad’s, you know.”

“Was it?” Jackson stared off in the distance and then nodded. “I think you’re right. I’m pretty sure his dad did give it to him. Or maybe he inherited it, but that’s an old memory. I remember his dad was pretty obsessed over it, but he had a heart attack a little on the young side, so Silas ended up getting it.”

“What did he do with his other boat though?”

“I think he sold it to somebody,” Jackson said, with a shrug. “I don’t really know. If he lives, you can ask him.”

“Right,” Trey muttered, the gloom landing suddenly on his shoulders. “It’ll be awfully tough on Missy if he goes.”

“True,” Jackson noted, “but losing a parent is never easy on any of us.”

“No, but she had to sit there and watch him all that time, trying everything she could to get signals out, to put up flares, to build fires, anything that was available to her, and yet there was still no help.”

“It never even occurred to me that he would be that far out,” Jackson noted, as they walked toward the marina.

“I don’t know that he was that far out on purpose. I just think the storm blew in, and they ended up out in the middle of nowhere, where they didn’t have much in the way of options.”

“True, but that was quite a ways out,” Jackson said, “and it’s not exactly the easiest thing for people to find when they go that far.”

“And yet the Coast Guard was out looking.”

“Sure, everybody was looking. We all had quadrants that we were searching, but it’s a pretty deserted coastline, and depending on exactly where they were, where the boat was,… they may not even have been visible from the ocean,” Jackson explained.

“You came around each of the shores and slowly moved around each island, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, of course I did.”

“And that’s what I was doing, but I was in a different location,” he pointed out.

“So, you just ended up”—Jackson winced—“and I know this sounds terrible, but you ended up being lucky.”

Trey snorted. “Yes, if you want to go that direction.… Yeah, I was lucky.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” Jackson explained, “but, honest to God, a lot of us were out there, spending many hours each day. Then you go out on day one, and suddenly there she is.”

“She?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Missy,” he said, with a shrug. “And her dad and Schooner,” he added, looking at the dog always attached to Trey now. “He seems to have really taken to you.”

“I think that probably has a lot to do with the fact that I got him off that island and brought his owners to a hospital, where they could get some care,” he murmured. “So hardly a surprise.”

With that, Jackson laughed.