Cash reads the link she’d texted him again. She must have sent it to him because she thought it would be a good fit. Right? Right? Or maybe it was a joke. For all Ayers knows, Cash is back in Colorado, skiing the bowl on Peak 8.

But he’s not. He’s in Iowa City without a job, without prospects. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine a life on the water.

With Ayers. He would agree to live in the space station if it was with Ayers.

He decides not to respond to the text right away. He wants to sleep on it.

In the morning, the text is still there and Cash is proud of himself for exercising restraint and not sending a knee-jerk response.

Winnie is asleep at the foot of the bed. When she feels Cash stir, she lifts her head.

“You liked St. John, right?” Cash asks. “Wanna go back?”

Of course, it’s not Winnie’s permission that he needs. Cash pads down to the kitchen in his pajama bottoms and a decade-old Social Distortion T-shirt he found in the bureau in his room. Irene is juicing oranges the old-fashioned way—by crushing the hell out of the buggers with a galvanized-steel juicer that had belonged to her own mother. Cash watches her as she presses and twists the orange under her palms. All of that energy for a dribble of juice. Though it’s probably not the worst way to release pent-up frustration.

“Mom,” he says. “I’m not going back to Colorado.”

“You’re not?” she says, relaxing her death grip on the orange in her hand and then tossing the rind in the sink.

“With your permission…” he says. His voice sticks. Asking her this is harder than he thought it would be. “I’d like to go back down.”

“Down?” she says, though he can tell she understands.

“To St. John,” Cash says. He clears his throat. “I have a lead on a job there. And I was hoping I could just stay in the villa.”

Irene abandons the juice project altogether in order to stare at him. He can’t tell what she’s thinking, but then, his mother’s expressions have always been inscrutable. Against all odds, they had both sort of fallen in love with St. John—at least, Cash did. He knows Irene had warmed to it as well; she went out fishing with Huck once in an attempt to get information, but she also took a second boat trip with him before she and Cash left. He supposes it’s possible that her feelings have changed since they’ve been back home and now the whole Caribbean represents an enormous, ugly deception that she doesn’t want to revisit. And maybe she’d prefer that Cash not revisit it either.

It’s the idea that Irene might say no, might ask him nicely not to go or forbid him to stay in the villa, that makes Cash realize how badly he wants to return and give life down there a shot. He won’t stay forever. Maybe just until summer.