Page 139 of Falling Overboard

“I don’t know—”

“Save it,” he cut me off. “I don’t actually need you to explain this to me. I can see exactly what it is.”

“But I didn’t make this. I didn’t participate.”

He narrowed his gaze at me. “That paper says otherwise.”

Suddenly everything came into focus. When Emilie had rushed past us in the crew mess, she must have been going after the list, adding my name to it and giving me points for kissing Hunter.

“And then there’s this.”

He handed me another piece of paper and I gasped. Someone had taken a picture of Hunter kissing me in the primary cabin. The captain must have printed it out.

I knew I’d heard something. Emilie must have done it.

Then another paper. This one was a screenshot of my texts with Georgia. Where she asked me if I was hooking up with Hunter and I had sarcastically replied that he and I were having sex.

Georgia never would have shown those texts to anyone. Had she been too drunk that night and forgotten to delete them? She had sent them from François’s phone. Would he have shown the captain? That didn’t seem like something François would do.

But how did the captain have them? Wait, my phone had gone missing and then mysteriously reappeared. Emilie must have taken it. I hysterically thought about the fact that I had always meant to put password protection on it and now it was too late.

“This was a joke,” I said, my heart beating so fast it felt like it might actually explode. “That’s why there’s a smiley face after it. I was kidding. I haven’t slept with Hunter.”

“There’s photographic evidence of you kissing him, which is against the rules.”

And I couldn’t deny it. He was right.

“You kissing on the primary guest’s bed with a fellow crewmember is inappropriate and unprofessional. What if one of the guests had walked in and seen you?”

My face burned with shame. Again, he was right. Most of the guests had been off the ship but Amber could have easily gone down to her room for any reason.

“This is the third strike, Lucky. The last few weeks you have shown a continual pattern of not doing your job properly or within the parameters I’ve established.”

Sweat broke out on my lower back as I realized what was going on. I was at DEFCON screwed. I had lived in constant fear of the captain letting me go, and now here we were. It was happening.

I was being fired.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

There it was. My anxiety had caused me to imagine him firing me so many times that part of me had almost been expecting this. The one time I broke a rule and it was destroying everything.

He got my passport and paperwork, along with an airplane ticket. He said I would fly out of Genoa and catch a connection in Rome back to America. “You can take the tender with the guests and the exterior crew.”

Which meant I had to hurry. I was shaking now, so hard that the papers he’d handed me made a rustling noise.

“I’ll radio Thomas to grab your suitcase,” he said.

And that, more than anything, made this feel final for me.

I’d lost my job.

And my dream of opening a bakery.

And the man I loved.

There was no point in trying to defend myself, either. Even though most of it wasn’t true, the main one was. I had kissed Hunter repeatedly in violation of the rules.

I also realized that if I tried to tell the captain about Emilie, I would only come across as bitter and self-serving. He wouldn’t believe me. He would have to find out the hard way. The rest of the crew didn’t deserve to be stuck with her, but Captain Carl certainly did.

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