Chương 4
I looked at the mug.
Elias noticed.
“My sister.”
“She seems accurate.”
“Use the computer.”
He woke the screen and entered a password without letting me see it.
A browser opened.
“What do you want?”
“My father.”
“Message him through something he doesn’t normally use.”
I thought of my father’s habits.
He hated social media.
He hated messaging apps even more.
He answered email through his assistant and still dictated notes into a recorder when traveling.
Then I remembered the private investment portal his family office used for document approvals.
Florent knew about it.
He did not know my father and I sometimes used the comment field beneath archived reports to leave each other stupid messages.
It had started years ago after I wrote Nice tie beside a photograph from a board presentation.
My father had replied Insolent child.
We had kept doing it.
I logged in.
Two-factor authentication appeared.
My phone had no service.
My stomach sank.
Elias leaned closer.
“Can you receive through Wi-Fi?”
“Maybe.”
I connected my phone to the maintenance network.
A warning appeared.
Then notifications flooded the screen.
My mother had sent six messages.
My father had sent two.
Florent had sent one from somewhere aboard the same yacht.
Rest, beautiful.
Dinner at eight.
I stared at it.
Elias said, “Focus.”
The authentication code arrived.
I opened the portal.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard.
“What do I say?”
“The truth.”
“He’ll call the yacht.”
“Then don’t give him time.”
I opened a six-month-old quarterly report.
Under a graph about renewable infrastructure, I typed a comment.
Dad, emergency.
Do not call me, Florent, the yacht, or anyone connected to this trip.
I overheard Florent, Antoine, and Florence planning to drug me and push me overboard tonight.
They said there is also a plan involving your car in Courchevel next week.
Contact French authorities and maritime authorities privately.
Do not alert them.
I am trying to stay conscious.
I stopped.
Elias was reading over my shoulder.
“Add location.”
“I don’t know our coordinates.”
He wrote them on a yellow sticky note.
I added them, along with the yacht’s name.
“What else?”
“Proof.”
“I don’t have any.”
“You have pills.”
“Not proof of who gave them to me.”
“Then say what you actually have.”
I added that I had hidden three tablets in my left walking shoe and that Florent had been administering similar pills nightly.
Then I hesitated.
The final sentence was harder than everything above it.
I wrote, If you see this, please don’t do anything reckless.
My father would ignore that instruction.
He had ignored every version of it since I was twelve.
I sent the comment.
For several seconds nothing happened.
Then the page refreshed.
Message saved.
I stared at those two words.
They were not rescue.
They were not safety.
They were only a thread stretched across hundreds of miles of ocean.
But it was something.
Elias disconnected my phone.
“You have to go.”
“Can we send another message?”
“To who?”
“Someone outside my family.”
“Police?”
“Someone Florent doesn’t know.”
He looked at the clock.
“You have two minutes.”
I thought of names.
Friends.
Lawyers.
People from work.
Anyone obvious could become a liability if they called me back.
Then I remembered Diane Mercer, an American attorney my father had hired during a dispute involving a Florida subsidiary.
I had met her twice.
She had once told me, half joking, that rich families survived disasters by keeping one lawyer who was paid to be unpopular.
I found her firm’s public contact page and wrote down the emergency number instead of sending anything.
“Why not contact her?”
“Because I don’t know who receives the form.”
“Good.”
Elias closed the browser.
“You’re thinking better.”
“I wish I weren’t.”
He looked at me carefully.
“What are you going to do at dinner?”
The question landed like a weight.
“Eat.”
“They may drug your food.”
“I know.”
“You need to avoid it.”
“If I suddenly refuse dinner after barely eating for three days, Florent will notice.”
Elias leaned against the desk.
“What if you fake being sick?”
“He expects me sedated, not vomiting.”
“That’s a sentence I never expected to hear at work.”
I almost smiled again.
Then the yacht rolled gently beneath us.
My stomach surged.
This time I did vomit.
I barely reached the wastebasket.
Elias jumped back.
“Jesus.”
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Well.”
He handed me a roll of paper towels.
“That solves dinner.”
I looked up at him.
“No.”
“It absolutely solves dinner.”
“It proves I’m sick.”
“It proves something.”
I sat back against the cabinet.
My legs were trembling.
“What if they already gave me too much?”
Elias crouched in front of me.
“We need the captain.”
I shook my head.
“You don’t trust him.”
“I don’t know him.”
“I do.”
That made me look up.
“He’s strict, cheap with praise, and thinks everyone under forty is incompetent.”
Elias paused.
“But he’s not a murderer.”
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
The honesty chilled me.
Then he added, “I’m sure enough that hiding this from him is becoming more dangerous than telling him.”
I looked at the closed office door.
Somewhere above us, my husband was waiting for night.
I stared at the floor between Elias’s shoes and tried to decide whether fear was making me cautious or stupid.
The distinction mattered.
A cautious person gathered information.
A stupid person waited until all the exits closed.
“Take me to him,” I said.
Elias stood.
“You’re sure?”
“No.”
“That’s probably the right answer.”
He lifted the wastebasket, tied the liner shut, and set it outside the office.
The ordinary neatness of the gesture nearly undid me.
A man was helping me decide whether the captain of my honeymoon yacht might be involved in my murder, and he still did not want vomit sitting beside his maintenance reports.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
We left the engine space through a different corridor.
May you like
He moved quickly without appearing hurried.
I tried to copy him.
