CHAPTER ONE
Before my sister Marianne showed up and threw all of our worlds into a giant tailspin, I’d been on the cusp of having the best summer ever. But my life always went haywire when Marianne showed up, and today was no exception.
In my defense, I didn’t think she would follow us onto a cruise ship.
“Dashwoods!” I heard my sister before I saw her. Honestly, it kind of felt like I was in a horror movie, the way my hair stood up on the back of my neck, the drop in my stomach that told me exactly what I’d see when I turned around. “And Edward, I guess! Hey!”
“Oh my God.” Next to me, my oldest sister, Elinor, froze in her place, hands clenched around the passports she was about to distribute to me and her husband, Edward. We were standing just inside the entrance to the Miami cruise terminal, a gigantic mosh pit of security lines and bag scans. It had been stressful enough making our way through the chaos of shouted instructions and ten thousand percent humidity. Now … “That’s not—”
“Surprise!” Before I could even brace myself, my middlest sister, Marianne, jumped on me and Elinor from behind, pulling us into a gigantic squish of a hug. “I’m in Florida!”
“Marianne. Hi.” Elinor got her composure together with a speed I did my best to copy, untangling herself from Marianne’s tanned and toned arms and turning around to face her. “What are you doing here?” A great question. Marianne and her boyfriend, Brandon, lived in New Orleans, and I didn’t know that much about the geography of the South, but I knew that wasn’t, like, a super-easy hop, skip, and a jump away. Was she here to see us off or something? Mom had thrown a big bon voyage party for Elinor, Edward, and me back in New Jersey, and Marianne and Brandon were supposed to come up for that, but they’d backed out at the last minute.
If this was some sort of weird last-ditch effort to make up for it, fine. But I hoped it wouldn’t take long, because I was one gangway and a set of sliding glass doors away from the best summer of my entire life, and I wanted to get it started as quickly as possible.
“I haven’t seen you since Christmas, and that’s the first thing you ask? Damn, Elinor.” Marianne laughed. She had a gigantic suitcase with her, which was weird. And no Brandon, which was even weirder. The two of them were literally always together. Not that I was complaining. These days, Brandon was a lot easier to talk to than my sister. “Are you sure you want to ruin the big surprise that quickly?”
“Surprise?” Edward’s eyes were wide behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “What kind of surprise?”
Marianne held her bracelet-clad arms out wide to the side, almost hitting a visored and Hawaiian-shirted tourist in the process. “I’m coming with you!”
And as she grinned at us in the middle of the terminal walkway, I watched my summer crumble away, like a sandcastle that had been hit by a gigantic, unstoppable wave.
“You—you are?” I asked. We just kept repeating ourselves, the three of us, three people who were supposed to be going on the adventure of a lifetime and had just been saddled with the one person who could mess with it. “What about Brandon?”
My sister’s face, which had been all bright and smiling, sunshine beaming out of her, fell hard and fast.
“Oh, right.” She adjusted her tote bag on her shoulder, pulled her suitcase a little closer. “Brandon and I broke up.”
What the actual hell?
As we all stared, I realized Marianne was crying behind her sunglasses. She was trying to hide it with a painted-on smile, but tears slipped out past the gigantic heart-shaped frames that still weren’t big enough to hide her heartbreak.
Elinor, Edward, and I were frozen in place in front of Marianne, even as our fellow cruisers streamed around us, pushing and shouting to one another. Brandon and Marianne were, in my mind, an immovable force. Theirs was the sort of love that moved mountains, at least according to my sister. And now what—it was just over?
And then I remembered what happened the last time Marianne was heartbroken. Without a great romance to keep her together.
Dread filled my chest, thick and crushing.
* * *
I’D built my life on order and dependence, ever since That Year.
You couldn’t get hurt if you knew when things were coming, if they were planned for. But I’d never planned for this. For the end of Marianne and Brandon, for the idea that Brandon might leave our family, even though he had been part of it forever.
As Elinor pulled Marianne into her arms, murmuring into her ear while throwing a panicked look toward Edward over her shoulder, I worried. As Edward struggled to pull Marianne’s suitcase behind him as well as his own while on the phone with someone at the ship to figure out our new arrival, I worried. And as we stood in what I hoped would be the last line of the day, waiting to board the ship, I worried.
Because Marianne had one major skill, these days, and it was making my life harder.
She didn’t mean to. I assumed she didn’t mean to, anyway. But my sister was a tornado of chaos and energy, an actual hurricane of a human. And I’d been super into that once. When I was younger, and I’d prided myself on being just like Marianne.
But then we’d gotten so badly, terribly hurt, and I’d disappeared into Elinor’s shadow, where I’d hoped Marianne couldn’t follow me. And for the most part, these last five years, she hadn’t.
I’d watched a lot of horror movies in my day, and I knew one thing to be true—when you were somewhere as enclosed as a ship with the thing you were trying to avoid, you’d run into it at every opportunity.
