A Second Chance at Love novel · Chapter 6 of 12

Chapter 6: Wet Pages

He didn't stop at the bottom of the ladder.

He let go and dropped into the slip feet first.

The splash came up over the dock edge and soaked my knees.

For one second there was nothing but black water and broken ice knocking together.

Then his head came up, his hair flat, his mouth open on a gasp I felt in my own chest.

He had the bag in one fist.

"Line!" somebody yelled from the deck.

Two deckhands were already throwing one. It landed across his shoulders on the first try.

Of course it did.

They hauled him to the ladder, and he came up it slowly, one rung at a time, with my notebook clamped in his teeth by the plastic.

On the dock he dropped it into my hands.

His lips were blue. He was shaking so hard his teeth clicked.

"Your notebook," he said.

I didn't think.

I pulled the coat off my shoulders and put it around his.

It was the first time it had been on him in three years.

I held the front of it closed with both fists, and he stood there dripping into it, staring at me.

Sigrid was ten feet away with her phone half raised.

"It slipped," she said. "It was an accident. Obviously."

The chief had come down the gangway at a run, which I hadn't known she could do.

She looked at Lars, at me, at Sigrid.

"Obviously," she said, in a voice that could have peeled paint.

Sigrid put her phone away.

The pages came out of the bag in one soggy brick.

The chief carried it into the engine room.

We peeled them apart one by one with a butter knife from the galley and hung them over the warm handrails around the main engine.

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