As she finished, and one of the men entered what Bette gave them into the laptop, Kaci motioned Bette to grab hold of the boy.  She waved them to stand behind her. Kaci and one of the two men left in the warehouse then started shouting at each other, arguing about something.

A rational person would have been saying her last prayers at that moment, given that these fierce-looking, gun-toting men had become extremely agitated and were threatening to shoot them, but Bette felt a serene confidence that Kaci would figure it out. Kaci would get them out of this one. There’d never been a time that Kaci hadn’t managed to get them out of harm’s way, no matter the scenario. Why would this one be any different?

Her thoughts flitted to the time they’d discovered their secret cove: they’d each hopped onto a paddle board, a tricky enterprise since they’d only just learnt how to get on a paddle-board, and then they’d paddled to the island across the way, a beguiling destination that Bette had been intensely curious about and had kept asking the adults about. They’d nimbly paddle-boarded over the stretch of sea to get to it, and, on reaching there, had chanced upon the cove during their exploration of that island. They snorkeled, and then hopped back onto their paddle boards. They’d made their way safely back to the Necker Island resort where everyone else was. No one had been the wiser.

But it turned out that the sea channel they’d traversed had been a dangerous one, prone to strong undertows and undercurrents, and if an undercurrent had taken hold of either of their paddleboards, or if either one of them had slipped out of their paddleboards, and dropped into the sea, the undercurrent would have pulled them away, whisked out to the dark Caribbean Sea, in seconds. They’d have vanished, and no one would have been the wiser.

At least that had been the warning they’d overheard from a lifeguard while they’d built sandcastles on the beach the day after their paddle-board adventure. The lifeguard had been instructing a group of newly- weds about avoiding the stretch of sea between the islands.

Instead of scaring them off, the warning served to embolden the two — the fact they’d survived the dangers of crossing that stretch of sea would have been the story to top all stories! Wow! If two skinny seven year-old girls could survive that, they could survive everything, right? From then on, Bette had always felt that as long as she was with Kaci, they were unsinkable. It was as if by being together, they’d transformed into descendants of Thymoscera, and Diana, daughter of Hypollita, had been their kin.