The Woman in Cabin 10(24)

“Don’t,” I said urgently.

“Lo, what I did, I was a shit, I know I was—”

“I said don’t. It’s over.”

He shook his head, but his words, somehow, had stopped my crying. Maybe it was the sight of him, stricken, hunched, and so very miserable.

“But, Lo.” He looked up at me, his brown eyes puppy-dog soft in the soft bedside light. “Lo, I—”

“No!” It came out harsher and louder than I meant, but I had to shut him up. I wasn’t sure what he was about to say, but whatever it was, I was certain I couldn’t afford for him to say it. I was stuck on this boat with Ben for the next five days. I couldn’t let him embarrass himself more than he already had done, or this trip would become unendurable when we had to rub shoulders in the cold light of day. “Ben, no,” I said more gently. “It was over a long time ago. Anyway, you were the one who wanted out, remember?”

“I know,” he said wretchedly. “I know. I was a twat.”

“You weren’t,” I said. And then, feeling dishonest: “Okay, you were. But I know I wasn’t the easiest— Look, that’s not the point now. We’re friends, right?” That was overstating it, but he nodded. “Okay, then don’t screw this up.”

“All right,” he said. He stood up painfully and swiped at his face with the arm of his dinner jacket, then looked at it ruefully. “Hope they’ve got an onboard dry cleaner.”

“Hope they’ve got an onboard dress mender.” I nodded at the rip all the way up the side of the gray silk dress.

“Will you be all right?” Ben said. “I could stay. I don’t mean that in a sleazy way. I could sleep on the couch.”

“You totally could,” I agreed, looking at the length of it, and then shook my head as I realized how my words sounded. “No, you couldn’t. It’s big enough, but you can’t; I don’t need you to. Go back to your cabin. For Christ’s sake, we’re on board a ship in the middle of the ocean—it’s about the safest place I could possibly be.”

“All right.” He walked, hobbling slightly, to the door and half opened it, but he didn’t actually go. “I—I’m sorry. I mean it.”

I knew what he was waiting for, hoping for. Not just forgiveness, but something more, something that would tell him that squeeze wasn’t completely unwanted.

I was damned if I’d give it to him.

“Go to bed, Ben,” I said, very weary, and very sober. He stood in the doorway a moment longer, just a millisecond too long, long enough for me to wonder, with a shift in my stomach that echoed the shifting sea, what I would do if he didn’t go. What I’d do if he shut the door and turned around and came back into the room. But then he turned and went, and I locked the door after him and then collapsed onto the sofa with my head in my hands.

At long last, I don’t know how much later, I got up, poured myself a whiskey from the minibar, and drank it down in three long gulps like medicine. I shuddered, wiped my mouth, and peeled off my dress, leaving it coiled on the floor like a sloughed-off skin.

I stripped off my bra, stepped out of the sad little pile of clothes, and then fell into bed and into a sleep so deep, it felt like drowning.


I don’t know what woke me up—only that I shot into consciousness as if someone had stabbed me in the heart with a syringe of adrenaline. I lay there rigid with fear, my heart thumping at about two hundred beats per minute, and I scrabbled for the soothing phrases I’d repeated to Ben just a few hours before.

You’re fine, I told myself. You’re completely safe. We’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean—no one can get in or away. It’s about the safest place you could possibly be.

I was clutching the sheets with a rigor mortis–like grip, and I forced my stiff fingers to relax and flexed them slowly, feeling the pain in my knuckles subside. I concentrated on breathing in . . . and out. In . . . and out. Slow and steady, until at last my heart followed suit, and I could no longer feel its frantic pounding in my chest.

The drumming in my ears subsided. Apart from the rhythmic shush of the waves, and the low engine hum that permeated every part of the vessel, I couldn’t hear anything.

Shit. Shit. I had to get a grip.

I couldn’t self-medicate with booze every night for the rest of this trip, not without sabotaging my career and flushing any chance of advancement at Velocity down the drain. So that left—what? Sleeping pills? Meditation? None of that seemed much better.

I rolled over and switched on the light and checked my phone: 3:04 a.m. Then I refreshed my e-mail. There was nothing from Judah, but I was too wide-awake now to go back to sleep. I sighed and picked up my book instead, lying splayed like a broken-backed bird on the bedside table, and opened it to the last page I’d read.

But although I tried to concentrate on the words, something niggled at the corner of my mind. It wasn’t just paranoia. Something had woken me up. Something that left me jumpy and strung out as a meth addict. Why did I keep thinking of a scream?

I was turning the page when I heard something else, something that barely registered above the sound of the engine and the slap of the waves, a sound so soft that the scrape of paper against paper almost drowned it out.

It was the noise of the veranda door in the next cabin sliding gently open.