“Boggs, I know Nantucket wasn’t on your dream sheet.”

Kodiak. Clearwater. Wailuku. Cape May. Honolulu. Juneau.

Nope. No sign of Nantucket on his dream sheet. Not that the dream sheet always mattered. Obviously not. Otherwise he’d be sipping a hot cup of coffee in Alaska right now.

“What’ve you got against Nantucket?” Duncan asked. “Most guys have the island at the top of their list.”

Cody shrugged. “Just never been a fan.”

Okay, so when he’d thought of Duncan as a friend, maybe he’d exaggerated a little. They were friends, but his master chief didn’t know the whole truth. Why he’d joined the Coast Guard. Why he didn’t want to be here. Why seeing Louisa was like seeing a ghost. Why it wrecked him to think—even for a second—how differently today could’ve gone.

If Duncan had known any of that, Cody had to believe he never would’ve allowed him to come here in the first place.

“Just let me get back to work, Master Chief,” Cody said.

Duncan eyed him as if deciding whether or not he wanted to issue a directive and force Cody to go home.

“Fine,” he finally said. He leaned back in his chair. “I need someone I can trust in my corner. Guys don’t always respond well to new leadership, and these guys need to function as a team. You know that.”

Cody forced himself to listen. It was important to hear the master chief’s vision, important the two of them were on the same page.

But the image of Louisa—pale-faced with blue lips and that striking red hair, limp on the deck of the rescue boat—assaulted his memory yet again.

What was she doing out there alone at that hour—without a life vest, no less? If she were here, he’d tell her exactly what he thought of her extracurricular activities. After all, they’d never been the kind of friends who beat around the bush. Whatever the opposite of passive-aggressive was, that was Louisa. She had never hesitated to speak her mind, but she did it in a way that made everyone fall in love with her.

He’d never met anyone who didn’t like Louisa Chambers. She was witty and smart and adorable. At least she had been. She’d gotten a little surly at the hospital. Maybe he simply had that effect on women.

He and Louisa had never actually “met.” They’d just always known each other. There were pictures of them in diapers together. Their parents had met in college ages ago, and since not a single one of them had a sibling, they all sort of adopted each other, became each other’s family.

Sometimes Cody wondered if their mothers had intentionally gone into labor on the same day, as if they could’ve planned for such a thing.