The Shell Collector

32

“Shit, I think the mics were on,” Ness says. He finds one of the headsets and places it back on its rack. I’m pretty sure I knocked it off trying to get my arm out of my coveralls. “The operators on the ship must’ve heard everything.”

“Tell me you’re joking,” I say.

Ness hesitates.

“I’m joking,” he says.

“Come lie back down,” I tell him. “And by lie back down, I mean curl up in an awkward ball on top of me while the edge of this armrest gouges into my spine.”

“I have to get us surfacing,” he says. “We’ve almost stayed down as long as we can.”

I groan in complaint. I’m as scared to leave this place as I was to come here. I don’t want to go back to the old rules. I like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rules. “Have them send the other sub,” I say.

Ness laughs. “It’s a two-hour ride back to the top if we start now. You’ll be sick of me by the time we get there.”

“I doubt that,” I tell him.

The sub rocks slightly as it leaves the sea floor. A small motor whirs somewhere behind us. Ness checks one more gauge, then asks me to get up. He arranges himself on the small bench and motions for me to get on top of him. I curl up across his chest and lap, my head on his shoulder, my lips brushing his neck, and he smooths my hair, which has largely come loose from my braid.

“That was amazing,” I say. I feel like a teenager, where kissing and fondling are as extreme and satisfying as sex. More satisfying. It’s like we both knew to dance along that last line, not wanting to cross it, not wanting to mess up the moment.

Ness kisses my forehead. “I forgot to ask if this was going to be off the record or not.”

“Definitely off the record,” I say, laughing. “And look, I won’t make this hard for you—”

“Don’t,” he tells me. “Please don’t break up with me at the bottom of the ocean. It’ll make the next two hours really awkward.”

I laugh.

“Besides,” he says, “I like you. I have since the moment you stormed out of my house and called me a sociopath. So you’re the one who’s gonna have to decide what comes next, not me.”

“The story,” I say. “My job.” I think of all the complications that would’ve been ridiculous to ponder an hour ago but which now swirl all around me, the myriad reasons this is a dumb idea. I think of the five-hour drive back and forth, how much a pain in the ass dating would be, how everyone in the office will think the wrong things but will be partly correct. How they’ll say the wrong things, which will be partly true. What my sister will say if I tell her I’m dating Ness Wilde. What Henry will do. His mustache will spin if I tell him about this. Agent Cooper will flip. I think about the rest of my story and my responsibility to our readers, and how hard it’ll be to write that last piece. All this and more haunts me in the space of a heartbeat.

“Stop stressing,” Ness says. He runs a finger across the worried furrow in my brow. “Let’s take it one day at a time, see if we can even get through this week.”

“Is that how long this usually lasts?” I ask him.

Ness kisses my temple and doesn’t respond. I choose not to press him, not to mess this up. Instead, I nestle into his arms and tell my worrying brain to take a vacation, to think on these things later. I allow myself to enjoy this moment, me and Ness in a sphere of twinkling lights, the black world outside fading to a dull crimson, and then a deep, rich blue, as we rise toward the surface and I fall in and out of sleep.

Ness wakes me and says we’re fifteen minutes away. So begins the strangest search-for-clothes-after-making-out that I’ve ever encountered. I get my bra arranged and my shirt back on, then wiggle into my coveralls, trying not to hit any switches with my elbows. As Ness puts on his headset and takes over control of the sub, I comb out my hair with my fingers and then put in a new braid.

“Okay,” Ness says into the mic. “I’ve got you now. Not sure what that was all about. Comms acting glitchy. No—no, I don’t think we need to tear anything apart to sort it out. Everything else is online. Yup. See you in five.”

He smiles at me. I push his microphone out of the way and kiss him quietly. I want to see if the rules of the deep still apply this close to the surface, and they seem to.

“Holly will be so proud of us,” I say.

Ness laughs. He covers the mic with his hand. “I’ve got her next weekend if we want to plan something. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

“I’d like that,” I say. I feel a shiver from having crossed some new line, some thermal barrier.

“Maybe together, the two of you can explain how the cover to my Shelby ended up in the guest house bathtub.”

“Is a Shelby a car?” I ask.

Ness shakes his head. “You were so much sexier fifteen thousand feet ago.”

“Thanks. How do I look? Is it obvious we made out? It’s obvious, isn’t it.”

“No. You look like you had a claustrophobic fit.”

“Excellent.”

“And then somehow ripped off your jumpsuit and put it back on with the buttons snapped all wrong.”

I look down and see that the top snaps don’t line up, that all of the snaps are off by one. I start redoing them. “You better have that mic off,” I say.

“Whoops,” Ness says, but I can tell he’s joking. I’m beginning to be able to read him. He takes a bit more getting used to than even Melville.

Outside, the water brightens, like the sun is rising. But we’re the ones coming up. We’re in a golden sphere, approaching the horizon. Ness takes the controls again and guides us toward the underbelly of the ship. Along with the great hull of the craft, and its massive propellers, I see the fins of a diver treading water. We break the surface just a few feet from him; the diver gives a thumbs-up through a porthole, has a cable in his hand. Ness arranges the arms of the sub to provide a ladder to the top. There’s the clanging of metal on metal, and then the slap of a hand on the hull.

“Locked in,” Ness says into his headset. And up we go, softly spinning again, water sheeting across the portholes, the sea falling away beneath us until the railing of the great ship swings below our feet once more.

We touch down with a clang, and Ness pops the hatch, water dripping down in a veil. As I crawl out of the sub, I feel like I’m in possession of some incredible secret. Like a kid sneaking kisses behind my parents’ backs. All the questions the deck crew has for Ness are about the sub, not about what happened between us. I marvel that no one suspects anything, that such an incredible moment—making out with someone for the first time at the bottom of the sea—could be contained by the two people involved. Part of me is dying to get on my phone and tell someone; the other part wants to keep this selfishly for myself and never tell another living soul.

The next hour is a blur, my head still swimming, my hormones coursing and adrenaline raging. I barely have time for a shower and a quick lunch before Ness is saying we need to leave. After I grab my bag from my room, I track down Ness’s room with the help of a crew member. He startles when I walk in, was just in the act of stuffing the last of his things into his bag. As we navigate the tight corridors of the ship together, I brush his hand with mine. He turns as he ducks through a doorway and is grinning from ear to ear.

The helicopter ride back to the island is smoother this time, the rain having slowed to a trickle, the sky clearing. We land on that small island about as far from civilization as one can be, and get back on the plane. I look forward to the flight. The time to think. To relax. Ness stows our bags and then walks to the rear of the plane, past the eight leather recliners, beyond the bathroom, and to the door at the very back.

He opens it and waves me toward him. The flight crew folds the steps behind me and shuts the door, and the jet engines whine as they power up. “Ladies first,” Ness says, in what has become a little mantra of sorts, a private joke between us.

“What’s in there?” I ask.

“A bed.” And when he sees the look on my face, he quickly adds: “I’m not suggesting anything. Just thought you’d be more comfortable. If you wanted to get some rest. That’s all.”

I squeeze past him and into an opulent bedroom. Rich cherry veneer, a queen size bed, a lounging area, a closet, a pile of pillows. It reminds me of the master stateroom in a yacht I toured once for a shelling piece I wrote.

“Is this the same plane we flew in on?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Ness says.

“You mean you let me sleep in that chair on the way here instead of telling me about the bed?”

Ness bites his lip. He looks guilty. “I… didn’t want you out of my sight. And it’s not like I could’ve stayed in here with you. Not then. So yeah, it didn’t occur to me to send you back here.”

“You’re just saying that now to be sweet,” I say, a hand on his chest. “You didn’t think that at the time. Not yesterday.”

“I did. I thought it all day when I had to leave you on Wednesday, when I had to put that note in your door. If it hadn’t been an emergency, I wouldn’t have left you. I didn’t want to go.”

“I’m so confused.” I place a hand on my forehead. “Why is this happening?”

“Get some rest,” Ness says. “If you want, I can stay out here—”

“No, I want you in here with me. I’m not confused about that. Just about… life.”

The room sways as the plane begins to taxi. I lose my balance, but Ness steadies me and steers us both so that we collapse into the bed.

“Should we be buckled up?” I ask, scooting so that my head is on the pillows.

“Probably,” Ness says, but neither of us gets up. We just slide back in the silk sheets as the jet accelerates, clinging to one another and laughing, and I feel young, dangerously young, like new love feels when you have no idea where it might lead.

We are entwined and kissing before the plane leaves the tarmac. At one point, I have to pull away and pinch my nose and blow to relieve the pressure in my ears. “Only you could be cute doing that,” Ness says. I crawl on top of him and stretch out, so our bodies are pressed together from head to toe. There’s no pressure for us to get naked, to move too fast, even though we both must know our time is limited, that there’s no way this can work, that it’s too ludicrous to contemplate.

And maybe this is what dooms his relationships. Maybe his fame and wealth and reputation never recede enough for two people to simply be a couple. Perhaps I’m the one who’s Icarus, destined to get burned.

Ness rolls me over and kisses my neck, my shoulder, my cheek, the crook of my arm. I try to imagine what this is like for him. I’m so caught up in the absurdity of making out with him that it doesn’t occur to me that he might be feeling the opposite. That I’m overly normal. And then I see everything in a new light, and I feel sorry for Ness. Whoever he’s ever been with, there’s the pressure he must feel to just be himself, not the CEO of anything, not the son of someone, not the great-grandson of someone, but just a man. Maybe he’s looking for normalcy. Maybe he’s trying to forget that he was named after a monster.

33

Not long after the plane levels off, Ness gets up and says he’ll be right back. I take the opportunity to use the en suite and freshen up. I have to dig my toiletry kit out of my bag. Ness’s bag is beside mine, and I feel a twinge of reporter curiosity that I have to wrestle away. I feel guilty for even thinking it.

Ness returns with a tray. There are two glasses of fizzing champagne and a bowl of strawberries and blackberries. He sets the tray on the bed, and I ask him about the tattoo on his shoulder. I noticed it on the dive trip and again in the sub. He lets me lift his sleeve to study it.

“It’s the Crux,” Ness says. “Also known as the Southern Cross.”

The tattoo is simply four stars arranged in a crooked pattern.

“It’s the closest thing this hemisphere has to a North Star. It isn’t over the South Pole really, but it points to it.”

“What’s the significance?” I ask. “Have you spent a lot of time down here?”

“I have, but that’s not why I got it. Well, not really.” He hands me a glass of champagne.

I take a sip and grab a strawberry from the bowl. “This is going to sound snobby,” I say, “but I was totally meant to live like this.”

Ness laughs. “You would’ve made a fine Egyptian princess.”

“And died when I was twenty from an infected tooth and then had my brains slurped out my nose.” I feed him a blackberry. “So why’d you get the tattoo, then?”

“Because…” Ness takes a deep breath. And then a sip of champagne. “I guess I spent a long time searching for myself before I finally realized I was looking in all the wrong places. College, marriage, work, meetings. When I got into shelling, I realized there was half a world I wasn’t seeing. Like the other side of a coin. Options I never knew I had. It hit me in Australia, off the Barrier Reef. I think it was there that I realized what kind of process my grandfather went through.”

