When the sun set, the rum came out and a steel band set up, and once I made sure Maia was safe, under the watchful eyes of her aunties, I found Huck and he poured some Flor de Caña and we did a shot together.

“We’re going to make it,” he said.

“Are we?” I said. I knew it was the right time for me to find a home of my own. I had plenty of money in the bank to rent a nice place, maybe even buy, but I knew that if I moved out, my heart would break and so would Huck’s. My mother was gone. We needed to stick together.

I found Ayers and Mick sitting on the beach together and I joined them and Mick’s dog, Gordon. We were such good friends that we didn’t have to speak; we could just be.

Mick whistled, snapping me out of my daydream. “Would you look at that,” he said. “Bluebeard.”

I made a sound, words trying to escape that I caught at the last second. Bluebeard? I stood up and, sure enough, there was the yacht, cruising across the horizon in front of us. Headed away from Tortola, it looked like, and toward…well, toward Caneel. Where else?

I stayed on Oppenheimer until the very end, helping to clean up until every trace of the celebration was swept away. Ayers and Mick offered to take Huck and Maia home. I wanted to stay there and hang out by myself for a while. They hugged me. They said they understood.

They did not understand. Ayers was my confidante but I hadn’t even told her the truth. I feared she would tell Mick, and Mick would tell someone who worked at the Beach Bar, and the next day, the whole island would know. Ayers thought Maia’s father, someone I called the Pirate, had come in on a yacht one weekend and then left, never to return.

Ayers hadn’t given a second thought to a yacht called Bluebeard.

By the time I got to Caneel, it was very late. I still knew people who worked there—Estella, Woodrow, and Chauncey, the night desk manager. I knew that Chauncey had grown complacent at his job. Absolutely nothing happened at Caneel between the hours of midnight and five a.m. Chauncey slept in the back on a cot.

I parked in the lot and sneaked across the property in the shadows, going past the Sugar Mill, the swimming pool, and tennis courts, across the expanse of manicured grass, to a string of palm trees that lined the beach.

Bluebeard was anchored offshore.