“I didn’t want to,” I confessed softly. “I thought we were leaving the boat together. We talked about it all the time — where we’d work next, how we’d spend some time off traveling together before we took our next job. I had a friend in the Bahamas who hooked us up with her captain. We had all these plans…”
I shook my head, the pain so fresh even two years later that I half-expected to look down and see blood gushing from a wound.
“But the last night of the season, he told me he was going home to Dublin to open a restaurant,” I said, swallowing. “So… I guess I’d never really been a part of his plans. He let me think it, let me live in my delusional fantasy until the very last moment.”
“Oh, my God… why would he do that?”
“To have a little fun on a boat and not have to face the consequences, I guess.” I shrugged. “It was just a boatmance to him. I was stupid for thinking it was more.”
Even as the words slid from my lips, I didn’t believe them. I’d spent two years trying to get myself to face reality — that I’d meant nothing to Finn. But he’d played my heart so expertly that I still wanted to believe he cared about me, even when I had all the proof that he didn’t.
“He never let on that it was just a fling to him?”
At that, I let out a soft, painful laugh. “He was a mastermind,” I whispered, meeting her gaze. “I swore he loved me. Everyone else on that boat swore it, too.”
That admission had everything inside me going sharp and sour, the memory of how broken I’d been when I’d walked off that boat slamming into me like a cold block of ice. I’d thrown myself into my next charter, desperate to fill my time and stay busy so I wouldn’t think about how much I missed him. I got a new piercing. I got a new tattoo. I drank and partied with my new crew. I tried to build a new life without him.
None of it made me feel any better.
Eventually, I moved on — but not in the “I’m over him! I’m healed!” sort of way. I moved on because time gave me no choice. I moved on because I put one foot in front of the other, and eventually, weeks turned to months, and then to years.
And now here we were, two years between us, and all it took was one look at him for me to spiral.
I asked my mom once what it was that kept her and dad together all this time. They’d been college sweethearts, and it just seemed like a miracle to me that they could survive that youth, and then graduating, jobs, marriage, buying a house, having a kid.
She’d looked at me with a small smile as she washed dishes and said, “Some people come into our lives and then fade out,and we miss them, but not in a desperate way. We think of them fondly, but we can go on living without them. But others come into our lives and something inside us clicks into place, like a missing gear that has the power to make our whole system work properly. We can’t let those people go — even when it gets hard, even when common sense says we should. They’re a part of us. We will go to battle for them without a second thought. We’ll lay down our own lives for them, no questions asked.” She’d shrugged then, her eyes that mine mirrored swinging my way with a twinkle. “Some loves are inevitable — meant to be. And when you stumble upon that kind of love, it becomes an impenetrable force. Nothing can break it — not trial or time or distance. It just… survives.”
I remember smiling at her like I got it, but really, I was just thinking about her and Dad. I was trying to understand how she put up with a man who could be so cold sometimes. It helped me make sense of them. It helped me see their love in the soft moments I witnessed them share and I realized that Mom didn’t need a man who doted on her or showed up with big, grand gestures — she just needed Dad.
But I couldn’t really relate.
Not until I lost Finn.
I understood her fully now.
Except where her love for Dad survived and kept her thriving, my love for Finn survived and killed me, little by little, day by day — even still.
And it wasn’t even real to him.
“Maybe he did love you,” Leah said. “Maybe there’s more to the story.”
I offered her a small smile, patting her leg before I stood. “Well, if there was, he had his chance to tell me and didn’t. He just… left. Left yachting, left the Med, left me.” I shrugged. “Andnow he’s back, with Gisella, so maybe it’s just that I wasn’t what he wanted in the long run.”
Leah frowned, reaching out to squeeze my wrist. “I’m sorry. It must be kind of weird, being back in close quarters with him.” She winced. “Oh, God. That was so cheesy. I bet the producers will love that line.”
I chuckled, but her comment made my gaze flick up to the blue light of the camera rolling in the corner of the cabin. “It’s fine. We’re all adults. And what Finn and I had is in the past.”
My stomach roiled with the lie.
“Well, I’m here if you ever need to talk about any of it. Or if you want to, like, print out a picture of him and throw darts at it.”
Palmer called over the radio that we were set to head to the beach and set up, and I smiled at Leah, nodding my thanks.
“Get some rest,” I told her. “I don’t need to talk about my ex, but Idoneed my stew to feel better.”
“On it,” she said with a salute, and then she crawled back under the covers.
Five minutes later, I was in the tender with the guys headed toward the beach, the salty wind in my hair and one of the cameras pointed right at me. Between the growl of the engine, the slap of waves against the hull, and the occasional holler from Palmer as he steered us toward shore, it was too loud to hear anything.