“You mean from reading his journal?”

Ness nods. I take a sip of champagne and enjoy the light airy fizz against my tongue.

“So what’s your background?” Ness asks. He’s rubbing my arm and studying it.

“Are you asking me what kind of breed I am?” I pull my arm away from his touch.

“No… God, no. Not that. I love your skin. Your complexion is amazing. I mean—of course I want to know where your parents are from. I want to know everything about you. What I meant was, what was your childhood like?”

“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. That’s just usually what people mean when they ask that, so I get testy about it. My childhood was basically me and my sister sticking up for one another, people picking on us, black kids and white kids. Meanness is just as immune to color as kindness, as it turns out.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Must’ve been tough.”

“We got through.”

“What does your sister do?”

“She’s an investment banker. She would tell you she stares at charts all morning and PowerPoint slides all afternoon. She thinks I live this amazing life, of course.”

Ness smiles and makes a show of sweeping his arm at our surroundings.

“Touché.”

He laughs. “Okay, so now that all that’s out of the way, exactly what kind of mongrel are you?”

I grab a pillow from the bed and swing it at him, and Ness has to block it with one hand and save his champagne with the other. “If I spill this on my pants, they’ll have to come off,” he warns me, laughing.

“If you really must know, my mom was from Antigua and my dad was from Boston. They’re both… they passed away when I was younger. I mean, I was an adult, but it was years ago. So I’m able to talk about them without turning into goo.”

“Can I ask how they met?”

“Yeah, well, it’s almost as good as how your parents met. Just a bigger spot in the sea than an oil rig. My dad went to Antigua for a destination wedding. It was for one of his frat brothers, who got hitched right out of college. My mom was a server at the place where they had the reception dinner. One of the other frat guys had too much to drink and came on to my mom, and my dad rescued her. Or as he used to tell it, he stole her away and was only able to do so because of the favorable comparison he made to his drunk friend.”

“So you’ve got island blood in you,” Ness says.

“Yeah, and Boston is a sea town if ever there was one. I think that’s why I feel lost when I’m away from the water.”

Ness nods and smiles. “That explains so much.”

“Yeah? Glad it was that easy for you to know the entirety of me.”

“Not the entirety, but what drives you. Most of us have simple passions at the core of who we are. Those passions might change over time, but at any one moment, I feel like there’s a striving inside us that frames our decisions. The shame is that most people never ask themselves what their passions are, much less look deep into others. They just do whatever feels right at any one moment, bouncing from thing to thing.”

“So is redemption your passion? You mentioned that in the sub.”

“Maybe,” Ness says. “I have a lot of passions. Too many, perhaps.”

“Well, just so you know, I understand trying to atone for a father’s sins. I totally get that. My dad wasn’t perfect either.”

“Yeah? How so?” Ness brushes the hair off my face, then rests his hand on my shoulder. I see worry in his furrowed brow.

“Oh, he wasn’t bad to me,” I say, reassuring him. “Nothing like that. My dad and I were real close. He just had… he did some things that I later learned weren’t very good.”

I eat a strawberry and take another sip of champagne, feeling dangerously honest.

“What did your dad do?” Ness asks. “I mean for a living. You don’t have to tell me any of that other stuff if you don’t want.”

“It’s hard to tease those two apart, actually. I thought my dad was a spy when I was really young, some kind of superhero private investigator. But he mostly followed people around and took pictures of them without their crutches, or with other women, and then handed that info off to lawyers so they could rain hell down on people.”

“Sounds like they were the kind of people who deserved what they got,” Ness says. He pulls the comforter over my bare legs when he sees me rubbing the goose bumps away.

“Yeah, that part of his job I understood. I mean, I do now. But I used to sit with him in his car when he had me for the weekend, just like you have Holly sometimes—”

“So your parents were divorced?”

“It’s… complicated. They split up, but they stayed married. My dad moved back in with my mom when she got diagnosed with cancer. Anyway, when I was young, they lived apart, and my dad would take me on these jobs with him. Side jobs. He would have me sit in the passenger seat and run the laptop while he took pictures of people with this great big lens.” I shake my head, remembering.

“Jeez, now you have to tell me.”

“You have to promise not to tell.”

“I get confused,” Ness says. “Was that a teaser or a cliffhanger?” He laughs, but when he sees I’m dead serious, he raises one hand. “Off the record. I swear.”

I readjust myself on the bed, holding my champagne flute so it doesn’t spill. “Okay, so keep in mind that this was back when facial recognition software first got really good but before people knew it was getting good. You know what I mean? Well, Dad was one of the first in his trade to see the potential. So he would park outside brothels, strip clubs, seedy massage parlors, places like that, and shoot everyone who came out. I mean everyone. Then he’d run the pictures through the DMV database, which a friend on the force got him access to. That was my job, running the laptop and switching out the memory cards. I was better at it than he was. We’d get a name from the DMV, do a Google search, and see if anyone had a high profile, if they were worth anything—”

“Blackmail,” Ness whispers.

“Yeah. Basically, instead of waiting for someone to get suspicious and hire him, Dad started sampling the crowd to drum up more business for himself.”

I feel like shit admitting my role in it all. It took me years to come clean with Michael. I have no idea why I’m telling Ness.

“That’s fucked up,” he says.

“I know. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

Ness’s face lights up. “You know, I’ve heard about scams like this. There was a senator from Connecticut who got ruined by something like that. Claimed he thought it was a regular massage parlor—”

“Senator Hutchins,” I say. And then, sheepishly: “I was with Dad that weekend.”

Ness leans back to study me. “No. You’re kidding, right? That was your dad?”

I feel a flush of heat on my neck, remembering the weeks after the incident. “I thought I was going to go to jail or something. I was too sick to attend school, couldn’t even tell my mom. It was the first time in my life that I started reading the paper—the physical thing. Which probably led me down the path I took, career-wise. Not just from reading the paper, but seeing the difference between telling the truth in print and all the sneaking around my father did for a living.”

“You took down a United States senator,” Ness says. “Hell, I wish I could do that to a few of them.” He shakes his head. “You were more powerful in third grade than I am now.”

“And I don’t even know how many other people I helped ruin like that. For me, it was just a game. It felt like the kind of video game my sister liked to play on her computer. Maybe that’s why I don’t have the stomach for them.”

“You know, what you did is right up there with destroying the world’s oceans and wrecking a billion miles of shoreline,” Ness says.

I know he’s joking, but neither of us laugh.

“I don’t know why, but it feels good to tell someone without building up to it for years and years, without dreading the conversation. I haven’t told many people. Not sure why it feels safe to tell you. Maybe because you’ve shared things with me that I have to keep to myself. Like mutually assured destruction.”

Ness runs his hand down my arm. “I like you, Maya Walsh. I like that you challenge me, make me think. I like that you’re complex. I even like that you don’t like me.”

“You’re one of those guys who falls in love easily, aren’t you?” I ask. I don’t mean it to sound harsh, but as an honest question.

“Maybe,” he says. “Is that a bad thing?”

“It depends. Do you fall out of love just as quickly?”

Ness considers this. Looks sad for a moment. “I don’t think so. I love my work. I have a lot of passions in life. The people who’ve left me recently, they haven’t wanted to share me with those things.”

“As long as it’s not someone else, I can share. I get lost in my work as well. Michael used to have to stand in front of me and shout my name to pull me from whatever article I was working on. It drove him nuts. He couldn’t understand my ability to disappear like that.”

“No one disappears like I do,” Ness warns me.

“Challenge accepted,” I say, offering my hand.

Ness takes my hand, but he uses it to pull me into him, nearly spilling my champagne. “Close your eyes,” he commands. And I do. Ness kisses me and tells me I’m beautiful, and then he says, “Close them tighter.”

I squint until not a sliver of light comes in.

“I win,” Ness says.

34

When we land, I can tell that we’re not back in Maine. The flight didn’t feel long enough, and the temperature and the humidity are too high. I feel both before we get to the front of the plane. I glance back at Ness, who is smiling guiltily.

“Detour,” he says.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“The nearest thing I have to a home.”

Outside, the midday sun has heat waves shimmering up from the tarmac. It’s stuffy, but the faintest of breezes wafts through, bringing relief. I look around for an airport. There are no other planes. A single hangar and a small cluster of structures the size of outhouses, a few silver tanks streaked with rust that I assume hold fuel. Or used to. The pilot hands Ness our two bags, which he throws on the back of a nearby golf cart. There’s another cart nearby. Two islanders help the flight crew with their bags.

“Get in,” Ness says. “You drive.”

I jump behind the wheel of the golf cart. When I hit the accelerator, the silent whine of a strong electric motor rockets us forward. Ness clutches the oh-shit handle and laughs. “I took the governors out,” he tells me.

“Of course you did,” I say.

“Take a right past those bushes.”

We cruise along white sandstone-paved roads, seeing nothing and no one. The golf cart’s windshield is down, and the breeze feels nice. Now and then, we pass twin ruts of sand that jut off into the scrub brush, trails only golf carts and feet have been down. Ness is gripping the cart with one hand, has the other on my thigh, and is watching the world zip by. He doesn’t tell me to turn, and I don’t ask.

Ahead, I see the road bend to the left. Scanning the low island that direction, I spot a structure beyond a stand of palm trees. The palms here remind me of the ones along Ness’s driveway in Maine. He said this place feels like home to him. I wonder if that’s why he has the trees transplanted, if the cost is justified by the longing he feels.

Supporting this theory is the fact that this house looks a lot like the one in Maine. Wood siding, the same bright Caribbean colors, open doors with flowing white linens. Small and cozy. The central part of his Maine estate without all the wings and additions.

“Pull around the back,” Ness says.

I swing around the end of the house, and the view on the other side causes my foot to slip off the accelerator. I find the brake pedal and bring us to a jarring stop. Ahead of us, a tiered patio steps down toward a pristine white powder beach. I barely see the cabanas and the pool and the amenities. It’s the water beyond the titanium sand that draws me in. Not blue, not even the bright green of a clear lagoon, something more like sea foam. A green so bright it has a tint of yellow. The color of clarity. Of shallow water over white sand.

“If you don’t start breathing, I’m going to have to kiss you again,” Ness says.

I tear my eyes away and lean over to kiss him. “Where is this?” I ask.

“The Bahamas. Tara Cay. And yeah, the water here is unbeatable. I’ve been to more beaches than I can count, and when I saw this one, I never wanted to leave.”

“Why do you leave? Why would you ever leave?”

“Work,” he says. And I’m reminded that he leaves a lot of beautiful things behind for his work. “Let’s put your stuff away and see if anything’s washed up.”

“There are shells here?”

“Not on this beach. Too shallow. But we’ll take the boat out and hit the ocean side. I haven’t been here in a few weeks, and there’s been a good storm since then, so we might get lucky.”

“I feel lucky just to see this. Is this one of the islands your dad bought for you?”

“No. Those are down in the Caribbean. I gave them back to the countries that owned them, and they put them in a preserve. And yes, the tax benefits were enormous. Make sure you put that in your article.”

