“Your daughters are lucky, you know that?” He gave a sheepish nod and Linda had to laugh. It felt as if years of closely wrapped chains fell away. Inside, teenage Linda wanted to dance. “Is Bartok v. Price spelling full-time employment for you?” He smiled, looking pleased. “With any luck.”

***

Marissa swallowed down the last of her soy meal shake with fake chocolate flavor and surveyed the two envelopes—both junk—that had been in her mailbox. Work was hectic, the food tasted bland and she remained afraid to do so much as sprinkle some salt on the boxed dinners for fear of messing with a magic formula of some kind. Ocky wanted to completely overhaul their questionnaire style, her mother still wasn’t speaking to her and Linda could be dead for all she knew.

She was about to throw away both envelopes when she realized that one might not be junk at all. It was from the cruise line—she’d mistaken the splashy logo for an ad. She slit it open and extracted several sheets of paper. A check fluttered onto the floor. After she picked it up she saw it was a refund for a substantial portion of the cruise price. She’d have to forward it to her mother, since her mother had paid for the trip. She mentally dashed off the note.

Dear Mom,

Thank you again for the lovely cruise. Because of the circumstances, the cruise line has refunded some of your money.The check is enclosed. I am still pursuing a settlement from the trip insurance company and hope at least to get the value of the books, camera and clothes back.

Love, Marissa

P.S. Still a lesbian.

The other pages were copies of press releases relevant to the explosion. There was a technical explanation of the decompression and a complete passenger manifest to aid those with trip insurance in filing their claims. Marissa glanced down the list and realized that there were very few passengers whose names she’d even known. She scanned it a second time. She had found one very familiar name—but oughtn’t there be two?

Between Cedras, Anthony and Chandler, Susan, was Chabot, Marissa. But Bartok, Linda was not on the list.

Further down was a Price, Lindsey. Lindsey was the only remotely close match to “Linda” on the entire list.

Confused more than anything else, she sat down at her laptop and hit the search engines. “Linda Bartok” brought back hundreds of thousands of pages, the most relevant promising information about classical music. It was exactly the same result as she’d gotten when she’d first thought she might find Linda through the Internet.

Recalling that first exchange of names, she limited the search by adding “Boston.” That resulted in still over a thousand hits and the first few were for real estate. She changed “Linda” to “Lindsey,” kept “Bartok” and added “Price.” To her relief, she got back only three dozen with all the search terms.

Sometimes, when Marissa wasn’t paying attention, memories of the beach, coconuts, hot sun and cool breezes would well up inside her and for a few moments she would be right there, with Linda nearby. She’d never known such warmth and ease.