He Divorced Me at His Ship's Christening, So I Held the Ship novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: The Sea Buoy
Ruel's POV
The board met on the thirtieth of June and cleared me before lunch.
They kept the letter on the record with my correction stapled to the front, and they thanked me for the drawings.
The chief pilot shook my hand in the corridor and said I had cost him three Saturdays.
I did not mind the Saturdays.
On the night of the second of July I sat in the pilot boat's cabin at the Point Loma station.
I had a thermos and a weather report.
The Clarissa B. would be at the sea buoy at four in the morning, and I would board her there.
It was ten o'clock, and the cabin was dark except for a red work lamp and the blink of the buoy through the porthole.
I heard boots on the dock, and then a light, quick step on the ladder.
Filipa came down into the cabin in jeans and a gray sweatshirt, with a paper bag in her hand.
"Pastel de nata," she said. "My aunt says you can't pilot a nine-hundred-foot ship on an empty stomach."
"Your aunt has opinions."
"She has more than that."
She put the bag on the chart shelf and stood in front of me, close, in the red light.
I had been working up to this for two weeks, and I did not know how to begin.
So I began where it hurt.
"At the festa you introduced me as the pilot who waited," I said.
She went very still.
"At the Coronado, you called me a man in a good shirt."
"Ruel," she said.
"I'm not asking you to take it back."
I kept my voice level.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of He Divorced Me at His Ship's Christening, So I Held the Ship are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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