A Second Chance at Love novel · Chapter 2 of 12

Chapter 2: That's My Coat

The second mate knows things about the night on the ice that Keira never told anyone, and as the boat sails under the lift bridge the dean writes that Prescott has charged her with stealing his design.

He was still holding my collar.

His thumb rested on the letters.

"Where'd you get this?" he asked.

"Somebody gave it to me."

"Three Januaries ago?"

The wind came across the deck and I forgot to breathe.

"How do you know that?"

He folded the collar back down, neatly, the way it had been for three years.

"I lost it on the harbor ice," he said. "Right off this boat, by the outflow. About two in the morning."

Snow was landing in his hair and he didn't brush it off.

"There was a girl in the water. Red hair. One mitten. The other one was gone."

My hand closed in my pocket.

The left mitten was still in a drawer at my mom's house in Hibbing. I'd never found the right one.

"She kept saying the same thing over and over," he said. "Don't call my mom."

I had never told anyone that.

Not Kat. Not the nurses. Not Prescott.

My mouth went dry.

"Prescott Hallworth pulled me out," I said. "It was in the student paper. He rode in the ambulance with me."

He looked at me for a long moment.

His eyes were very dark, and they didn't move off my face.

"Okay," he said.

That was all.

He made a mark on his clipboard and pointed aft with the pen.

"Engine cadets bunk on the second deck, port side. The chief's waiting below."

"That's it?" I said. "Okay?"

"You're cold, and we sail in fifteen minutes." He nodded at the coat. "Button it up. It's a warm coat."

He turned to the next person on the gangway, a deckhand with a case of oranges.

I stood there one second too long.

Then I went below.

The chief was sixty-one, square and gray, in coveralls so clean they looked ironed.

She was waiting at the bottom of the engine-room ladder with a pair of earmuffs in her hand.

"Mullane," she said. "You came."

"You said you don't wait for anybody."

"I don't." She pushed the earmuffs into my chest. "You stand the four-to-eight with me. You touch nothing you can't name. You write everything down."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Chief."

"Yes, Chief."

She looked at my coat, her expression softening slightly.

"Go up and watch us leave," she said. "Everybody does it once. After that you're mine."

At six the whole deck shook under my boots.

The engines had been warming for an hour, and now they took hold, a deep hum I felt in my teeth.

The Astrid slid away from the ore dock so slowly I didn't believe it until the gap of black water opened.

I stood at the rail on the boat deck with my hands in his pockets.

His pockets.

I couldn't stop thinking it.

Ahead of us, the lift bridge was rising.

Its whole span went up between the two towers, lights blinking, cars stopped on both sides.

People stood along the canal pier in parkas, filming us with their phones.

Somebody's little kid was waving with both arms.

The captain blew the salute right over my head.

One long. Two short.

It went through my ribs.

From the bridge tower, the answer came back across the water.

One long, two short.

Everybody on the pier cheered.

I looked back at Duluth.

The hill went up in rows of lights.

Near the top I could see the engineering hall, the windows of the auditorium still dark.

Somewhere down the hill, in a brick building with a doorman, Prescott was asleep with Sigrid's phone number at the top of his calls.

I tried to hear the voice from the ice, the one that kept saying "I've got you."

All I could hear was Prescott telling me what it said.

I looked up.

Lars Holm was standing on the bridge wing above me, hatless, his collar turned up.

He wasn't watching the bridge or the pier.

He was watching me.

When I caught him, he didn't look away. He just lifted two fingers off the rail.

I turned back to the water before I could do anything stupid.

We cleared the canal.

The lake opened up in front of us, gray and huge, with ice floes drifting.

My phone was in my pocket.

I'd turned it on for the first time since Friday to check the weather.

Now it buzzed, and kept buzzing.

Forty-one texts. Most of them from numbers I didn't know.

One email.

It was from the dean of engineering.

"Ms. Mullane, Mr. Prescott Hallworth has filed a formal complaint stating that you took his design files without permission and are presenting his work as your own."

I read it with the lake spray hitting the screen.

"Your graduation is suspended pending a public hearing on Tuesday, April 14, at 2 p.m., in the engineering auditorium."

There was one attachment.

It was my heat exchanger, tucked behind the engine, with his name typed in the corner where my initials used to be.

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