The Unsinkable Greta James(12)

She rides the elevator up with a couple so old they both have to hang on to the gold bar that runs along the inside. The woman—who is small and stooped, with brown skin and deep wrinkles and a wispy halo of silvery hair—stares at her hard, then raises a finger to point at Greta’s face. “You’re very pale,” she says with a frown.

Greta nods, because this is true enough. She takes after her mother, whose parents were both from Scotland. She has the same dark hair as Helen did, the same scattered freckles across the bridge of her nose, and the same pale complexion that’s been described as porcelain in so many magazines, her brother jokes that people must think at least one of their ancestors was a toilet.

“Make sure you wear sunblock,” the woman continues. “Just because the sky is gray doesn’t mean it can’t get you.”

“Will do,” Greta says as they come to a stop on the lido deck and the couple starts to shuffle out of the elevator. “Thanks for the tip.”

“You don’t want to look like me when you’re eighty-nine,” the woman calls back over her shoulder, and Greta smiles.

“I should be so lucky.”

At the restaurant, she spots her dad and the rest of the crew across the buffet. They’re sitting at a table in the corner beneath a painting of a grizzly bear, their plates already empty. Her dad holds up a champagne flute when he sees her, and Todd slides another in her direction as she pulls out a chair. He’s already got his binoculars around his neck, ready for the day.

Greta frowns at the glass. “Isn’t it a little early?”

“I thought you were a rock star,” Davis teases, and when Greta takes a sip, she can feel it fizz all the way down her throat.

“What’s the occasion?” she asks.

“Well,” Mary says, beaming, “we got an email from Jason this morning.”

“Which is an occasion in and of itself,” Davis jokes, and Mary looks so excited she doesn’t even bother to roll her eyes at this. Instead, she lets out a happy laugh.

“They got engaged last night!” she says, and when it’s clear that Greta still isn’t sure what’s happening, Mary widens her eyes. “Jason and Olivia.”

For a moment, Greta just stares at her. She’s never even heard of Olivia. Beneath them, the ship lists, and she can feel the champagne sloshing around in her empty stomach. She has to concentrate to keep it from coming back up again.

“Wow,” she says finally, trying to arrange her face into something resembling a smile. “That’s…wow. Congrats. To both of you.”

“Mother and father of the groom,” Mary says, smiling at Davis, who grins back at her. “It has a nice ring to it.”

“Speaking of rings,” Eleanor says, her face brightening at the thought, “did they send a photo?”

“I couldn’t get it to download,” Mary tells her. “But apparently he bought it at a flea market, so who knows…”

“Well, she said yes,” Conrad says. “Which is the important thing.”

Mary lets out a happy sigh. “That’s true. She said yes.”

“How long have they been together?” Greta asks, trying to sound like a vaguely interested childhood friend rather than someone who has been sleeping with their son on and off for the past decade.

“Oh, must be about a year now,” Davis says. “She’s a nice girl. You’ll like her.”

“I’m just happy he’s finally settled down,” Mary says, and for once, Greta doesn’t even care about the look Conrad gives her, which plainly suggests she might think about doing the same. She’s too busy trying to get her head around it: Jason Foster is getting married.

For all her years of teenage pining, and all the chemistry they discovered later, she never really imagined herself with him in that way. Not for real. Jason works on the forty-second floor of a huge international bank. He wears suits every day and takes black cars to the office and always preferred to stay at his place, which is sleek and shiny and has white carpeting so pristine that Greta was afraid to drink red wine there. Her life—the small, cluttered apartment with its wilting plants, the months of travel and the late evenings in bars with random musicians, the nights she wakes up with a tune in her head and sets the room aglow with her phone screen as she tries to capture it—that’s never been for him. They never would’ve worked.

Still, she feels a gut punch at the thought of him marrying someone else. It occurs to her that if they’ve been together for a year, that means he was surely with Olivia that day Greta found him in her old bedroom. She knows she’s not above reproach herself; she was with someone too. But they were on the decline, whether or not Luke realized it yet. Jason, on the other hand, was ramping up to a proposal. And in the Horrible Person Olympics, doesn’t that make him worse?

It’s a particularly strange kind of loss, when something you don’t think you even want gets taken away from you. Greta feels the sting of it, a dull hurt rising from someplace inside her she hadn’t even known was there. She thinks maybe it’s sadness, a tiny sort of grief; but if she’s being really honest, it’s probably something closer to embarrassment, or maybe even jealousy, though for what, she’s not entirely sure. She doesn’t want that life. Not now. And not with him. So then why should this news unsettle her so much?