Sharks don’t drop everything and take on roles they’re ill-suited for to make things right for their sisters. They don’t drive six hours for a pile of someone else’s quilts. They don’t dig around in cabinets to cook dinner for someone who’s had a shitty day. And they don’t pull a second shift through the night to keep someone they barely know from doing something dangerous and impetuous on too little sleep.
Most of all, they don’t violate their own sense of honor and justice to save David from Goliath.
Rhys is wearing a shark suit, but he’s something else underneath.
I need to know what.
11
Rhys
I’m relieved when Eden finally nods off, her head tipped against a bit of the fleece blanket she’s folded between her and the window.
I’m glad to see her eyes closed. To hear her breathing even out and deepen.
Partly because it gives me a minute to think.
I can’t believe she guessed about the email. And I can’t believe I confirmed it for her.
If anyone ever finds out, I’ll be disbarred.
Still, I wouldn’t take it back. If I had to do it over again, I’d do it the same way.
And I’m not sorry she knows.
We climb the mountains while she sleeps, a little rain falling as we pass through the Cascades’ windward towns. This drive is better in the daytime, obviously, but at least there’s no chance of freezing in early September.
The car’s clock tips over past midnight.
We’ve just crossed the Columbia River, following the freeway on its turn north, when the engine stutters the first time.
I tell myself I imagined it. Because that’s the kind of thing you’d imagine. Driving a rented luxury car, jilted bride sleeping in the seat next to you. Chasing her fiancé across the state of Washington. And then: car trouble.
Seriously, that can’t happen in real life.
Even so, I’m braced, listening, for miles.
I’ve just relaxed when it comes again. And this time it’s not so much a stutter as a—pause. Like a broken heart.
Fuuuuck.
I take the next exit and find myself…in the middle of nowhere.
Eden rouses. “What?” she asks. “Where are we? What are you doing?”
“Shh,” I say. “Go back to sleep. It’s nothing.”
The engine chooses that moment to jolt alarmingly.
“That didn’t sound like nothing,” she says, sitting fully upright. “And neither doesthat.”
The engine’s whining now, like a child about to tantrum, which is pretty apt. And I’m not the guy who changes his own oil or tinkers under the hood, but I did grow up on a ranch driving aging trucks, so I recognize the sound of a failing fuel pump.
“Can you GPS the nearest gas station for me?” I ask her.
She does and gives me directions.
We really are fucking nowhere. In the dark, the landscape is featureless. Part of me wonders if I should have stayed on the highway, called for a tow. The rental car company would have been on the hook to arrange it. Now we’re here. Wherever here is.
