“I’d lost my wife, the only person who mattered to me. I couldn’t afford her medical treatments. They cost too much money, money I never had but others did. I blamed myself. Everything seemed so unfair. I wanted revenge for all the suffering I’d gone through. I wanted Jason Lambert to lose as much as I did.”

“His life,” Alice said.

“Yes.”

“It was not yours to take.”

“I know that now,” I said, looking down. “But . . .” I hesitated. “That’s why I never went through with it. I never detonated that mine. I hid it away. Please believe me. Someone else must have exploded it. I can’t explain. It’s been torturing me ever since it happened. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know I’m to blame . . .”

I began to cry. Alice touched my head softly, then rose to her feet.

“Do you remember the last thing you did on the Galaxy that night?” she asked.

I closed my eyes. I pictured myself in those final seconds on deck. The rain was beating down, my elbows were on the railing, my head was hanging low, staring at the dark waves. It was a terrible moment. I was thinking about how I had failed you, Annabelle, and the horror I’d been ready to commit in my grief, and what a pathetic, empty man I had become.

“Benjamin?” Alice asked again. “What was the last thing you did?”

My eyes opened slowly, as if coming out of a trance. Finally, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I confessed the truth, whispering the words I had been hiding all this time, from you, from Alice, from myself.

“I jumped.”

* * *

A long time seemed to pass before I spoke again. Alice had her hands clasped under her chin.

“I didn’t want to live anymore,” I whispered.

“I know. I heard you.”

“How? I never spoke.”

“Despair has its own voice. It is a prayer unlike any other.”

I looked down, ashamed of myself. “It doesn’t matter. The Galaxy blew up anyhow. I saw smoke from her engine room. I saw her go under. I didn’t do it. But it’s still my fault.”

Alice walked to the rear of the raft. She stepped onto the tubed edge without the slightest hesitation. Then she turned back to me.

“Lift your head, Benjamin. You were not responsible.”

I slowly raised my eyes.

“Wait . . . What do you mean?”

“The mine did not explode.”

“I don’t understand. Then what destroyed the ship?”

She turned her gaze out toward the deep. Suddenly, three massive whales burst through the surface, enormous charcoal monolithic bodies with flippers spread out like wings of a plane, easily the largest creatures I have ever witnessed on this Earth. When they hit the water, the spray from their impact flew through the air and covered us in seawater.

“They did,” she said.

* * *