I’d forgotten about my article. I’d forgotten that I’m a reporter. I’d forgotten about the fact that the FBI is looking closely into Ness and those shells. Right then, I’m not sure I could find my apartment if I were dropped a block away from it.

The rest of the day is just that sort of discombobulated blur. I try not to dwell on all the nagging doubts and fears, choosing instead to just enjoy where I am. Ness lets me pilot his center console around the back of the island. It’s a big thirty-foot Contender, nicer than the one at his other house, but sun-beaten and salt-worn. Well used. Amid the rocks on the Atlantic side of the island, we find fighting conchs, sozon’s cones, and a horse conch. My life feels complete when I turn up a scotch bonnet in a tidal pool, the shell in very good or excellent condition, and Ness has to assure me ten times that it wasn’t planted there. That it is a real find. I don’t even dare put it in the shelling bag I borrowed from the house. For the rest of our expedition, I carry it with me in my palm. I know even then that it will be the one shell I walk away from this experience treasuring. I have this, even if everything else is taken from me.

Back at the house, we take turns showering. With towels wrapped around us, there’s a feeling of familiar intimacy but danger as well. We haven’t yet been completely naked in front of each other. He must expect it as much as I do, the inevitability, but not knowing when it might come is like holding a grenade with the pin pulled. We both dance around it as we get dressed while the other isn’t looking.

Dinner is on the patio. A fire in a raised metal pit crackles. We watch the sun go down as dinner arrives. I meet Gladys, the chef, and her husband, Nick. Ness introduces them like they’re family. When he tells Gladys that my mother was from Antigua, she shrieks and cups my face in both her hands, like an island hundreds of miles away is somehow next door. For the rest of the night, any time I catch her looking at me she bursts into a wide smile.

“I wish I had my laptop,” I say after dinner, while enjoying a glass of wine.

“Party foul,” Ness proclaims.

“To write,” I say. “I feel inspired to write some fiction. Make something up. Something less impossible than this, so people would buy it.”

Ness sips his wine. “Ever written a novel before?”

“Started a few. Meandered. I vacillated between feeling silly and feeling pretentious. Like some parts weren’t serious enough and other parts I was trying too hard to be profound.”

“Sounds like me learning to play the guitar. I would go back and forth between teaching myself chords and trying to learn complex tunes one contorted note at a time. I think that, with a lot of art, you just have to be bad at it a long time before the magic happens. And I suck at being bad at things.”

I laugh at the play on words. “Me too,” I say. “I mean, I’m really good at being bad at things, but I hate it. So I avoid it.”

“Dangerous habit,” Ness says. “Life is too short. And you’re lucky you don’t have your laptop.”

“Why is that?”

“Because if you pulled it out, I’d toss it into the sea.”

I laugh at him.

“I’m not kidding,” Ness says, even though he laughs with me. “Speaking of the sea,” he continues, “it’s warm enough to go for a dip. You wanna?”

“I would, but someone told me a whole bunch of things not to pack, and one was my bathing suit.”

Ness lifts his hands in defense. “I didn’t know you were going to jump me in the sub and that I’d be bringing you here!”

“I totally didn’t jump you. You took advantage of me in a weakened state.”

“Whatever. I’m going for a swim. If you wanna come, it’s dark enough that I won’t see anything. Not that I’d be looking anyway. And not that I haven’t already seen your breasts.”

“The lights were out. You didn’t see anything.”

But Ness is already up and out of his chair. I refuse to move, electing to enjoy my wine, the stars, the sound of the gently lapping water before me, the crack and pop of the fire, and the distant hiss of waves crashing on the other side of the island.

Ness sheds his shirt before he gets to the sand. I study his silhouette as he drops his shorts and then heads out into the water. Gladys appears beside me, gathering the dessert dishes.

“You a mad woman,” she says.

“Oh, we were just playing,” I tell her.

“No, you crazy not being out there with that man. He insane for you.”

“He barely knows me,” I tell her.

“All right then, tell me why he never bring no woman here. I say you mad.”

She laughs on her way back to the house, and I hear her talking with Nick, realize the two of them are probably gossiping about this last-minute arrival and this mysterious woman with half an island in her.

“Fuck it,” I say. I leave my wine and head down the tiered patio. At the sand’s edge, I pull off my shirt, take off my bra, drop my shorts and then my underwear. “No regrets,” I say. And by the time I get to the water, I’m running and laughing. I’m remembering what it feels like to be free again.

35

The best kisses in the world take place at night, in the ocean, with two naked bodies coiled around one another, only the stars to keep them company. Weight disappears, and our bodies with it. Ness stands on his toes, me clinging to him, my arms wrapped around his neck and my legs around his waist, our lips tasting the salt on each other.

The water is warm enough that I barely feel it, heightening the sense of my loss of self. And when we move, microscopic sea life blooms green and gives off an ethereal glow. Above us, a path of dense light reminds me where the Milky Way got its name. The stars are intense. Like the sky is as alive and excited as every cell in my body.

We stay in the water until I can barely feel anything with my fingers, they’re so pruned. Our bodies hardly ever came apart the entire time, so that when the water flows between us, it chills my breasts and stomach, which have been against Ness for what feels like half an hour. I think I stayed pinned to him to avoid access to other parts of our bodies, and so he couldn’t see me in the bright starlight. As we exit the water, there’s no avoiding it. I can feel his eyes on me. Holding my hand, he leads me down the beach where a blanket has been laid out.

“Did you plan this?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Gladys did, I guess. I saw her out here arranging something.”

“So you were kissing with your eyes open,” I admonish him.

“Guilty.”

There are towels on the blanket. Ness and I dry off. He wraps his towel around me and rubs my arms. The breeze is soft, but it chills my skin where it’s still wet. We lie down on the blanket, huddle under one of the towels, and Ness runs his hand over my hair as we watch the sea slide toward us and then away, over and over.

“You shouldn’t be shy,” Ness says. “You’re gorgeous. Women half your age must loathe you.”

“Everyone in New York is gorgeous,” I say, deflecting his praise.

“I’m serious. Inside and out, you are intoxicating. And you were right, I was coming on to you that first night. It wasn’t just the wine, either. I was excited that you agreed to come out and talk to me. Made me think you weren’t out to get me, you know? That you were interested in my story, interested in hearing the truth. It makes it easy to open up to you.”

I think about why I really went up to interview Ness, and my heart aches for him. But I bite my lip and don’t say anything.

“A lot of shooting stars tonight.”

I scan the sky. I haven’t seen one yet. We rub our feet together to keep them warm. I see a flash of light overhead and squeeze Ness’s hand. He squeezes back. “Make a wish,” he says.

“That would be greedy,” I tell him. “I’ll let someone else have it.”

And then, maybe because I’m fighting so many dark secrets about why I wrote my articles and why I went to see Ness, and maybe because I’m terrified to share something that will drive him away from me, but I’m terrified that if I don’t say anything he’ll know I’m keeping something from him, I decide to give him a dark secret that I’ve never given anyone before.

“I’ve got to confess something,” I tell Ness. I wiggle away from him and prop myself up on my elbow. He studies me intensely, brushes the hair off my face.

“You used to be a man,” he guesses. “I’m totally cool with that.”

I laugh. “I’m serious,” I say. “I’m about to tell you something I’ve never told another living soul.”

His hand falls still for a moment, and then he seeks out my hand. He waits.

“There was a time when I didn’t care about shells. Not one bit.”

Ness doesn’t laugh at how insignificant this sounds. And it does sound insignificant to me, saying it, but only because I’m not sure how to tell the rest of the story.

“My sister and I had a rough time in school. I guess the things society tolerates come and go, and so we had friends with two moms or two dads, but there weren’t any other mixed-race girls in our elementary school. Parents came in color-coded couplets. Except ours.

“Our parents talked about moving us to another school, but they didn’t. I think we stopped telling them how bad it was because we worried it was all our fault. And you know, looking back, it wasn’t like the school was against us. It was probably five or six kids. Everyone else was nice to us or ignored us. But at that age, you just remember the ones who are after you.”

Ness squeezes my hand.

“So anyway, I hated my skin. When I was six or seven, I would alternate between covering up and staying out of the sun, hoping I’d turn white, or I’d lay out in the back yard with no clothes on trying to get darker. Neither of which worked like I hoped. All I wanted was different skin. I would have killed to have different skin. I even used to have these dreams when I was a kid where I could step into a skin suit and zip it up and no one would know it wasn’t mine.”

I wipe a tear off my cheek. I feel bad for ruining the moment, but what started as an urge to share something, anything, wells up into a desire to really have this off my chest.

“So the reason I got into shelling—it has a dark history behind it. I’m almost ashamed of it. Which is difficult, because it’s become the thing I most love doing in the world. But it all started when I was nine. Like I said, for a few years there, I didn’t care about shells. I liked them when I was real young, because my parents and my sister did, but then I became consumed with this self-loathing, which is a crazy thing for a little kid to feel, and that’s all I thought about.

“Then one day, we were on a hike on the bluffs up from my childhood beach, and we came across this writhing ball of hermit crabs. Like two dozen of them. They were crawling all over each other. You could hear them crinkle as their little legs tapped on each other’s shells.”

“They were swapping,” Ness says.

“That’s right. I sat with my mom and watched crabs crawl out of one shell and into another. Some shells were empty. It was all this furious activity, hermit crabs leaving one home and jumping into another.”

“And you wished you could, too.”

I bob my head, my vision swimming with tears. My voice cracks as I try to get it out. “I told my mom— told her ‘I wish that was me,’ and she said—” Ness gives me a corner of the towel, and I dab my cheeks with it. “She said, ‘Why would you want to leave our house?’ and I said, ‘I want to leave me.’ And I don’t think she ever got it. But I was mesmerized with this idea. I never saw shells as anything other than rocks that came in pretty shapes. Didn’t realize what they were. But after that day, I wanted to find all of them. I thought there might be one out there shaped like me that I could just crawl into.”

I’m bawling by the time I finish. Ness grabs me and pulls me against him, letting me sob into the crook of his neck. He kisses my cheek, smooths my hair, and holds me. I cry so hard that I shudder, letting out this thing that I’ve contained all on my own for far too long, this dark secret to my passion, this ignoble reason for what I do and who I am.

“I think you’re perfect,” Ness says. “You are perfect just like you are. With every chip and ding. With the polish rubbed off. There’s nothing wrong with you in the world.”

I control my sobbing so I can hear him. And then I’m not crying anymore. I’m kissing him. And this time the kissing grows into something frantic, a rawness from having exposed myself, from becoming more than merely naked. Throwing the towel off, hot now, I straddle Ness and sit up in the breeze. I let him see me in the cast of starlight. His hands are on my hips. They trace up my waist, cup my breasts.

“I want you,” I tell him. “Right now. I’ve never wanted anything so badly in my life.”

I feel his hands stop. Something flashes across his face. “I can’t be an escape for you,” he says. “Not some temporary home.”

“I don’t want temporary,” I tell him.

