“Absolutely. Forget all that. Forget about trying to solve everyone’s problems, and all your plotting and scheming. Evie is safe with Vanessa. You said so yourself. Today is just about us. Let’s be a little bad together.”

“Okay … fine. You and me,” I say, giving in to his seductive speech of temporary freedom and smiling up at him. “Let’s be a little bad.”

We board the Narwhal and stow the cooler in the below-deck apartment. Then Lucky quickly unmoors the boat, and while I chew on ginger and don my life jacket, the sky above begins to look overcast. And then more than overcast.

Definitely not a perfect summer day. But I guess it’s still okay to sail.

“Chance of rain,” Lucky reports. “We need to keep an eye on the weather. Hopefully it will stay south of us. I’m not too worried.”

The darkening skies make me nervous, but I know zilch about navigating a boat. So I just nod and take a deep breath.

“Let’s get out of here before anyone catches us,” he tells me, “and find out what it’s like to be free of Beauty for an afternoon.”

Sure. Let’s be a little bad.

Let’s just not get caught.

Chapter 18

NO OVERNIGHT DOCKING: Sign posted on dock at northern end of Rapture Island, several miles south of Beauty. There are more than thirty islands in Narragansett Bay, and Rapture, though uninhabited, is one of the largest. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)

Chapter 18

Lucky was right: Rapture Island is small. Very small.

It’s a little rocky on both ends, with trees in the middle. Among those trees, I can make out a few old buildings—or what remains of them. Just stones, really. And at one end of the island, near a weathered pier, a white-and-red lighthouse beckons like a finger into the water.

Not a single human being in sight.

Just the two of us.

Our own private getaway.

Lucky pilots us to the pier by the lighthouse, shutting off the motor to startling silence. And as he moors the boat, I exit it and tread onto old, gray boards stippled with white bird droppings. The boards bounce like rubber with each step.

It smells good out here, like saltwater and cedar, and as I approach a boxy, gray clapboard dock house on the sandy land at the end of the pier, the sweet scent of shrubby beach roses drifts from beneath its dusty windows.

A painted sign stands between the empty dock house and a footpath that splits between the lighthouse and farther into the island. It reads:

RAPTURE ISLAND

FIRST SETTLED BY THE NARRAGANSETT TRIBES.

SOLD TO EARLY AMERICAN PATRIOT, ROBERT HART.

HAS BEEN: TRADING POST, PIG FARM, RELIGIOUS COLONY.

RAIDED BY THE BRITISH IN 1776.

DESTROYED BY THREE HURRICANES.

SETTLED BY FORK-TAIL ROCK SWALLOWS IN 1969.