“Is he . . . awake?” Beckett asked and peered over the bow.

“No. And I can’t get him in your boat. We’ll have to drag him. He’s so sunburned, Beckett. My God . . .” A sob escaped just as the low hum of motors and horns drew near. The Coast Guard had arrived.

Beckett said, “I gave them the coordinates.”

Men in blue uniforms and caps took over, hollering instructions, placing Gavin on a board and lifting him into their own boat, where he would receive medical attention. As Colleen watched, they expertly slipped in an IV and settled an oxygen mask on his face.

Beckett and Colleen climbed onto a second Coast Guard boat, as they had no light of their own to guide the way home. The men spoke in solemn tones. The boat with Gavin took off, rocking them all as they grabbed the edges and poles of the boat that would take Beckett and Colleen back to Watersend while the first would take Gavin to the hospital in Savannah.

He was alone; her sweet dad with his ravaged body on a stretcher, alone on that boat with strangers.

Chapter Thirty-two

I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it is.

Vladimir Nabokov, interview, BBC Television, 1962

Gavin Donohue lay supine on the hospital bed, his toes pointing west and east under the tented blanket. Machines beeped and squealed and Gavin was oblivious to all of it, his eyes closed and his body still. The lines on his face had etched deeper somehow, the sunburn evident and flaming around his face. His eyes were closed, the lids puffy and red, the veins blue beneath skin so fragile. His chapped lips were covered with thick white cream. He breathed—in, out, in, out—slowly, intermittently, without any smooth rhythm. Colleen stood with Hallie and Shane around his bedside, all bearing their own guilt for where their dad was and why and, Colleen knew, each sibling in some small way blaming the others. If this or if that or if only.

They stared at him, no one speaking, until Dr. Matthews entered—a tall, thin woman with dark hair and a white lab coat with iodine stains on the sleeve. She stood at the end of Gavin’s bed, her hands placed evenly across the footboard, her stethoscope dangling from her neck. She cleared her voice before she spoke.

“You are all his children?”

“Yes,” they answered in unison.

“I’m sorry, but your father’s condition is critical.” Her voice held steady as if this wasn’t a damning verdict but something one said every day.

“Dad,” Hallie said. “Dad, not Father.”

Colleen knew why she corrected the doctor about something so trivial at a time like this—because it mattered. Dad always said it: names matter.