With this, his hands move again. He rolls me over and lowers me to the blanket. As he kisses my neck, and then down my body, I keep my eyes open. A field of stars glitters above us, the sea lapping nearby, streaks of light as foreign bodies strike the Earth’s atmosphere, exploding and burning upon entry. Ness’s mouth is against me, and now I can’t tell if all the stars I’m seeing are real. My vision bursts with them. I have to close my eyes; our hands interlock; I arch my back and moan with pleasure.

When I can’t take it anymore, I pull him up so I can kiss him. So our chests are together. So he can enter me. And for the first time, I forget who this man is outside of any context beyond the last few days together. I let go of his past. My past. There is nothing behind us, nothing before us, just a promise of now. The world is not flooding. All the tides are slack. Waiting. Pausing. Nature catching her breath. While the two of us lose ourselves in each other.

36

The next morning, I wake up before Ness. I watch him sleep for a long while. I notice that the crease in his forehead is gone. Like the worry that seems to plague him during the day is giving him respite in his sleep.

When I can’t hold it anymore, I get up to pee. I grab my phone on the way to the bathroom to check the time, and marvel that I have signal. It’s just wi-fi, though. I wonder how this works with Ness’s “no laptop” rule, but I use it to check my email and my messages while I’m on the toilet. I have a depressing metric ton of both. I scan for important names, see my sister asking me how things are going, that she assumes the silence is a good thing, reminds me to let Ness know she’s single. I stifle a laugh at this. What in the world am I going to tell her?

There are tons of messages from Henry. I have a workaholic breakthrough by opening none of them. Just one day of not caring what the emergency is. A way of honoring Ness’s laptop rule. Leaving the bathroom, I worry my flushing might’ve woken Ness, but he’s still sound asleep. I decide to venture out for coffee. As I’m passing the bed, I see inside Ness’s bag, which is open. It’s the bright orange plastic case that catches my eye.

I freeze, glance back at the bed, see that he isn’t moving, then crouch down beside his bag. I pull the case out. It’s identical to the murex case Agent Cooper gave me. In fact, I fully expect to see a lace murex inside as I work the latch. Instead, some water sloshes out, and I have to tilt the case in a hurry to get it level and keep from making more of a mess. I lift the lid slowly. Inside is something that looks like a cross between an auger and a cerith. Not quite as smooth as the former or as bumpy as the latter. When it moves, I realize where it came from. And why the water inside feels so warm. And why these cases have rubber seals.

I close the lid, secure the latch, and put the case back in Ness’s bag. My mind is racing, but it’s going around in circles. These clues seem important, but they aren’t spelling out the big picture. When I stand, I turn to find Ness stretching in the bed. He looks over at me.

“Morning, gorgeous.”

I feel terrifyingly naked. I don’t know how much is my usual shyness and how much is my swimming thoughts.

“C’mere,” Ness says.

I crawl into bed and kiss his neck. “My breath is awful,” I say.

“Is that your polite way of saying that it’s my breath that’s bad?”

“No, but I assume it isn’t hunky dory either. I’m going to make coffee. You want some?”

“Yeah, because that’ll fix our problems.”

I laugh and push him back against the pillow when he tries to sit up. “Stay here,” I say. “I’ll get it. And can I borrow a robe?”

“I like that look,” he tells me.

“It’s chilly,” I say.

Ness waves toward the closet. I find a robe hanging on the back of the door.

“Oh, and do you have a landline?”

“Why?” he asks.

“I need to call my sister. She was expecting me to check in today. I didn’t know we’d be in the Bahamas.”

“Sure. Make sure you use the country code.”

“Okay. Back with your coffee in a bit.”

I grab my cell phone on my way out. While I’m sorting out the coffee and filter and putting water in the coffee maker, I pull up Agent Cooper’s phone number in my directory. I also find an alarm radio on the kitchen counter and figure out how to pair it up with my phone. I choose a beach playlist. Ness yells his approval, and I crank up the volume. I find the house phone, remove it from its cradle, and take it outside while the coffee is percolating.

There’s static atop the dial tone as I head out onto the patio. Too far, and the phone won’t work. I balance between distance for privacy but not so much that I lose reception. Agent Cooper picks up on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Cooper. It’s Maya Walsh. Listen, I don’t have a lot of time. Just wanted to fill you in on something.”

“You can call me—”

“Stan. Whatever. Just listen. That case you found? It’s a research sample case. Insulated. It’s watertight to keep water in, not out. Ness is taking live mollusks from the deep sea. That’s where he’s getting his shells.”

“Hydrothermals? Maya, nothing like the lace murex lives down there.”

“I know. The laces aren’t the thing, don’t you see? Ness reacted to seeing the case, not the shells. The shells are blinding us. You. Us. Whatever. The point is, I think he’s after those shells maybe to breed them. Or something. He wants them alive. This isn’t about forging shells at all.”

“Breeding shells isn’t illegal,” Cooper says. “We give out permits for that.”

“To anyone? He said something about senators, doesn’t trust them. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but I know for a fact he’s doing something illegal. He admitted that. And he’s keeping these samples hidden from me. I think he’s growing shells, and maybe it’s the scale of his operation that’s an issue. I mean, he’s got entire islands where he could be breeding these things. Maybe selling the shells as if found. Or using what he breeds to move into cast fakes, like you suggested. I don’t know.”

“Maya, I want you to come in and debrief with me. I want you out of there.”

“I can’t. Not now.”

“You’re in too deep. I’m telling you. If you were my agent, I’d be ordering you to get out of there.”

“Good thing I’m not, then. Anyway, I’ve gotta go.”

“Wait. I wanted to talk to you about the article.”

“Can’t. I’ll call you later.”

I hang up. My palms are sweaty. A mix of thoughts rush through my head. The first is that the FBI just recorded me, and that Cooper is probably already listening to our conversation again to make sure he got everything. The next is a feeling like I’m betraying Ness, which stings deep, because I’m pretty sure I’m falling for him. The last thought is of my own wound, because it’s obvious that he hasn’t been telling me the whole truth, which sucks because of the aforementioned falling-for-him bit. But it’s also a salve for my guilt. Maybe we’re betraying each other. A little.

Back in the house, I find the coffee pot full. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young are singing about eighty feet of waterline, nicely making way. Ness is sitting up in bed on a throne of pillows as I deliver his coffee.

“Your sister convinced I haven’t murdered you and dumped your body at sea?” Ness asks.

“Not exactly. She says she wants a photo of me with today’s paper to be sure I’m okay. I told her we don’t get the Times where we are. Thank goodness.”

“That’s what I love about this place,” Ness says. He cradles his coffee with both hands, takes a deep breath through his nose, and arches his shoulders back as he stretches. Letting it all out, he smiles at me. “No stress. No work. And the sea in every direction.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s perfect here. But I’m guessing we have to get back.”

I try not to make it sound like a question, like I’m eager to leave. I wish I could be more like Ness. Or maybe I’m too much like Ness. But this vacation has become work all of a sudden. I remember why I’m out here, what I’m hoping to uncover. And the lack of computer and cell coverage has me feeling isolated. Cut off. Something’s going on, and I won’t get any closer to it by staying here. And I hate myself for feeling this way.

37

The following day, I wake up in Ness’s bed back in Maine. The memory of Tara Cay is a memory as perfect as it is small. Like a beaded periwinkle, or any shell that requires a magnifying glass to fully appreciate. It was paradise crammed into a fistful of hours, the sort of moment you can lose if you’re not careful.

The view from Ness’s bed is almost as glorious. The storm has passed. Dawn is just breaking, the disk of the sun rising above the Atlantic and throwing the sky into pinks and reds. I watch the colors bloom and fade; sunrises like this are over in a blink. The sky changes from second to second. It reminds me of my week with Ness, which came and went too fast, every breath full of something new and strange and wonderful.

I reach for my phone on the bedside table. The flight home was a blur. I only remember passing out in bed, falling asleep curled up against Ness, eager for the answers he promised I would get today. I want this journey behind us so I can see where the next one will go.

My phone tells me it’s Saturday, which is almost impossible to believe. There are dozens of missed calls and even more texts, but all that will have to wait until I have coffee in my veins. Is it really Saturday? I think back: Monday, we shelled on the beach, Tuesday diving—God, that feels like a lifetime ago—and on Wednesday morning it rained, but that afternoon we flew halfway around the world, spent Thursday at one of the deepest parts of the Atlantic Ocean, Friday on Tara Cay, and now it’s Saturday.

Hours earlier, I woke up to Ness getting quietly dressed. Sweatpants and sneakers. I asked him where he was going, and he said for a run. When I asked where, he said, “To the end of the driveway and back. To get the mail.”

I’ve not yet gotten out of bed when I hear him coming down the breezeway. The sunrise has nearly lost its hues, is now just a single yellow orb. Ness has a triangle of sweat from his neck to his navel. It occurs to me that he may have run the entire length of that long shell-covered driveway to the outer guard gate. My thirty minutes on the treadmill after work and occasional Pilates feels inadequate.

“What’s for breakfast?” I ask, stretching.

He strides into the bedroom, hair matted with sweat, a blank look on his face. He throws a newspaper onto the bed. “Betrayal,” he says. “More than I can stomach.”

He storms into the bathroom while I gather my senses. A different man returned from the one who left the house. What does he mean by “betrayal”? I gather the paper, which flew apart from being thrown onto the bed. I check the Arts & Culture section, an old habit, and see nothing. And then I find the front page. And my heart sinks. I scan the familiar article, making sure it doesn’t have anything about the FBI in there.

“I didn’t know about this,” I yell at him. “I swear.”

I grab my phone. Ness’s grandfather stares accusingly at me. His image takes up half the front page of the Times, practically everything above the fold. The headline says: “Part 2: The Grandfather.” I check the byline, and there’s my name. It’s the piece, word for word, nothing changed. The very piece I told Henry he couldn’t run. I find him on my speed dial. Henry picks up after the second ring.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asks.

“What is this?” I shout at him. “You promised me.”

“I’ve been trying to call you for two days.”

I think of the flights, being in the sub, the island, all the emails from him.

“You promised me,” I say. “I’m working on the story of a lifetime, Henry, and you’ve just fucked it up.”

“It wasn’t me,” he insists.

“You run the paper!”

“I don’t own it. Jesus, Maya, have you been following this? Your piece has gone nuts. The board’s been all over me wondering why the second story hadn’t run yet. I’ve been trying to buy you time—”

“Why not run the one on his father, then? How did they even get this one? How did they know about it?”

I hear Henry take a deep breath. I get out of bed and walk through the closet, try the door to the bathroom. It’s locked. I can hear the shower running. I go back to the bedroom as Henry explains.

“We sent the files off to the printer last week, remember? The story was running when you went home that night, which was when I got a call from Wilde’s agent and then you-know-who. So the story was in our system. Someone in the office must’ve tipped someone on the board to let them know it was here, that we already had it. I swear to you, Maya, I did everything I could. This was going to run yesterday. I stalled as long as possible. They were going to fire me and run it themselves if I refused.”

