The Waves by Matayo Amy

Author:Matayo, Amy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance
Publisher: SYG Productions
Published: 2019-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Onboard the Ship

He’d gotten word that the girl’s father had stayed behind at the last port to look for his daughter while the mother stayed here to see if she might show up. That should ease the captain’s conscience a bit, but it didn’t. He couldn’t get the mother’s words out of his head.

What kind of people are you that you would just leave her out there alone?

He’d seen this situation before…so many times before. Careless passengers who miss the boat and have to rejoin them at the next port via another cruise ship or a private water-taxi. And that’s only if they remembered to take their passports. If not, things were much more difficult. Hold-ups at the Embassy, extra security at the airports, pat downs, suspicions, questions. So many questions. He’d seen it take several days in the past. Eventually though, they made their way home.

But this time he couldn’t shake the feeling something was wrong. He could feel it in his gut. A churning down deep, a shadow hovering overhead. Like the panic that comes from momentarily losing your child in a supermarket. Like that strange moment that descends right before you answer the phone—a foreboding of bad news on the other side—and being blindsided by the news of your youngest daughter’s horrible accident.

He told the mother he had three daughters.

He didn’t tell her that one of them had spent the last ten years living in a wheelchair with a brain so low-functioning that she could barely hold her head up. He didn’t tell her his daughter had to be fed with tubes coming out of her nose and hadn’t had an actual bite of anything since the accident. A drunk driver had plowed straight into her car door at full speed when his daughter was driving home from college to celebrate his birthday. His birthday. Something he would have to live with for the rest of his life. He no longer celebrated the passing years. How can you celebrate life on a day that—in most of the ways that matter—caused a beloved daughter’s death? No birthdays for him. Never again.

Doctors thought it a miracle his daughter had survived at all. He wasn’t sure if he thought it a miracle or a cruel twist of fate.

The drunk driver survived without a scratch.

That was the cruelest twist of all.

The captain checked on the missing girl again last night, asked a crew member to find out if she had ever been located. The woman came back with the news; the local police found a recent charge on the girl’s credit card, but the girl was still missing and the mother was beside herself. The combination was troubling, because although the authorities couldn’t pinpoint who made the charge, it was a clear indication that something was amiss. The obvious sign points to a runaway, but who runs away at twenty-eight years old?

As for the man she left with—Liam something or other—there was no word on him. To the captain’s knowledge, his parents hadn’t come forward, his brother seeming to be the only one concerned.

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