Rosie died in the helicopter crash with Russell Steele.

Now here’s Huck, five years after LeeAnn’s passing and one month after Rosie’s passing, in danger of falling in love with Irene Steele, the wife of Rosie’s lover.

As his friend Rupert would say, You can’t make this shit up!

It comes as no surprise to Huck that the Invisible Man, Russell Steele, was just another Caribbean pirate. Evading taxes and laundering money were nearly as common down here as snorkeling and drinking rum. Irene has now lost the villa in Little Cinnamon as well as her home in Iowa City, and the latter, Huck understands, is the greater loss by far. Most people down here are from somewhere else. They have another place they call home. It must feel pretty rotten to have that taken away, to be left with little more than the clothes on your back, the shoes on your feet.

Irene isn’t bankrupt. She has twenty thousand dollars in an account down here, money from her magazine job.

“Twenty thousand isn’t nothing,” Huck says. They’re standing out on the deck of Huck’s house, elbow to elbow on the railing but not touching, gazing out at the water and the faint outline of St. Croix in the distance. A lot of people would call them lucky—people in Iowa City whose cars were buried under three feet of snow, for example.

“It’s not enough to live on for very long,” Irene says. “Both you and I know that. I need to find a decent place to live with reasonable rent and I’ll need to buy a car.”

Huck is relieved that she seems to be talking about staying on St. John, even though they both know that her money would last a lot longer if she lived almost anywhere else. “You can stay here as long as you want,” Huck says. This turn of events doesn’t seem all that bad to him. He likes having her here. He likes being the person who can put a roof over her head and food on her plate, though he would never, ever reveal this to Irene.

One trait all the women in his life have shared: They were “born on the Fourth of July.” Independent.

Irene bows her head. Her hair is out of its braid; it’s wavy and long as it falls around her face, a chestnut curtain shot through with strands of silver. When she looks up, she says, “I’m grateful for your friendship and the job on the boat—”

“You’re an asset on the boat, AC,” he says. “I need you on the boat. Today alone was hell on me.” That morning, Huck had a Master of the Universe type on board—guy in his early forties, world by the balls, gung ho, let’s go—and his four sons. The older three were complete hellions from the second they stepped onto the boat still in their basketball sneakers.

“Take your shoes off,” Huck told them.

The oldest kid, maybe fifteen, said, “These are Cactus Jacks.”