I cradle the phone with my shoulder while he’s talking and pull my shorts on. I don’t want Ness to see me naked. Whatever I thought I was doing with him, whatever the last two days were, it’s obviously over. I’ll be another picture on the wall. I wonder, idly, if maybe some of those women hurt him instead of the other way around, if I didn’t have that completely backwards as well.

“Maya, you’re not going to like this—”

“Jesus, Henry, what?”

“They’re making me run his father’s piece tomorrow, and the piece on Ness for the Monday edition.”

My thoughts go immediately to Holly. Those stories will always be out there. Forever. And I can tell from Henry’s voice that there’s no stopping them. It’s a done deal.

“What if I quit?” I ask. “Can they legally run them if I’m no longer at the Times?”

“Yes,” Henry says. It’s the first time he hasn’t doubted that I’d do it. “I’m guessing this puts a dent in whatever you’re working on up there?”

“Yeah, that’s toast.” I put him on speaker and pull my shirt on. I look at the rumpled bed. Was I even the one who slept in it? Was that me in a goddamn submarine? On a private jet? On an island? Nothing makes sense. A voice from New York has dragged me back into the real, and out of wherever I’ve been. I pick up the phone and take it off speaker just as the shower door slams shut in the bathroom. “Listen, Henry, I’ve got to go. I’ve gotta see if I can make this right.”

“One last thing,” Henry tells me. Ness steps out of the bathroom and gets dressed in the closet, doesn’t glance at me. I’m torn on whether I should run to him, throw myself on my knees, explain what happened, tell him it wasn’t my fault—or if I should let him cool off.

“Whatever this did to your current story,” Henry says, “you should know that this series is a big deal right now. I’ve got a dozen requests from major media who want to interview you, and book publishers want the rights to this. We have a few Hollywood studios talking to our legal department right now. You’ve got the book rights, but we might move ahead with the film stuff, while the iron is hot.”

“Please, Henry. Don’t do anything until I get back to the office.”

Ness looks at me as I say this. He’s pulling his running shoes back on, is wearing blue jeans and a button-up.

“It’s out of my hands,” Henry says.

I hang up in disgust. Ness strides from the closet and through the bedroom, into the breezeway.

“Let me explain,” I tell him.

He whirls around, points a finger at me, and tries to form the words; I can see in his eyes, in the twitch of his cheeks, in his furrowed brow, that he has legions to say. But all that comes out is: “You promised me.”

He heads toward the front door. I follow him, explaining anyway. “I told my boss not to run it, that I would quit if he did. The board pressured him.” How to explain all the politics of a multimedia conglomerate owned by a company that started out selling dish soap? “They already had the story, Ness. They were going to fire my boss, the editor in chief of the goddamn Times, and run it anyway. There was no stopping this.”

“Then why make the promise?” Ness asks. He hesitates at the top of the stairs, and I think for a moment that we’ll be able to talk through this. Then I hear him say, “I thought you were real.”

He opens the front door, leaves, and slams it behind him. I run up the stairs, fumble with the latch, and hurry out onto the porch. Ness is already around the low wall toward the garage; I hear the rapid crunch crunch crunch of shells from him running. By the time I get around the corner, the garage door is opening, and a bright red convertible with a white stripe down the middle is growling out in reverse. He doesn’t look my way as he roars by.

This is where I let him go, where I lose him, where I slink home to New York and never see him again, where our tryst is a memory, and whatever story I could write from this wreck of a week is left unfinished, with no resolution, with no way of piecing together his scattered clues.

But I say, “Fuck that.” I say it out loud. I turn to my car. And then I remember my keys are down in the guest house.

I take the boardwalks at a dangerous pace. I’m still barefoot. No bra on. My thoughts whirl. Surely he’ll understand. Once the adrenaline wears off. Once the sting of betrayal cools. I’ll write a retraction. An even bigger piece. When word gets out about how the Times ran this story, there’ll be mud on their faces.

Get real, Maya, I think to myself. When was the last time a retraction ran anywhere but in a small inset on page twelve? The untruths go on the front page. Corrections are buried.

I’ll write the piece anyway. I’ll make it a book. I can fix this.

Fetching my keys, I run back up to the house, out the front door, and jump in my car. I speed across broken shells. I want to catch Ness, don’t want to sit at the house and wait for him to return. He might stay away until I have to leave, might have Monique or his guards throw me out. Approaching the first guard gate, I lay on my horn, and the gate comes up. A new guard comes out with his hand held up. I blow right by him, kicking up a cloud of dust.

I don’t see a trail from Ness’s car. Too far ahead of me. I get my car up to sixty on that gravel road, reach over my shoulder and grab my seat belt, click it in. Tall trees whiz past, trees that don’t belong here. I feel a kinship with them. These trees understand.

The second guard gate eventually comes into view. Ness has already passed through. A paved highway waits for me on the other side. This time, the gate doesn’t open. A guard steps out, hands raised, asking me to stop. The other guard probably called ahead. This one doesn’t look too happy. I roll down my window as I crunch to a stop.

“Hey, hey,” the guard says. “Take it easy. What the hell is going on?”

“Which way did he go?” I ask.

The guard scrunches up his face. “Who?”

“Ness. Mr. Wilde. Your boss. Which way did he turn? Where would he be going?”

The guard glances up the driveway and deep into the estate. “I haven’t seen him since an hour ago when he came to get the mail. Is everything okay?”

“That doesn’t make sense—” I say. But then it does. I throw the car into reverse and back into the empty parking space beside the guard gate, making a quick three-point turn.

“I’m going to ask you to wait here,” the guard says.

But I’m already gone, peppering the shack with bits of ground shells as I spin out.

I know where Ness went. I have no idea where it leads, but I know how I missed him.

38

Finding the turnoff isn’t easy. I remember about how far down the driveway I was, but I have to creep along with my window down and peer between the trees for the gate. I also look for tire treads veering to the side, or grass flattened on the shoulder. I’m feeling more and more certain that I’ve passed the spot, that I need to turn back and look for it again, when I see the gap between the trees and the black gate in the woods. I pull into the gap, hoping it’ll open automatically. Then I remember the keypad. I get out to study it.

There’s a small LCD screen. I punch in four numbers. The cursor is still blinking. I add two more numbers, and a red light flashes twice. A six-digit code. One of the only relevant numbers I know to try is Ness’s birthday. I try it twice, once with the day before the month and once the other way around. I get red lights both times. The guards are probably on their way. I listen for their jeeps. The hidden road seems to run through the woods to the south. Forgetting the car, and not knowing how far the drive goes or where it leads, I decide to go ahead on foot.

This is where shoes would’ve been a good idea. I stick to the sparse grass where I can, and I stay out of the deep tire treads full of rainwater. The trees only go a few hundred yards, and soon I can see the open field beyond: tall grass, a road cutting through it, the shoulders maintained. To my left, due east, the field runs a long distance before it becomes scrub brush and dunes that must slide down to the sea. Ahead of me, I can see where the road itself leads: to the lighthouse, with its white and black stripes. Maybe a mile away, out on a jut of coast. I start walking.

The hike gives me time to reflect, time to compose what I’ll say to Ness, what I’ll write in my piece, what I might be able to say to Henry to keep the rest of the story from running. I dream of storming into a board meeting and telling them what shortsighted and stupid idiots they are, that this is so much bigger than the tawdry gossip I’ve been compiling, that the last week might have had far greater implications than the last two years of my work.

The sun beats down. The ground is still soggy from the heavy rain the day before. My feet are covered in mud; it cakes up between my toes.

What will I tell my sister? When all this is over, and I have nothing but a destroyed family behind me and two days of perfect shelling and two days of perfect bliss, what will I say happened?

Henry’s news of book offers and film deals haunts me. I can see one way this turns out: with my wealth and notoriety increased, with the publication deals that have always eluded me, with the big-screen dramatizations my long-form colleagues at magazines often get, all at the expense of ruining what might in fact be a decent man.

The parallels to that future and Ness and his family are eerie. I think of how it must feel with all his wealth coming on the back of a broken and flooded world. Maybe he hates himself like I used to hate him, like everyone I know hates him. I may have the same life ahead of me, especially if our affair leaks out. There will be lights flashing, people asking me to sign my book for them, and the pain in my gut like I’ve been punched. Because of what made it all possible. Who I had to hurt. What I had to destroy.

I feel closer to Ness in this moment than I did in bed or on the beach. I feel so close to understanding him perfectly, to knowing his demons. That’s who you interview to get at a man: not his family, his friends, his coworkers, his competitors. You interview his skeletons and his demons. I feel like I’ve finally met them. I think of how he got his name, how we all need monsters to blame, but how those monsters are our own construction. I did that. I helped torture him. Because it made me feel better.

I damn myself as I reach the lighthouse. I think of all I will say to him. How I will pour my heart out. This is how it always works in the movies, right? Two people fall in love, there’s a massive misunderstanding, but it all works out in the end. I tell myself this: that it’ll all work out in the end. It has to. It can’t end with everyone broken. Who does that?

Beside the lighthouse are a number of vehicles: Ness’s red sports car, two sedans, a panel van, and a pickup truck, all splattered with mud from the drive out. Shielding my eyes, I gaze up at the top of the lighthouse. No sign of activity there. No other building attached. Just a tall black-and-white-banded tower of stone.

Trying the door, I find it unlocked. I let myself in and call for Ness. No answer. Off the small entry hall, there’s a set of spiral stairs running up. I take them two at a time and feel winded by the time I get to the top. There’s no one there, just a spectacular view. I didn’t pass any doors along the way, didn’t see or hear a single soul. I wonder if maybe there’s a trail that leads down to the beach, if there’s another building. I work my way back down and look for any door or passage I may have missed on the way up.

Nothing.

Back in the foyer, I poke around fruitlessly. A cardboard box with some light bulbs. An empty coat rack. A small table and chair. A scattering of tools.

I leave the lighthouse and walk around the building. Bingo. On the other side, there’s a set of stairs leading down. The door at the bottom of the stairs is locked. There’s a keypad by the door; it looks newer than anything else around the lighthouse. I bang my fist against the cool steel and shout Ness’s name, wait for an answer.

No one comes.

I could sit down and wait, see if the guards get to me first or if Ness comes out. Now that I have a pause to think, I wonder about all those cars, what they’re doing here, why the lighthouse is empty. My fight with Ness fades for a moment as I realize something fishy is going on, as the reporter in me resurfaces from beneath the damaged lover.

What code would he use? I try his birthday every way I can think of. And then I realize who will know. But I’ve got no way to get in touch with her. I pull out my phone. One measly bar. And the battery is low from getting in late last night. I leave the sunken stairwell and walk around the lighthouse until I have two bars and the data light comes on.

I search my email inbox until I find Henry’s instructions for driving up here. There’s a number for the guard gate and one for Ness’s house in case I’m running late. I try the house number. It rings eight times before I get voicemail. I hang up, count to ten, and try back.

This time, someone answers after the third ring. A man. “Vincent?” I ask.

“Speaking,” he says.

“This is Maya Walsh. We met down by the boathouse the other day. I’m a… friend of Ness’s.” It feels painful to say, for this is both an understatement and a lie. “I need a huge favor. I need to get in touch with Victoria Carter, Ness’s ex. Can you help?”

