Chapter 4: The Sea Cave

I held the card for a full minute before I put it back in his wallet.

Then I got back into bed, and he pulled me against his chest without waking up.

At breakfast I asked him about it, lightly, with a mouth full of mango.

"Your wallet fell. I saw a master key for every property."

"Maintenance gets one," Jack said, and kept buttering his toast. "You can't fix a leak if you can't open the door."

It was a smooth answer, and I knew it was smooth.

I looked at his hands, rough at the base of the fingers, and decided that was a worry for another day.

"Okay," I said.

He glanced up. "That's it?"

"Rule two. No questions about home."

"I like your rules," he said.

That afternoon he rented a small white sailboat from the dock.

He rigged it in four minutes without looking at the lines, and I sat in the cockpit and watched him.

"You do this a lot," I said.

"Since I was little. My father put me in a dinghy at six." He tilted his head toward the scar. "The boom taught me the rest."

"That's not a rule violation. That's just a story."

"Then I'll tell you the rest later."

He took us around the point to where the cliffs came down to the water.

A narrow cut ran through them, and he dropped the sail and let the boat drift to a ledge.

"There's a cave," he said. "The dive shack told me. It's only open at low tide."

"You want me to swim into a cave."

"It's a dry cave. I checked."

I took his hand, and we climbed out onto warm rock.

The cave went back thirty feet into green dimness, and the air smelled of salt.

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