A Second Chance at Love novel · Chapter 3 of 12

Chapter 3: Red

Keira earns a nickname in the galley while Sigrid's clip calls her a stalker, the chief recognizes the numbers in table three, and at the Soo Lars tells her his side of the ice night before the captain posts that Sigrid and Prescott are coming aboard.

I stood on the boat deck thinking over the dean's email, and then the chief yelled my name down the stairwell.

My first watch started at four.

The engine room was three stories of heat and noise, and I loved it immediately.

On my second round I found a drip under the number two ballast pump that the oiler had walked past twice.

I wrote it down. The chief read it, grunted, and sent him back with a wrench.

That was the whole compliment. I took it.

At eight I came up starving.

The galley smelled like bacon and coffee, and the cook was a woman in her fifties with flour on her forearms and a radio playing polka.

She looked at my hair and set down a plate with four pancakes on it.

"Sit, Red."

"My name's Keira."

"I know what your name is. Eat."

I ate.

Two deckhands at the next table were bent over a phone, snickering.

I heard Sigrid's voice before I saw the screen.

"Some people just don't understand the word no," she was saying, in a video she'd filmed in her car. "When someone follows you for three years, you're allowed to finally be free."

There was a clip of me standing up in the third row, my mouth open.

Under it were pink letters: #finallyfree.

Two hundred thousand views.

My phone buzzed at the same moment. It was Kat.

"Don't read the comments," she'd written. "I mean it. I'm reading them so you don't have to. I'm reporting every single one."

I read the comments.

Stalker. Psycho. Somebody check his house for cameras.

The cook reached over the deckhand's shoulder, took the phone out of his hand, and dropped it into the dishwater.

"Hey!"

"That's what happens to phones at my table," she said. "Ask anybody."

The other deckhand quietly put his own phone in his pocket.

I laughed so hard I had to put my fork down.

That afternoon the chief called me into her office off the control room.

My design was spread across her desk. Kat had emailed it to me, and I'd printed it on the boat's printer.

"Read your dean's letter," the chief said. "Read this too."

She tapped a page with one thick finger.

Table three.

"Those are my engine's numbers," she said. "To the decimal. I sent them to you in October because you asked me nicely."

"I know."

"Who is this Hallworth kid?"

"He's the one with the prize."

She looked at me over her reading glasses for a long time.

Then she folded the page, put it in her shirt pocket, and buttoned the pocket.

We reached the Soo Locks after dark the next day.

The Astrid had to wait for the upbound boat to clear, so the deck crew was out in the floodlights.

Lars handed me a heaving line, a long rope with a heavy knot on the end the size of a fist.

"Throw it to the wall," he said.

"Why?"

"Because someday a deckhand will be sick, and the boat will need you to."

I threw it.

It went about six feet and landed on my own boot.

Behind me, three deckhands made a noise.

"Again," Lars said.

The second throw hit the rail and came back at my face.

"Did you just duck?" I asked him.

"I've seen engineers throw."

"Show me, then."

He coiled the line in a few quick motions, swung it once, and sent it sailing in a long, lazy arc onto the lock wall, right where a linesman was standing.

"Show-off," I said.

"Yes," he said, and for the first time he smiled.

It changed his whole face.

That night I couldn't sleep.

I went up to the boat deck in the coat and found him already there, leaning on the rail, watching the lock lights.

I stood next to him.

"Tell me," I said.

He was quiet a long time.

"I was a deckhand on winter watch. Alone on the boat," he said. "I heard a crack and somebody scream, and when I got to the rail there was a hole in the ice with red hair in it."

"And a boy?"

"Somebody running toward shore. I didn't look long."

My chest went tight.

"I went down the ladder with a line and crawled out flat. I got you by the hood."

"Then what?"

"I carried you to the dock and wrapped you in the coat. I called 911. You told me not to call your mom." He rubbed his thumb along the rail. "When I heard the siren, I went back aboard."

"Why?"

"You can't leave a boat alone in winter. Leaving a watch gets you fired. I was twenty-three, and this was the only job I had."

"You never told anybody."

"I didn't know your name," he said. "I knew your hair."

I looked out at the lock.

"Prescott rode in the ambulance," I said. "He told everyone he did it. There was a whole article in the student paper. I thanked him for three years."

Lars didn't say anything.

His jaw moved once.

"Can you prove it?" I asked.

He looked at the water a long time before he answered.

"It's just my word," he said.

I believed him, and I didn't know what to do with that.

In the morning there was a sheet of paper taped to the galley door.

The cook was reading it with her arms crossed.

"Owner's guests boarding at the Soo, 0600, for the trip to Gary," it said. "Miss Sigrid Engstrom. Mr. Prescott Hallworth."

It was 5:55.

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