While my two older sisters were still talking, and Edward was trying to massage some life back into his shoulder after pulling two hundred pounds of suitcase down a super-long hallway, I pulled out my phone, started drafting a text to the guy I’d assumed would be my brother-in-law one day. Who I’d already thought of as a brother.
What happened??? I backspaced, deleting my words. Tried again. Did Marianne—
No, I didn’t even know what I was asking, couldn’t begin to comprehend what could have caused this. Marianne knew she needed him.
I’d text him later, I decided, once I talked to Elinor. Once she’d caught me up on whatever the hell was happening here. Still, I scrolled up through our messages for a second. Brandon and I had last texted only a couple of days ago. Even though Marianne and I didn’t talk much between her sporadic visits home, Brandon always kept me up-to-date on what was going on with their life, sending snapshots of the little herb garden he kept on their balcony and telling me how the different plants were progressing.
Which, yes, I admit sounds wildly boring, but when you compared it to what Marianne was like without Brandon … I liked boring.
He couldn’t be gone.
And, look, normally, I would be great in a crisis like this. I’d been promoted to the head of the lifeguarding team last summer after pulling a little kid out of the deep end; even when her mom was freaking out, I was the one who called 911 and kept the rest of the kids calm. And around the Dashwood residence, I’d learned from Elinor how to keep my head cool in any situation. That time Edward had gotten poison ivy so bad that he looked like the rash-covered version of Violet from Willy Wonka? I’d been the one to talk him down from his panic while Elinor covered him in calamine lotion. When my mom had been wailing about never being able to afford to send me to college, I’d found a school where I could get a swimming scholarship. I loved fixing things.
But I never knew how to handle a Marianne crisis. Maybe because deep down, in the places where I shoved the parts of me I didn’t want to deal with, we were too alike. Both prone to dramatics and heartbreak. And even though I’d spent the last five years ignoring that side of myself, trying to emulate Elinor in every way I could … being around Marianne had a way of bringing it out in me.
But not this time, I thought, tucking my phone back in the pocket of my shorts. In the years since Marianne and Brandon had gotten together, since our lives had calmed down and I’d been able to put myself back into one piece, I’d learned how to act more like Elinor than Marianne. To fill my life with order and plans, not instinct and chaos. I could keep it that way. No matter what was happening with Marianne.
Right?
Right.
CHAPTER TWO
Just ignore her, I told myself, as we inched ever so slowly forward in line. Not that Marianne was an easy person to ignore, but this was my summer. No matter who had showed up unexpectedly. I could handle it.
And even though Elinor was distracted by Marianne, I still had Edward.
“Did you know the ship has Broadway-caliber shows?” I asked him, brushing my red curls back from my forehead as we shuffled forward, as if I could force everything to go back to normal by pretending it still was. “And there’s three pools.” That would have been one for each of us if Marianne hadn’t arrived. Maybe she’d share with Elinor.
“Well, did you know they have to make the pools on cruise ships smaller because of the weight of the water?” Edward responded, and I held back my grin. No matter how early it was, Edward couldn’t help but be a fact-spewing machine. Dressed in a light-blue-striped button-down and a pair of khaki shorts, with a wide-brimmed hat to protect his skin from what he described as the harsh Florida rays, he looked like a professor who’d gotten lost on an archaeological dig. “People don’t think about it, but the weight of all that water at the very top of the ship could topple the whole thing over if it wasn’t carefully designed.”
“Horrifying, but good to know.” Edward Ferrars was one of my favorite people in the entire world. Maybe it was corny and weird for your brother-in-law to be one of your favorite people in the world, especially since he was ten years older than me, but I wasn’t not corny and weird, so we’d go with it. Medium height and deeply dorky, with pale skin that made even me look tan and brown hair that stuck up in every direction, he was, according to Elinor, one of the most popular pastors at his church because his sermons were always half as long as everyone else’s. “We’re assuming this is one of the well-designed ones?”
“They certainly made it sound that way during my new employee orientation Zoom.” We could just see the ship rising above us through the glass windows that surrounded us, and Edward eyed it nervously. “Though I suppose they wouldn’t say if it wasn’t.”
“Not if they want to retain any of said new employees,” I agreed. Edward’s job was the reason we were on this dream cruise in the first place. While the Dashwoods were rarely (never) world travelers, Edward had gotten the sickest gig ever for the summer as a chaplain (aka, boat pastor) on a cruise ship for six weeks. Elinor would be joining him, of course, and as my high school graduation present, they’d taken advantage of Edward’s family discount and invited me.
I’d been stoked. An entire summer with just my favorite sister and brother-in-law? Yes please! We’d have the time of our lives, we wouldn’t be stuck in Barton, New Jersey, and I’d get to suck up as much family bonding time as I could before I headed off to start my freshman year at UC San Diego in the fall.
It was so typical of Marianne, too, to just show up and ruin everything, just like—
No! No, I refused to dwell on Marianne. So she was coming with us. Fine. I’d deal with the consequences of that later. Because now, as we pushed through the last checkpoint and headed up the gangway, stepping on the wood-paneled deck for the first time and then being ushered into a huge atrium …
We were finally on board the Queen Mab, and she was absolutely gorgeous.