“Sure. I don’t have her number on me, but I can track it down for you. Is this a good number to call you back?”

“How long will it take?” I ask.

“Ten minutes. I’m down at the boathouse now. Monique might have the number if you want to try her.”

“Yes. Give me her number.”

I wait while he pulls it up. I watch the woods, where I expect the guards to emerge at any moment. Vincent gives me the number, and I hang up and call Monique. She answers on the first ring.

“Monique? This is Maya Walsh, Ness’s friend, the one staying in the guest house. I need to get in touch with Victoria, Holly’s mom. Do you have her number?”

“Yes,” she says, “but I don’t think she’ll pick up. I always have to leave a message. She’s a very busy woman.”

I clench my fist in frustration. “Okay, give it to me anyway. Or can you think of some way I might get in touch with Holly?”

“Why? What’s going on?”

A jeep emerges from the woods, one of the white security vehicles. A man on foot follows soon after.

“Nothing much,” I say, my heart racing. “She left something down at the guest house, and I think she needs it. What’s Holly’s number?”

I put her on speaker. Monique tells me the number, and I key it into my phone.

“Oh, Ms. Walsh? You might want to text her first. You’ll freak her out if you just call.”

“Of course,” I say, but I’m glad of the reminder.

I open up my messenger.

Holly? It’s Maya. Can I give you a quick call?

I hit send and back around the edge of the lighthouse. The guard on foot has jumped in the jeep, which bounces down the muddy road toward me.

I watch my messages. After an eternity, my phone vibrates in my hand.

Sure.

I call. Holly picks up and says, “Headquarters of the No-Rain Society.” Which is better than a greeting or an apology or an explanation for how we left things.

“Reporting bright and sunny conditions here,” I tell her. The jeep is halfway to the lighthouse. There’s no place for me to hide. “Hey,” I say, trying to keep my voice calm. “There’s totally nothing to do here. I was going to get the cable going, but the customer service people won’t talk to me.”

“Yeah, they suck,” Holly says. “Gimme a minute. I’ll call and have it up and running in no time. That book was boring, right?”

“No, that’s okay,” I say, a bit desperately. “I don’t mind calling them. I was just hoping maybe you knew your dad’s security PIN. That’s what they’re asking for. But if not, no big deal. I can get back into that book.”

I duck my head back, thinking one of the guards in the jeep saw me. I hear the engine rev. Only my pulse is racing faster.

“Oh, no worries,” Holly says. “That’s easy. It’s my birthday.”

“Of course,” I say. I hurry around the lighthouse and down the steps toward the door. Holly says something, and then she’s cut off. I look at my phone. No bars. I hurry back up, wave the phone at the fickle gods of cellular communication, and get a single bar. I start to call back, can hear the guards talking on the other side of the lighthouse, one saying to go inside, the other saying he’ll check the back. As soon as I call Holly, they’ll hear me. When—bless her—my phone vibrates with a text.

Dropped you. 09-22-28. l8r

Back down the steps, I figure I’ve got one chance. I punch in the code, expecting more damn red lights.

But there’s a clunk, a green light, and I push my way inside.

39

Two pair of muddy boots greet me inside the door. Beside them are Ness’s running shoes, as well as two pairs of ladies’ shoes. A rack is nailed to the wall, several jackets hanging from it. An umbrella leans to the side in a beat-up plastic trashcan.

The room is lit by bare bulbs screwed into outlets along the wall, metal cages around them for protection. Voices can be heard below me, leaking up a narrow staircase. I hear the guard outside clomp down the stairs. I hold my breath, waiting for him to come barging through the door. We seem to be standing there, listening for each other. After an eternity, I hear him march up the stairs. Either he doesn’t have the code or doesn’t expect that I would.

Barefoot, I steal across the room and try to pick out the conversations below. I wouldn’t think a lighthouse would have a basement. I wonder why Ness would come here. I reach the rail and peer down the stairs. Someone in a white lab coat walks past. A woman. I sneak around the railing and lower my head to get a better view, watch her stop at a table and talk to someone. The acoustics below—the distant clatters and the way voices are swallowed—make it sound like a much bigger room than this one.

I decide to creep down the stairs. There’s no sense of danger, not from Ness, not from whatever this is. It isn’t until I see the massive room that I feel afraid. It looks like a warehouse. Racks of shelves cover the far walls, and the shelves are stuffed with what look like aquariums. Long tables run the length of a room the size of a large grocery store. There are industrial machines and what looks like laboratory equipment everywhere. Microscopes. Vials. Twisting tubes of glass. Expensive centrifuges. Reminds me of my marine biology labs from undergrad, but on steroids.

The scope of the place is breathtaking. All cut out beneath a lighthouse. This facility must be newer than the run-down structure that stands above it, though. Added here. Is this where he breeds his hydrothermal shells? Was what I told Agent Cooper spot-on? I watch the man and woman as they huddle together, studying an object in the woman’s hands. There’s a plastic sample case on the table near them. It looks identical to the other two I’ve seen. I wonder if this is that cross between an auger and a cerith from Tara Cay, from our underwater expedition.

The stairs go down to another floor, deeper still. No one sees me creeping behind the rail. I sneak down, make the turn, and continue to the next floor without being spotted. Here, another large open area takes up half the space. A hallway leads off in the other direction, lined with doors—offices, or maybe small labs or storage rooms. All the doors are closed save one. There’s a light inside. I listen for voices but don’t hear any.

The rest of the space looks similar to what’s above, but with no workers. And rather than the long work surfaces, here there are lines of aquariums, water gurgling noisily, pumps and circulation fans whirring. Most of the aquariums are lit. Pipes and electrical wires form a maze across the ceiling, dipping down here and there to service the tanks. I creep over and peer inside the one nearest me. What look like white and orange nutmeg seashells litter the bottom of the tank.

I look around to make sure I’m alone, and then spot a familiar sight in the tank behind me: creamy white lace murexes with their jagged, decorative shells. An entire tank of them. But Cooper said there was no such thing. I reach in to grab one of them, the water warm up to my elbow, and bring it out.

The shell isn’t empty. There’s a slug inside. A gastropod. Was Cooper right all along? Is Ness taking some other species of slug and moving it into cast shells, creating the perfect fake? Maybe something in that process coats the shell enough to fool a testing machine. Or he makes the shells out of calcium carbonate from crushed-up species that are more common. Ness’s driveway is a clue to all that he has access to. Probably dredges the shells up from his private beaches and islands. Then the shells are formed here, injected into some mold, and finally non-extinct species are moved in to make them look real.

My story has an ending, I realize. Here it is. Closure. For the piece, and for me and Ness. I came here to explain myself, to apologize, but all that guilt vanishes in an instant. The story that ran in the Times this morning wasn’t my doing anyway. I was apologizing for something that wasn’t my fault. But Ness… he lied to me from the beginning, was leading me on a wild chase, flying me to the Southern Hemisphere when the murexes were sitting in a tank a short walk from his house all along.

I hear a door shut down the hall behind me, turn and see a man in a white lab coat, his face illuminated by the tablet in his hand. He looks up before I have a chance to duck and hide. His eyes widen. I bolt for the stairs. I hear him shout for me to stop.

I race up two flights. The man yells for someone to grab me. I have the murex in my hand; I close my fist around it. I see Ness as I pass through the floor above. He looks up from a workbench, from a microscope; his face was hidden before. I freeze for a moment. As I take off again, Ness lurches up and knocks his stool over. He gives chase as well. Several people are shouting at me, shouting at each other to grab me. I don’t pause to sort it out—I just run.

The cold metallic taste of adrenaline fills my mouth, my body dumping that storehouse of energy. I make it to the top of the stairs and yank open the door to the outside. Before I shut it, I get an idea, hurry back inside, grab the umbrella. Ness is up the stairs, yelling for me to wait. I get outside before he reaches me, slam the door shut just in time, and slide the umbrella through the handle so it catches the jamb.

The door pulls inward, but the umbrella holds. I don’t wait to see how long. I run.

Racing around the lighthouse, I see the jeep with the two guards in the distance. They appear to be driving up and down the tree line, still looking for me. My car is out there, beyond the woods. Ness and the others will be out of that buried laboratory in no time.

I just need to get to safety, and then I can call Cooper, call the cops, get someone to pick me up, blow the lid off this place. My mind races. I consider hiding in the tall grasses, but they’d find me eventually. I consider trying all the cars, seeing if the keys are in any of them, and then driving one of them back to the gate and to my car on the other side.

But the jeep blocks my way into the woods. They’d get me there as well.

Only a few heartbeats pass as I consider all these options. The umbrella rattles, holding Ness at bay. I need to get to the house. There are a handful of possibilities there, all of them insane. I could grab the boat and make my way up the coast to the next dock or bay. I could hide and call Henry or Agent Cooper, either of whom will send someone to help me. I just have to get to Ness’s house.

The edge of the tall bluff is just paces away. I run to the edge and gaze down at the beach. The dunes are steep here. But I can slide. I can make it to the beach and follow the coast.

I hear the door fly open behind me. I have to decide before they get up the stairs and see me, so I jump from the edge and into the steep face of sand. I stay on my back, arms wide, legs locked in front of me, and glissade down the sand in an avalanche.

Coming to a stop on a grassy ledge, I scoot to the edge and jump again. This time my feet catch, and I go end over end. I try to protect my head, to arrest my fall, and end up in a spread-eagle sprawl at the next lip of dune, my hair full of sand.

The murex is gone, my hand empty. I don’t have a hope of finding it, don’t even think of looking for it, but then I see it right along the ledge. It feels important somehow. Evidence. To replace the ones I lost. To make it up to Cooper. I grab the shell and lower myself off the next ledge, another avalanche of sand rushing along with me as I slide the last hundred or so feet to the beach.

I catch my breath at the base of the bluff. Looking up behind me, I see Ness peering down. He doesn’t hesitate for long; he jumps and begins sliding down the cliff face. I take off, running north, knowing I’ll never outpace him. He runs for exercise. My only hope is that he’s tired from his jog this morning, that he’ll cramp up, that he’ll let me go. Silly hopes.

I aim for the hard pack by the ocean where the running is easier. Looking over my shoulder, I see Ness is already a third of the way down the bluff. I concentrate on pumping my legs but check his progress now and then. I have a few hundred meters on him by the time he reaches the beach and takes off after me.

Palpable fear chokes me. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the anger I saw on his face when he slammed the newspaper down—maybe it’s the stakes of this dangerous game—maybe it’s the size of the counterfeiting operation they’re running—maybe it’s from watching too many movies, or from running from the guard at the gate, or from breaking into the lighthouse, or from all the secrecy, but I fear that Ness might kill me if he reaches me. I can’t explain the terror, but it’s real. Like the panic in the submersible. The surety that my life is in jeopardy.

