Chapter 2 - Five Days at Sea
The ship was enormous, gleaming white against a flawless blue horizon, and Adele felt entirely out of place walking up the gangway alone, watching couples and families stream past her in both directions. She found her cabin, unpacked with hands that wouldn't fully stop shaking, and sat on the edge of the narrow bed fighting the urge to simply turn around and fly straight back home.
Then she remembered Franklin's letter, tucked safely inside her carry-on. Go anyway.
So she went.
The first two evenings, dinner at table seven felt achingly strange — a table set for two, though only she ever sat there, the empty chair across from her a quiet, persistent ache she couldn't quite look away from. The waiter, a kind young man named Marcus, seemed to understand without her ever needing to explain a single thing. He simply refilled her water glass, recommended the sea bass, and let the silence between them sit comfortably instead of trying to fill it.
By the third evening, she'd started talking to the empty chair a little, quiet enough that nobody else could overhear.
"You'd have hated the buffet lines, Franklin," she murmured over her soup one night. "Too crowded. You always said crowds made your knees ache before they even actually started aching."
She caught herself smiling, faintly, for what felt like the first time in over a year.
By the fourth day, she'd made two friends at the pool deck — a widower named Gerald traveling with his adult son, and a retired schoolteacher named Louisa who'd lost her own husband three years earlier and understood, without needing a single word of explanation, exactly what Adele was quietly carrying with her on that ship.
"First cruise since?" Louisa asked, settling into the lounge chair beside her.
"First cruise, period," Adele admitted. "We were always going to do it. Then we never quite did."
Louisa nodded slowly. "My Edwin left me a similar note. Fishing trip to Alaska. I went. Cried the entire first day. Laughed considerably more by the last one."
"Does it get any easier? Being here, doing the things you always meant to do together?"
"No," Louisa said honestly. "But it gets less lonely. There's a real difference between those two things, even if it doesn't feel like it some days."
On the morning of the fifth day, an announcement crackled to life over the ship's speaker system just as Adele was finishing her coffee out on the balcony.
"Good morning, everyone. This is Captain Whitfield speaking. Before we continue with today's activities, I have a special request. Would Mrs. Adele Bennett please make her way to the main dining room at your earliest convenience? We have something waiting for you there."
Adele froze, cup halfway to her lips. Her name, spoken clearly across an entire ship full of strangers.
May you like
Franklin.
She set the coffee down with hands that had started trembling all over again and made her way down through the corridors as fast as her legs could reasonably carry her.
