Chapter 1 - The Sea Was Supposed to Be Our Beginning
On my honeymoon cruise, I went below deck for seasick pills and heard my husband rehearsing how he'd push me overboard.
The Caribbean air was supposed to taste like the start of a perfect life. By the third day of my honeymoon, it tasted like something closing over my head.
The yacht was a wedding gift from my father — sixty feet of teak and glass and quiet money, the kind of boat that makes people on the dock stop and stare. My father built his fortune from nothing and spent a piece of it on this. It should have felt like a dream. By day three it felt like a cell that happened to float.
For three days I'd been sinking into a heaviness I couldn't explain. I'd sleep ten hours and wake up exhausted. My words came out slow. My hands didn't always do what I told them.
Bennett — my husband, my handsome, attentive husband — would sit on the edge of the bed and smooth my hair back and tell me it was just seasickness. Every night he brought me two little white pills and a glass of water and watched me swallow them. I trusted him completely.
Until that afternoon.
Something in me clawed its way up through the fog and forced my eyes open. The cabin spun. I put one hand flat against the paneled wall and used it to walk myself out of the suite, one slow step at a time. By the time I reached the landing halfway up the main staircase, there was nothing left in my legs. I sank down against the cold brass rail and tried to breathe.
That's when I heard the champagne glasses touch, somewhere on the deck below me. Then laughter.
"How careful are you being with the dose?" A clipped, businesslike voice. Roland. My father-in-law.
"Relax, Dad. Two every night, and I put a little extra in her soup at lunch. By midnight she won't be able to lift her head off the pillow." Bennett sounded bored. Like a man reading a grocery list.
My heart went off like a fist against my ribs.
"So we do it tonight?" That was Marguerite. My mother-in-law. The woman who kissed my cheek every morning and called me "my girl."
"Tonight," Bennett said. "There's weather coming in after midnight. The crew stays below in weather like that. I'll wake her up, tell her the fresh air will help her stomach, and walk her to the stern. One push. The ocean does the rest."
"And the money?" Roland again. "When does the capital actually clear?"
Bennett laughed — a low, empty sound with nothing behind it. "She signed the power of attorney before the wedding. She just doesn't know it. Once the authorities call her lost at sea, three hundred million moves into the accounts in Liechtenstein."
Marguerite let out a bright, pleased little laugh. "God. The stupid girl really thinks she married a fairy tale." A pause. "And her parents?"
"They drive up to the Tahoe house next week. My people are already in position. The brakes go out on a mountain pass, and the whole Wexford family gets to be together again."
My stomach turned over. I clamped both hands over my mouth to keep the sound in, and my nails cut into my own palms. They were drinking my father's champagne, on my father's boat, raising a toast to wiping out my family.
The drug was rising in me again, thick and gray, pulling at the edges of everything. Outside the hull, the ocean moved in the dark, patient, already waiting for me.
May you like
A few hours until midnight. Alone. International waters. Surrounded by people who smiled at me across the dinner table and were counting the minutes until I drowned.
What do I have to do to live through the night?
