My father was wearing my robe when he told me to leave my own bedroom.
He stood in the center of the master suite with the easy confidence of someone who believed that occupying a space long enough made it his. My silk robe hung loosely on his wide shoulders, open at the chest. In one hand he held my crystal glass of scotch, and with the other he ran his fingers across my duvet as though he were evaluating a hotel suite.
My mother didn’t even bother to glance up.
She sat on the velvet bench at the foot of my bed, one cracked heel resting on her knee while she dipped two fingers into my eight-hundred-dollar face cream, smoothing it onto her skin as casually as if it were cheap drugstore lotion.
“Don’t just stand there, Vanessa,” she said. “Your brother is overwhelmed. You can sleep with the crew.”
I stayed in the doorway, staring at the scene as if a hidden camera might appear at any moment and reveal the joke. The pale curtains, the chrome fixtures in the bathroom, the steady hum of the generators beneath the floor—those were mine. Yet the people occupying the room felt like specters from a life I had spent three years trying to escape.
I couldn’t speak. My throat had tightened too much, and anything I might have said would have changed nothing.
So I turned, slipped past my father without touching him, and walked out onto the aft deck.
The Miami heat wrapped around me instantly—dense air filled with salt, diesel, and the faint scent of sunscreen. I gripped the railing and forced myself to breathe.
Leo stood near the gangway, nervously twisting the brim of his cap in his hands. He was nineteen, new to working on yachts full-time, and still had that sincere look of someone trying desperately to do everything right.
