The Unsinkable Greta James(71)

It’s not easy to turn such a big ship.

A new song comes on, slower this time, and around them, several couples wobble to their feet. After a moment, Ben stands too. “I think we should dance,” he says, holding out a hand, and then he leads her solemnly out onto the floor and pulls her close.

Greta can’t remember the last time she danced like this. It was probably with Jason at Asher’s wedding, the two of them leaving enough space to maintain the illusion that this was just a neighborly friendship, even as he slipped the key to his hotel room into her hand. But this is different. She wants to think it’s corny, her cheek pressed against his chest, his hands knotted against the small of her back, but she can’t muster any kind of cynicism right now.

“Can I tell you something?” Ben says, leaning back to look at her, his eyes searching hers. “It’s not just because of his writing.”

“What?” she asks, confused.

“The reason I’m so inspired by Jack London. It’s because he lived this great big life.”

The song ends, and the DJ puts on something faster, and the dance floor begins to empty again. Greta stops moving, and Ben does too, their arms still around each other. They just stand there under the swirling lights.

“He wasn’t only a writer,” Ben says with an odd sort of urgency. “He was a sailor, an explorer, a boxer, an oyster pirate, an activist. He went up to the Klondike when he was only twenty-one to seek his fortune, which sounds so wild and romantic, but in the end it was writing that really did it for him. He was this gutsy, intrepid adventurer, you know? But he was also just a guy with a pen.”

Greta watches the lights flicker across his face. He lowers his arms and takes a step back. Above them, a disco ball twirls, bathing the room in silver.

“I mean, look around,” he says, and she does: at the last few swaying couples, the people at the bar, the man falling asleep in the corner. “How many people really live? Like, really and truly do something big with their lives?” His eyes find Greta’s again, and there’s an intensity to them she hasn’t seen before. “I have a good life. But until recently, it’s been a small one too. And mostly I’m okay with that. But every once in a while, I look around and it sort of cracks me over the head. How contained it all is. How safe. And it makes me realize how few risks I’ve taken.” He reaches for her hands, both of them. When he speaks again, his voice is determined. “I want to take more risks. I want to make it count.”

She doesn’t know if he’s talking about this night. Or this moment. Or something altogether bigger. But either way, she understands.

Either way, she wants to make it count too.





Chapter Twenty-Eight


Sometime in the night, Greta must’ve agreed to go on some sort of excursion with Ben this morning. She has absolutely no memory of this, but nevertheless she wakes to find him standing over the bed in a green hooded sweatshirt that says SAVE THE WHALES, looking entirely too enthusiastic for seven a.m.

“Hey.” He nudges her shoulder. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.”

She yawns. “What’s happening now?”

“Whale watching,” he says, beaming, but then his smile slips. “You didn’t forget, did you?”

“Can you forget something you don’t remember knowing in the first place?”

He sits on the edge of the bed and leans over her, smelling of mint toothpaste. “Trust me, we’re going to have a whale of a time,” he says. Then—even as she rolls her eyes at him—he kisses her on the nose.

Looking out the window, she can see that the ship has docked flush up against a huge wooden pier, beyond which there’s nothing but forest, everything green and thick and wooded. A seagull flies low past the veranda, and they can hear laughter from the people next door.

“Where are we again?” Greta asks, rolling onto her stomach. Her head is pounding, her mouth full of cotton. “And how much did we drink last night?”

“Icy Strait Point,” Ben says as he stands and walks over to the dresser. “And a lot.”

When he turns around again, he’s holding a small worn paperback. He hands it over carefully, almost reverently, and she sees that it’s an old copy of The Call of the Wild, the spine cracked, the pages foxed and yellow.

“I thought you said you had a spare.”

He shrugs. “I have plenty of others.”

“Yeah, but this one…” She looks up at him. “It must be worth something.”

“Only to me,” he says with a smile. “It was my first ever copy.”

She stares down at the cover, a faded illustration of two dogs locked in battle. A classic story of the frozen North, it says.

“Ben, I can’t take this.”

“It’s just a loan,” he insists. “But that copy—it’s magic. It changed my whole life.”

“It’s too important,” she says, trying to hand it back to him.

But he only smiles. “I trust you with important things.”

A few minutes later, she has it tucked under her arm as she sneaks out into the hallway in a pair of Ben’s sweatpants and an oversized Dave Matthews Band hoodie. She pauses to check her phone. Six new messages from Howie. Her heart sinks a little further with each one.