Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 86515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 433(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 433(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
It shouldn’t bother me.
But it does.
♦
By the time I turn onto my street, the sky is dark and moody. No stars peek through the clouds that have been hovering all day, but the neighborhood streets are aglow from uplit mansions and old-fashioned gas lanterns lining the sidewalks. My new house sits back from the road, tucked into its slope like it’s cocooning, which is probably why I picked it. I’m a man who values privacy not only from the public eye, but from nosy neighbors as well. Motion-sensor lights flick on automatically as I pull into the drive, washing over stucco and tile and the broad curve of the entry like the place is waking up for me.
I park outside the three-car garage as it’s filled with my Porsche and dozens of boxes still to unpack.
Inside, the quiet deepens, almost eerie since this house is still very much a stranger to me. It’s too big and empty, bordering on lonely, but I know that won’t last long. I’ll get all my belongings set up and eventually it will feel like a home.
Boxes line the walls in tidy stacks, contents labeled in thick black marker.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and a smile takes my mouth hostage, because my sister is my favorite person in the world. I swipe to accept as I head toward the kitchen.
“What’s up?” I say cheerily.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she replies, voice bright and familiar. “You actually picked up. I had an entire speech planned out for your voicemail.”
“I can hang up and you can call back for it if you want,” I quip as I open the fridge and stare into it as if the answer to all my problems might be hiding behind the condiments.
“How’s camp going?”
I pull out a package of turkey and a loaf of bread, setting them on the counter. “About how you’d expect. Early days. Everyone skating like their jobs depend on it.”
“Because they do,” she says. “You settling into the house?”
I glance around the kitchen—granite counters spotless, cabinets half-filled. “Define settling.”
She laughs. “That bad, huh?”
“I’m trying to make a sandwich, and I can’t find a knife.”
My sister snorts. “That is bad.”
“Tragic,” I mutter, opening another box and rummaging through bubble wrap until metal clinks against metal.
Victory.
“So, how’s work?” I ask, peeling back the plastic on the turkey.
I hear the sounds of her career in the background—low mechanical hum, voices echoing, metallic clanging. She’s on a platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.
“Just got back in,” she says. “Visibility was crap. Cold enough that my fingers went numb even through the gloves.”
I close my eyes, already picturing it, my heart racing when she gives me details of her work. She’s a commercial saturation diver, and it scares the shit out of me. She’s one of only about three hundred and fifty people in the world who can do this work, supporting offshore oil, gas or infrastructure operations. Instead of diving from the surface each day, Birdie lives in a pressurized chamber on the platform for weeks at a time, which allows her body to fully “saturate” with inert gases. This allows her to work deep underwater without repeated decompression risks.
She gets paid an obscene amount of money to inspect subsea pipelines, valves and platforms—often in cold, dark, zero-visibility conditions.
It’s incredibly dangerous and I hate that she loves it so much, which means she’s never going to quit.
“How deep?” I ask automatically.
“Two hundred feet today,” she says casually.
I shake my head, spreading mustard too thick on one slice of bread. “You’re still insane.”
“Occupational hazard,” she replies. Then, after a beat, “You sound tense.”
“Well, yeah,” I say, knife hovering over my bread. “I’m afraid my sister might die because of her job. Wouldn’t you be tense too?”
“No,” she drawls. “That’s not it. It’s something else.”
Birdie’s thirteen months older and we’re as close as identical twins. She always knows when something’s wrong with me, just as I know it about her. I expect that if one day she does die down in the murky depths, I’ll feel it long before I ever get the call.
I exhale through my nose and lean back against the counter, the stone cool through my shirt. “They’re filming a documentary about the Portland Wildfire. You know I don’t like that shit. Can’t stand being the center of attention.”
“I know,” Birdie coos in empathy. “But hey—smile and stop lots of goals. How hard can it be?”
“That’s not how it works,” I snap, then rein it in. I don’t want to argue. I just don’t want to explain what she already knows.
“I know,” she says gently. “So, what else?”
“The filmmaker,” I continue, irritation creeping back in as I slice the sandwich in half and immediately lose interest in it. “She keeps pressing me for an interview. Won’t take no for an answer.”