I pull out my phone while I run, need someone to know what happened to me. No signal. The battery alert is flashing. I put it away, can’t run while operating it anyway. Ness is gaining, and my lungs are burning. There’s the inexorable tug of him reeling me in; his house is too distant, and I know there’s no hope, nothing I can do, that I should just stop and give up, but I run and run until he is right behind me, until I can hear him panting, can hear his feet slapping the sand, so close that I dare not turn and look, until he is right upon me, until he tackles me.

His arms wrap around me, and he twists so he takes the brunt of the fall. The air goes out of me anyway. I make the decision to fight, to not let him take me without a struggle, but I can barely breathe, can barely move, and Ness has me pinned on my back, straddles me, is breathing hard himself, and I kick and try to throw my knees into his back.

“What’s gotten into you?” Ness pants.

“You’re hurting me!” I scream. I twist my head to see if anyone will come for me, if Vincent or Monique might be able to hear me from the house.

“Stop fighting and I’ll let you go,” he says.

“If you would have let me go from the beginning—” Deep breaths. “—I wouldn’t have to fight you.”

I bring my arms close to my face, dragging his hands with me, and sink my teeth into his wrist.

Ness curses and lets go of me. I try to kick away from him. He pins me down again.

“I’m the one mad at you, remember? What the hell are you upset about?”

“You’re a phony,” I spit at him. “Everything about you is fake.” I take deep breaths. “Your smile, your damn shells, the trees, everything!”

I get a hand free and swing the murex at his face. The sharp crenelations open a gash. Ness covers his cheek, and I wiggle away. I stagger a handful of steps, wait for him to tackle me again, but he just sits there. I head for the house. My legs are jelly. I can barely stand, but I resolve to get there, to get help. Looking back, I can see that Ness hasn’t moved, is just holding his wound, watching me.

I take advantage of this and pause to collect my breath. I rest my hands on my knees and eye him like a wounded mouse might eye a hawk.

“What did you think I was going to do, write you into some kind of hero?” I ask.

He stares at me.

“And then you dump your shells on the market, right? Or have you been doing that already? How many of your celebrated finds happened right up there in that lab?”

I stagger toward the house. Checking my phone, I see the battery is dead. I don’t care. I feel dead, too. Emotionless. Betrayed to the core.

“This is not a fake!” Ness roars behind me. I turn to see him holding the shell in one hand, his cheek in the other. He gets to his feet, and I steel myself to run again.

“You still don’t get it, do you?” He raises his voice above the crashing sea and the wind. “Skipped right to the end, and you still don’t understand.”

“Stay away from me,” I tell him.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Ness says. “Not like you’ve hurt me.”

I don’t know if he means the story that ran that morning or the gash on his cheek. I no longer have the right to say it wasn’t my fault. Both wounds were. I know that. I made a promise I couldn’t keep.

“Let me off your property,” I plead. “I don’t know what’s going on up there, but I know it isn’t legal. Let me go.”

“You think I would hurt you? Goddamnit, Maya, I think I’m in love with you.”

“Shut up!” I scream at him. “Don’t say that. You don’t get to say that.” I cover my ears and jog toward the house. When I look back, Ness is running after me. It’s no use. My legs give out, and I tumble to the sand. Ness circles in front of me and falls to his knees. Tears are streaming down his face, blood down his cheek.

“Listen to me,” he begs. “Just listen.”

I bow my head, stay on my hands and knees, try to fill my lungs.

“No, it’s not legal what we’re doing. We’re trying to clear some hurdles, make it legal, but it hasn’t been easy.”

“You’re going to crash the market for shells,” I tell him.

“Yes, we are. I aim to. Because we’re going to bring them back. Don’t you see?” He shows me the murex. Its white shell is pink with his blood. Ness peers inside, touches the slug, and I see the creature move. Ness turns and hurls the shell into the sea. He sits back on his heels, wipes the blood from his cheek.

“I used to shell beaches as a little boy with my grandfather, and he told me once that we collect dead things. That the shells are worthless, but we collect them because they’re beautiful.” Looking up, he smiles at me, even though his eyes are still crying. “Another metaphor for your collection,” he says. “How shelling is like love. Collecting empty, pretty things.”

I don’t say anything. I conserve my energy.

“After he told me this, I started looking at the living creatures inside. I followed the shells with snorkels and then dive tanks. Grew up. Never forgot what he said. And one day, I went down in a Mir to oversee a geothermal installation, and I started thinking about the vents, where the water is toxic and warm. Acidic, like we’ve made the sea. But there was life there. Trapped. It couldn’t populate the rest of the sea because of the cold all around it. The animals there were boxed in, fit for a different world, for a world not of sunlight but of harsh chemistry. I wondered if we could bring them out, give nature a nudge, find something in their DNA that might help.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe you.”

“We started with the trees because they were simple and we could grow them quickly. I hired the absolute best. From what we learned with the trees, we were able to get two dozen species of gastropods living in existing sea conditions. And more on the way. The FDA thinks we’re working on algae for biotic oil production, that our proposed bills to relax some regulations have to do with that. There are politicians on our side, but others who will shut us down if they find out, who will think we’re playing God, creating little Frankenstein fish, that we’ll cause more damage than we’ll repair. But we’re only doing what nature does best. She just needs our help. Because we took her by surprise.”

I don’t want to believe him. I don’t care how it all fits, how this makes more sense than the monster I made up in my mind. I want to believe in the monster. I need to believe in the monster. It’s simpler. I can wrap my head around that. It’s more difficult to think that Ness is out to save the world. It’s more difficult to think that he sees anything in me.

“The feds are onto you,” I say. I want him to know he won’t get away with this, that it’s too late.

Ness nods. “I know. I think they suspect. They don’t want this either. If the market for shells crashes, entire departments will get shuttered overnight. It’ll be like the end of prohibition. No more jobs for the people who track down crooks. No more retail. No sales tax. All gone overnight. No one wants this, don’t you see? It’d be like turning the loch back over to the monster. The circus would have to pack up and go home.”

I shake my head. Ness reaches out to me, and I flinch. I can see that this reaction hurts him worse than the blow I struck. He is only holding out his hand, hoping I’ll take it.

“Come with me,” Ness says. “Come with me, Maya, and I’ll show you.” He turns and looks back to the lighthouse. A handful of figures can be seen up there, little dots on the ridge. “This is where the story ends. Right up there. Where it always ended. I was going to take you today—it was the plan all along. I was going to show you the sample we took from the Mir, you and me. I was going to show you the progress we’ve made.”

He frowns. His cheek is bleeding badly. “And then I saw the story this morning, with your name on it, and I thought I was an idiot to fall for you, that you were running that piece all along, that you were probably going to write about what happened on the sub, on the island, that I was setting myself up for all that again. While I was running back to the house, all I could think was that I made a mistake taking you to my most special place, my true home, that you—”

“I’m sorry I hit you,” I say. “I’m sorry about the piece that ran today. But I… I don’t believe what you’re telling me—”

“Why not? I’m willing to believe you. Right now. I believe that you had nothing to do with that story. I believe that you’ll set it all straight if you have the chance. I believe this, even though I have a long history of watching people betray my trust. A long history. But I believe you, Maya. Now I really need you to believe me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Ness, this is just too much.”

“Is it? You’ve seen the shells. You’ve seen inside them. You know they’re real. I need you to look past everything you know about me and the years of mistakes I made. Stop judging me by my father and his grandfather. Judge me by this week. By our time together. If that’s all you had to go on, what would you believe?”

I rest my face in my palms. My shoulders quake as I let out a sob, an exhausted cry. I expect Ness to reach out and comfort me, but he seems to know not to. I can’t believe any of this is happening, that my life somehow got caught up in the nexus of whatever it is Ness is trying to do and whatever it is the feds are investigating. All for running that damn story, for wanting to get back at the man I blamed for taking my childhood away.

“What do you think of me, Maya? From this week. From yesterday. From the guy at the bottom of the sea. From the beach. Tell me this is just a shell. Say it. Say you don’t believe me.”

“I can’t,” I sob. I shake my head, try to compose myself. I no longer feel in danger of Ness harming me. The danger I feel is far graver than that.

“I need you,” Ness says.

“To write your story?”

“No. Screw the story. Someone else will write it. They’ll get the facts wrong, but I don’t care anymore. It’s the shells. The shells are going to come back. That’s all that matters. We’re so damn close, and I want you to be there when it happens. I want you by my side.”

“Why?” I ask.

“You know why.”

I look him in the eyes. I see him through a veil of tears. But I’ll know if he’s lying. I’ve seen this enough times to know. I’ve heard the words from those who didn’t mean it, who didn’t really mean it.

“Say it,” I say. “Say it, and make me believe it, damn you.”

Ness smiles. Blood trickles down his jawline. The sea crashes and roars beside us.

“Ladies first,” he says.

40

But I can’t say the words. This is how relationships are most like the things I collect: We build these hard exteriors. We pull ourselves inside, block off the only way in, don’t let anyone see our true selves. Ness waits for me to tell him that I love him, but I’m still scared. I still doubt. Nothing feels real. Because I won’t crawl out and feel the world for myself.

“Show me,” I tell him. “Prove what you’re saying is true, and then I’ll decide how I feel. I want to see what you’re doing up there. Make me believe you’re doing something good.”

This is the most I can give him, this opening, my willingness to have been wrong about him one last time. For the moment, with him wounded and bleeding and me untouched, I believe that I’m not in danger, that he isn’t out to hurt me. Not only is he the one bleeding, the anger is now mine alone. My own sins have been forgiven.

Whether Ness really meant to show me what lies beneath the lighthouse or not, the secret I’ve uncovered there puts all the rest into perspective. And I realize the truth of what he hinted at once, that the story he wants to tell will make a mockery of my pieces. Maybe the story that ran today, the one that will hurt Holly and perhaps no one else, enraged him because of my betrayal, not because of his desire for self-preservation. I allow myself to believe this as I follow him in the direction of the estate and toward a flight of stairs that winds up the bluff. I allow myself to consider that he was angry in the shower not for the damage I caused his family’s reputation, but because he feared I felt nothing for him, that I had been using him all along.

I nearly press him on this, but I choose to walk in silence.

We tread up creaking and salt-air-worn steps, palms on rough splinter-toothed rails, Ness climbing ahead of me. I remember following him into his house what seems like several years ago. A lifetime ago. I came here to write about the world he wanted to destroy, to hoard for himself, to spirit away—and now he says it’s a world he wishes to save, to protect. I feel a tug in every direction on the deepest parts of my soul, this compound wish to be with a man both dangerous and protective. A man who could wreck vengeance on my behalf, but never upon me.

My mother pointed this out to me on a shelling walk, before I went off to college. “You’ll love most the ones who can hurt you,” she warned me. It was a version of my father’s more pithy: “Men are pricks.” However stated, it’s a lesson that must tragically be learned, not told.

“You okay?” Ness asks as we reach the top of the stairs.

I nod, out of breath. He’s the one with twin trails of blood curving down his neck. He’s the one whose family name is besmirched in today’s paper. And he wants to know if a flight of stairs has wronged me. And in that question, and that steely gaze, I don’t doubt for a minute that he would burn the stairs into the sea if I hinted at any offense.

“I’m fine,” I say.

