A Second Chance at Love novel · Chapter 1 of 12
Chapter 1: Third Row
Prescott wins the fleet prize with Keira's design and tells her to go home in front of everyone, so she stands, claims her work, walks out, and boards an ore boat at dawn, where the second mate looks at her coat and says it's his.
The drawing on the big screen was mine.
I knew it from across the auditorium.
The heat exchanger was tucked behind the engine like a lunchbox, because I'd drawn it that way at two in the morning on Prescott's kitchen table.
Under it, in big white letters, it said: "Design lead: Prescott Hallworth. Partner: Sigrid Engstrom."
My name wasn't anywhere.
I was sitting in the third row in Prescott's gray hoodie.
He'd asked me to come. He said he wanted me there when he won.
Everyone on campus knew me as Prescott Hallworth's hopeless admirer.
For three years I'd carried his coffee, rewritten his labs and waited outside his classes.
People thought it was funny.
They also thought it made sense, because of the story.
Freshman year, I fell through the harbor ice, and Prescott pulled me out.
It was in the student paper. It was the first thing anyone ever told a new kid about him.
Onstage, he clicked through my numbers.
Three men in Engstrom Fleet jackets nodded along at the judges' table.
Mr. Engstrom owns seven ore boats and half the harbor, and his daughter Sigrid was in the front row in white wool.
Prescott finished. The judges barely talked.
Mr. Engstrom walked up with a giant cardboard check for twenty-five thousand dollars and a job offer in a blue folder.
Everyone stood up and clapped.
I clapped too.
I still believed he'd say my name.
Prescott took the microphone back.
"One more thing," he said, and grinned.
The screen changed.
It was a photo of Sigrid laughing on a sailboat, and over it, in pink letters: "SIGRID, BE MINE?"
The room screamed.
Sigrid put both hands over her mouth and nodded, and Prescott jumped off the stage and kissed her in front of her father.
Then he walked back up the steps, still holding the mic, and looked straight at me.
"And Keira," he said. "Thanks for coming. You can stop following me around now. Seriously. Go home."
Three hundred people laughed.
Phones came up all around me.
Behind me a girl whispered, "Oh my God, she's going to cry."
"Film it," somebody said.
My face was hot. My hands were shaking in my lap.
I looked at the drawing on the screen behind him.
It was still mine.
I stood up.
"That's my design," I said.
It came out louder than I meant. The laughing stopped in patches.
"I drew every page of it. Ask him where the engine numbers in table three came from."
Prescott laughed into the microphone.
"See? This is what I've been dealing with."
People laughed again, but fewer this time.
Mr. Engstrom didn't even look at me.
"Young lady, sit down or leave."
I pulled Prescott's hoodie over my head.
My hair caught in the zipper and I yanked it free.
I folded the hoodie in half, then in half again, and laid it on my seat.
Then I walked up the aisle in my T-shirt with two hundred phones turning to follow me.
Outside it was snowing sideways off the lake.
I stood alone on the steps of the engineering hall with no coat, and the cold felt clean.
Below the hill the harbor was black, and the lights of the lift bridge were blinking.
There was one number in my phone I'd never called back.
In January the chief engineer of the Astrid Engstrom had offered me a cadet berth for the shipping season.
Nine months on a thousand-foot ore boat. Engine room hours toward a license. A hundred and ninety dollars a day.
I'd said no.
Prescott had wanted me in Duluth for his last semester.
It was Sigrid's father's boat.
It was also the boat where the numbers in table three came from, because the chief had emailed them to me herself.
I called at 11:48 p.m.
She picked up on the second ring.
"Mullane," she said. "You change your mind?"
"Is the berth still open?"
"Sign at the office Saturday. We sail Tuesday at six in the morning. Lars Holm's the second mate, he'll check you aboard. I don't wait for anybody."
"I'll be there."
"I know you will," she said, and hung up.
Kat was awake when I got back to our room.
She'd already seen the video. Everybody had.
She hugged me so hard my ribs hurt, then held me out at arm's length.
"Tell me you're about to do something unhinged."
"I'm leaving."
"Leaving him? Thank God. Leaving where?"
"Everywhere," I said. "For nine months."
She stared at me. Then she pulled my duffel bag down from the top of the closet and threw it on the bed.
"Pack your good socks," she said. "Not the cute ones."
At the bottom of my closet was the coat.
Heavy black canvas, frayed at the cuffs, a burn mark on the left one.
It was the coat Prescott had wrapped me in on the ice.
I'd tried to give it back once. He'd said, "Keep it," and changed the subject.
I'd slept under it every night for three years.
I almost left it.
Then I put it on.
My phone buzzed while I packed.
Prescott: "Where are you? I need the CAD files off your laptop for the Engstrom people Monday."
Prescott: "Don't be dramatic, Keira."
Prescott: "You know I'm the one who saved you, right? You owe me this."
I turned the phone off and put it in the bottom of the duffel.
Tuesday, at a quarter to six, I walked down to the ore dock in the dark.
The Astrid Engstrom was longer than three football fields.
Her red hull went up and up into the snow, and her name was painted on the bow in white letters taller than me.
A steel gangway ran from the dock to the deck.
I climbed it with the duffel banging against my legs.
A man stood at the top with a clipboard.
He was tall, about twenty-six, in a black work jacket, with dark curly hair full of snow.
"Name?"
"Keira Mullane. Engine cadet."
He found it on the list and checked it off.
Then he looked at my coat, and he didn't look away.
"Can I see your collar?"
Before I could answer, he reached out and folded the collar back.
Inside, under the fold, in faded black marker, was a name I'd never once turned the collar over far enough to see.
HOLM.
He touched the letters with his thumb.
"That's my coat," he said.
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