You know that scene in old movies, musicals especially, where the plucky young heroine has her two packed suitcases and steps off a train platform and into the Big Beautiful World for the first time? That’s what this felt like. Like I was an ingenue from a sepia-toned movie with a tilted hat and a big dream, finally leaving the farm (I mean, I guess I was literally leaving our New Jersey farm) to follow my dreams. Even though Marianne had thrown a gigantic wrench into my summer plans, I had the undeniable feeling that finally my life was beginning.
“Wow,” I breathed, and even the others seemed impressed, temporarily quieted in awe. Elinor had told me that the Queen Mab was considered a modest ship by modern cruising standards: older, without things like waterslides and rock walls and forty decks of wet ’n’ wild fun. But if this was small, if this was old, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what the newer, bigger ships were like. Queen Mab was a floating world, a skyscraper turned on its side and pushed out among the waves.
The whole ship, as far as I could see (not that I could see the whole ship, how could you even begin to see the whole ship?), was designed with an innate elegance that took my breath away. The atrium we’d walked into was open and airy, rising up and up, with walkways crisscrossing over our heads. Branching off the big open space were dozens of hallways, each leading to new and exciting parts unknown, stairs that went up and down onto balconies and over portholes. And way, way above our heads, the pièce de résistance: a stunning chandelier of gold and glass that shimmered and spun over a grand, central staircase.
The rest of the decorations and flourishes were done in royal blues and stately golds, and every inch of the ship gleamed with painstaking attention to detail. It was like I’d stepped into my favorite shows, the best movies, the inside of all the travel books Brandon used to bring me. (Don’t think about Brandon, move Brandon to the Do Not Consider List.) Dreams of a future that looked exactly like this one were all that had sustained me when things were at their worst, and now I was finally living life at its very best.
I squealed, louder than I meant to.
“Easy.” Elinor laughed, pushing a piece of frizzy auburn hair that had fallen out of her bun back behind her ear. (When I’d suggested she try a more casual hairstyle for our summer at sea, she’d said she’d “used a fun scrunchie!” and I’d let it go.) “She’s lovely though, isn’t she?”
“Spectacular,” Edward agreed, returning the hand sanitizer he’d just used to his fanny pack, and he squeezed Elinor’s hand for just a second before dropping it again. The two of them weren’t big on PDA, but considering I was going to be on a single boat—ship, Edward kept reminding me that calling it a boat was disrespectful, somehow—with them for a month and a half, I wasn’t complaining. Just because I was Team E+E didn’t mean I needed to see them be all mushy and gross. They could save that sort of thing for their room. Marianne had wandered a little to the side, examining a huge ship’s wheel in the center of the atrium that looked like it actually spun.
“Our cabins are just a couple of decks down,” Elinor said, pulling over to the side and taking a folder out of her backpack that was stuffed to the brim with documents. We mostly had the atrium to ourselves—I saw a few people on the upper decks, but that was it—and I took the opportunity to move a little farther from my oldest sister, touching every marble column and admiring the intricate pattern of the carpet. When I looked closely, I realized there were tiny anchors woven into the pattern. Adorable. “We should head down and get settled. Edward, you have a crew training at ten, and then I guess the three of us…”
I wandered out of earshot, since I didn’t really want to hear about all the plans that were supposed to be for just me and Elinor and now had Marianne attached to them. Besides, the ship’s wheel Marianne had discovered was gorgeous. It was a deep, polished mahogany, and, oh my God, it did spin. What a world.
“It’s like one of your pirate books,” Marianne said as I lazily moved the wheel beneath my hands. I had to admit, she was right. If I closed my eyes, I could be on a pirate ship somewhere in the Mediterranean, swashbuckling with the best of them. “What are the chances we get boarded by an actual Will Turner lookalike?”
“I wouldn’t joke about that.” I shot a quick glance back at Edward and Elinor, who were luckily too engrossed in their schedules to hear us. “I mentioned pirates once to Elinor, and she sent me articles about hostile takeovers of boats for a week straight. Apparently, it’s not as romantic as it seems.”
“Devastating.” Marianne sighed, spinning the wheel the other way. It was weird to see her without a smile on her face, especially in her brightly pink-patterned Lilly Pulitzer explosion, topped with a wide, floppy-brimmed hat over blond waves. Once she’d gotten together with Brandon, she’d smiled all the time. Now she just looked … like she was missing something. Not just a person. But, like, a limb. She looked empty. Usually the problem with Marianne was that she was too much. Now it looked like she wasn’t enough. “I could use some dashing in my life.”
Right, I thought. That was how Marianne had always preferred her guys. Swashbuckling and just as chaotic as she was. It was how I’d used to prefer them, too. Not that I’d ever really dated, considering I was only thirteen when Marianne tore her whole life apart over a guy. I’d learned that lesson early—romance was only worth pursuing if you knew it would be safe. For example, Edward was safe. I’d thought Brandon was safe, too.
Copyright © 2024 by Amanda Quain