We follow the ridge toward the lighthouse. There’s a winding dirt path worn into the grasses right at the edge, and I realize that Ness must walk from the estate to his secret lair sometimes. Perhaps every day. This is where he’s been the last four years, watching the sun rise over the glittering sea to his left, then watching the sky redden and the planets and stars come out as he winds his way back home at dusk. All for what? I want to see. I want to meet the people in the white cloaks, these people who moments ago I feared. I see two of them far ahead, by the lighthouse. I see the jeep and the guards as well. They watch with hands shielding their eyes as we approach.

Fifty meters away, and the men get in the jeep as if to come out to us, but Ness waves them off. I see them hesitate for a moment, but then they drive sullenly away, disappointed perhaps at this tease of danger, this thrill of excitement, of actually being needed.

“Do you want to call someone and let them know where you are?” Ness asks.

I consider this. It surprises me. Not that he is aware of my trepidation, but that he considers I might want some way to allay those fears, some way to let my boss or my family or the authorities know where I am. “My phone is dead,” I tell him.

“You can use mine.” He offers it. I consider the wisdom of calling Agent Cooper, filling him in, but I wave the phone away. The gesture is enough. To actually make that call would do more harm than striking him, I sense. Trust must be met with trust. Ness puts the phone away.

“This is my lead scientist,” he tells me, indicating one of the women I saw in the laboratory beneath the lighthouse. She’s standing with her hands in her smock, looking worriedly at Ness’s wound, then suspiciously at me. “Ryan, this is Maya Walsh. Maya, Ryan.”

We shake hands. She has a firm grip; she does not smile at me.

“And this is Stewart, my chief geneticist.”

Stewart is smoking an old-fashioned cigarette. I wonder if this is a habit he picked up from Vincent or vice versa. He exhales a cloud of smoke, then shakes my hand. “The reporter, eh?”

“Not today,” Ness says. “Today she is only a friend. I want you to show her around.”

I follow Ryan and Stewart down the stairs to the back entrance, through the locked door held fast by Holly’s birthday. Ness follows. Inside, the others kick off their shoes and don white booties. I take a pair from the cardboard box and pull them on too, realizing that only Ness and I are barefoot, that he must’ve kicked off his booties in pursuit. Twice I catch Ryan shooting Ness an Are you sure about this? look. And I catch him nodding almost imperceptibly. There is great risk in bringing me here, I realize. And it’s a risk he had planned on taking a week ago. With or without me, he has decided to blow the lid off his work here.

“We do most of our research on this floor,” Ryan says as we head down to the vast space I ran through earlier. “Genetic sequencing takes place over there. We examine samples from the vents, looking for base pairs that confer temperature and acidic advantages—”

“So they’re real,” I say. “These shells grow themselves. They’re not, like, transplanted in.”

It occurs to me that this might’ve been where Dimitri Arlov worked. Maybe he took the murexes home because he was proud of them, or simply because they were beautiful, or as a memento.

“Yes, they… grow themselves,” Ryan says, hesitating as though she’s reluctant to say more.

Ness interrupts. “Maya knows enough of the science to understand how this works,” he says. “Just explain it.”

Ryan shrugs at Ness and then turns to me. “They’re real, but we designed them. We have complete DNA samples of hundreds of extinct species. We use their nearest living ancestor to breed the first generation. And then we create enough genetic diversity for the species to become self-sustaining. Technically, it’s a new species, never seen before. But it looks the same. And it should fill the same niche. Should give us the biodiversity we’ve lost, which may trickle up the food chain.”

“Show her the murex,” Ness says.

Stewart nods and leads us down the next flight of stairs.

“What makes you think these animals will survive in the wild?” I ask.

“We have tanks on the lower level with live rock and water samples taken from various offshore locations,” Stewart explains.

“What about—?”

“Predators included,” Ness says behind me. He then pardons himself. He’s dying to talk, I can tell, but seems to want all this to come from someone else. He’s trying to be an observer, and I can tell that’s hard for him. While Stewart takes me toward the rows of tanks, I watch Ryan inspect Ness’s gashed cheek.

“I’ve seen the murexes,” I tell Stewart. I spot some knobby whelks in a tank a few rows down. Large shells. “What about those?”

“The whelks,” Stewart says. I follow him to the tank. He reaches inside and pulls one out. I watch the slug’s foot retract and swell to plug its home. “These were the fourth species we revived. They can already handle acidity levels plus eighty.”

“Plus eighty?”

“Eighty years out,” he explains. “Where we project the levels to be eighty years from now, anyway. It should give them plenty of time to adjust on their own. But if not, we can help them along again. Our command of this is only getting better.”

He passes me the shell. I touch the slug’s foot, feel it react to the stimulus, stiffen under my finger. I place the shell back in the water, lowering it to the bed of sand rather than dropping it. There are several tanks of this species. The digital thermometers against the glass show different temperatures, and notes are written in black wax right on the glass. I turn to ask Ness something and see Ryan dabbing Ness’s cheek with a rag, cleaning the wound I made. A pang of guilt laced with a twinge of jealousy courses through me.

“Why me?” I ask. And I realize that this is the question that has haunted me all week, from the guest house to the helicopter to the depths of the ocean floor to the beach. Why me? I wipe my wet hand on my shorts and close the distance between Ness and myself. “Why not show this to the scientific community? Publish a paper? Do a TV special on Discovery? Why would you show me?”

“We need to win public support before any legal campaigns start,” Ness says. “We need the whole world on our side.”

“Who would be against this?”

I know as soon as I ask. Ness answers anyway.

“The same people who were against me before,” he says. “The same people who burned one of my father’s oil platforms. The ones who see any tampering with nature as bad, who have given up, who won’t be happy until we’re the ones who go extinct. And they’ll have people they normally hate on their side, the people who don’t believe in playing God. And of course, there are those who love shell collecting for the money and not the shells. They won’t support this either. Neither will those who get paid to crack down on operations like this.”

He’s right, of course. He’s absolutely right. About all of it. It’s just what he told me on the beach an hour ago.

“So who will support this?” I ask. “Politicians?”

All three of them laugh, and I hear how ridiculous this sounds. The lobbying will be fierce. And when did reason ever stand a chance in that game?

“The people who love the sea are our only hope,” Ness says. “And they tend to love quietly. They love in the middle of the night with their flashlights. They keep their love from others. But we need them to be loud. We need to win this all at once or we don’t stand a chance.”

I shake my head. Making my way to the stairs, I lower myself to the treads and sit down. “No,” I tell him. “No.”

Ness sits beside me. I can sense his desire to put a hand on my knee, realize that somehow this sort of gesture has become natural between us, but he resists the urge.

“You never stood a chance,” I say. “Not with me. Oh, Ness, what did you think I’d be able to do? Work a miracle for you? Get people to agree on this? Help get policies written by force of will, by some lyrical appeal to nature and love and life?”

The way he’s looking at me, I can tell that he did believe this. And the way Stewart and Ryan look piteously upon this man I think I love, I can tell that they told him so, that this was a fool’s errand from the start, the errand of a hopeful, romantic fool.

“That’s your grandfather,” I say. “Your grandfather had the right words, and he lived in the right time. He could have convinced his generation to undo what they’d done—“

“The science wasn’t ready,” Ness says.

“Well the people of our time won’t be ready. You’ll have the majority of hearts, Ness, but you won’t have much else.”

“Write the story,” he tells me. “Write the truth, and the rest will come.”

“It won’t,” I promise him. “Ness, listen to them.” I indicate Stewart and Ryan. “They’re right. They aren’t hopeless romantics like us. They deal in the concrete, in the knowable—“

Ness leaps up and takes two angry steps away from me. His body is rigid, his fists clenched. I think for a moment that he’s angry with me, but consider that he might just be angry at the world. He must know that I’m right. Without realizing it, I’m behind him, one hand on his shoulder, the other lacing between his knuckles, coaxing that angry fist into an open and then interlocked hand. My mind is whirring, with ways to soothe him, with ways to take the bubbling vats of wonder in that room and bring my childhood to life once more—with ways to heal what I’ve wounded, what all of us have wounded.

“There is another way,” I whisper, even as it comes to me, even as I realize what we have to do. I don’t want anyone but him to hear, so I say it with a whisper. “Ness, there is another way.”

41

The bow of the boat undulates with the sea, rising and falling, rising and falling, a hiss of foam forming along the fiberglass sides and then sighing back into the ocean with the rhythmic and hypnotic grace of a swell rolling toward the beach. I watch the spray, enjoying the small rainbows that materialize and disappear like a mirage, and consider this illegal cruise of ours.

My father used to take me on boat rides like this. Late in the day, after pinky-swearing that we would not be skunked, after snorkeling every shell-hole we knew and casting lead sinkers and plastic lures until our arms were tired, we would race off with the setting sun on our starboard side to shell from the rich.

Just south of our home inlet, past the private beaches, there was a resort with hundreds of blue lounge chairs and umbrellas, a place where you were chased off if you didn’t have on the right colored wristband, where the towels and foot showers and the very sand itself were only for the well-to-do. My father and I would anchor beyond the swim buoys after the sun had set and snorkel ashore to steal a shell or two that had been carefully set out by the night staff for the early risers to discover.

We didn’t keep these shells. Nor did we take them for any reason other than to not-be-skunked. We simply took those shells because they didn’t belong there. Because they were paid for, as much a part of the resort package as the slices of fruit on the buffet table, carefully parceled out at all times of the day so every guest got their allotment, but so that every guest secretly felt that maybe, due to their industriousness or skill, they got just a little more than their share.

Some were perhaps even clever enough to fool themselves into thinking the shells they discovered had washed up of their own accord.

Father and I would secret these shells away, disappearing into the foam, and kick and laugh and swim back to our anchored boat. The shells would be deposited on the public beach across the narrow strip of road from our boat ramp, for someone else to chance upon.

An illegal boat ride on the edge of day and into deep water. I wonder if my father would be proud of what I’m doing this morning, all these many years later. It’s a different sort of law I’m breaking, but the moral code feels the same. Only this time, the shells that could get me into trouble are already in the boat.

Ness kills the motor and lets the boat glide along, the last of the wake fizzing and becoming part of the rising and sinking Atlantic. I open one of the great plastic tubs that line the bow of the boat. The shells inside writhe and crinkle. The shells are alive.

I feel Ness’s hand against the small of my back. We rock together, knees bent, studying his work. I turn to Ness and wrap a hand around the back of his neck, pull him close for a moment, breathe in the sunscreen and sweat and salt sea. He kisses me on the top of my head. “You sure?” he asks.

“I’m sure,” I say.

We each grab a side of the first bin, which has dozens of species in it, and hoist it to the top of the gunnel. A pause, a moment to reflect, and then we tip it over. The shells tumble out by the thousands. They plop and hiss and throw up bubbles on their way down, like little exhalations of freedom and joy. Ryan guessed that four out of every ten will end up food for something else. The rest will survive. And breed. And die. And one day be discovered on a beach.

Someone will pick up the pretty dead things, and see the worth there, but Ness and I will know the truth.

We grab another bin. And I’ve never felt more alive.