”I think I’ve made my point.” Lauren eased herself onto the bed next to Kenzi, and she pointed to the photographs. ”They’re beautiful, all of them…and you’re wrong Kenzi, you can do stuff.”

”Mad skills,” Kenzi said half heartedly, as she arranged the photos in some mysterious order. Kenzi looked up mid task, ”Lauren, are you thinking about leaving me?”

”What?!”

Kenzi rattled off what she saw as clues. ”You bought that book of poetry by that Spanish dude. And you gave it to your new fuck buddy—not judging, just saying. I see you two together—in the daytime! You talk about the one rule. What’s yours? Say goodbye at breakfast.”

Lauren studied the hurt she perceived in Kenzi’s face. She had seen that look only once, a few hours after Kenzi had buried Hale and joined her at the very beginning of this odyssey.

Lauren dropped her doe eyes and explained with a softness in her voice. ”Her name is Dr. Pallas, Nuria Pallas. She’s with Doctors Without Borders. I found this out over a few drinks and, surprisingly, even though we were both clearly drunk and stupid, and attracted to each other…Nuria graciously rejected my offer of spending the night.

”For some reason, I found it funny and refreshing and a bit bruising to my ego—which is probably just what I needed. And what she needed was a friend. All Nuria wanted was to talk. So we did. All through the night and into breakfast.”

”You didn’t sleep with her?”

”Don’t look so surprised, Kenzi. I don’t sleep with my friends.”

”But what about the book of love poems?”

”Ah yes, that,” she smiled while rolling her eyes upward. ”Nuria is flying back to the states to propose to her girlfriend. Supposed to be a surprise,” Lauren shrugged. “Sometimes there’s courage in poetry.”

“You bought the book for her?”

“Originally, yes. But then after all her talk of being in love—she gave it back to me, which at first, I thought was odd. Then she said I probably needed romance more than she did.” Lauren had come close to revealing to her new friend the real reasons behind her life at sea; while she didn’t attach a specific tale as the source of her obvious melancholy, the oil of Lauren’s sadness greased every word, every look, and every anecdote until Nuria recognized that Lauren’s search for adventure had been a quest to forget. Something. Someone.