Page 9 of The Sailor in Polynesia
I nodded. “That’s a nice find.”
“Mia.” Lila picked up a cheese-covered cracker. “Tell me more about your sailing channel?”
I cut my eyes to Jonas. His face flushed again and he looked away.
Lila continued. “I’ve never watched your channel or any YouTube sailing channel. I mean, I didn’t know it was a thing before meeting Jonas and Eivind. You’ve been pretty successful, yeah?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Jonas cut in. “The channel is very successful.”
I snapped my mouth closed. Notexactlythe word I would use, but okay. “Thanks,” I said with a smile.
Jonas took it as permission to say more. “She has a lot of subscribers. Maybe a hundred thousand?”
“Wow, that’s impressive.” Lila looked at me.
“They bought the boat in California,” Jonas said. I shifted a little bit at the near mention of Liam, but Jonas plowed on. “And Mia spent a lot of time working on it. She made dozens of videos of boat projects.”
Lila’s eyes were round when they turned back to me. “That’s amazing. I have a degree in engineering, but I’ve discovered I’m fairly useless on a boat.”
“You are not useless,” Eivind chided her, and brushed a strand of hair back behind her ear.
She patted his cheek. “Liar.” They grinned at each other.
Elayna leaned in for a snack and asked, “So when did you start sailing your boat?”
“We left California about two years ago.” Before I could continue, Jonas butted in again.
“They sailed down the coast to Mexico, and crossed the Pacific from there, ja?”
I nodded.
“You must have done a good job with all the work on your boat, to get her out here from California,” Eivind remarked.
“I guess so.” I thought about my current project list. I knew logically it was shorter than in those early days, but it didn’t feel like it. “It sure did take longer than we thought it would. We ended up leaving California late, and hustled to cross the Pacific, which was a disaster.”
Lila chortled. “Yeah, nah, does anyone’s crossing really go all that well?”
I raised an eyebrow. “You had some trouble?” I looked overEik’s deck. She was sparkling clean and nearly new.
“A lot of small things, and errors on our part, made for an eventful trip,” Jonas said.
“You crossed the Pacific and came here, yeah? To French Polynesia?” Lila asked.
I nodded. “We were late, and the passage had been hard and that’s kind of where things fell apart, so we stored the boat over in Apataki and flew back home.” I picked at the fringe on my sarong.
“And then...” Lila trailed off.
Ugh, the stupiddword.
“Liam and I got divorced,” I said, averting my eyes from the sympathetic gazes. “And I kept the boat.”
Lila wrinkled her nose. “So you came back alone? That must have been scary!”
“Well, to be fair, Apataki isn’t far from here. I’ve just been puttering around a few hours at a time, hopping around the islands.”
Jonas came to my defense. “Mia is an amazing sailor, and has been since she was a kid.”
“Mon Dieu!”Elayna rolled her head back against the wall. “We get it—you have watched all the videos.”
