Every day, I served my penance beneath the hot sun.
Every night, I found short-lived salvation within a pipe.
And the work I toiled with hopefully appeased the two ghosts who lived in the breeze and sky, watching me live, hopefully happy that I’d found a place of sanctuary.
“Sunyi. Your turn.”
Gede’s voice interrupted my mindless musings, dragging me back to a soaking boat and thundering rainstorm. The wind howled, picking up ferocity as if determined to drown us before we pulled ashore.
Pushing the fishnets away from my feet in the bottom of the boat, I stood. Kadek passed me the rope to secure the craft, and I dived into the ocean.
An embrace of salt and sea welcomed me back to a world I’d grown familiar with in the ten months I’d lived here, and I stayed under for a second or two.
It was quiet beneath the surface.
Heavy.
Oppressive.
Safe.
Kicking, I breached the chop and sucked in a breath. The ocean was warmer than the air with the storm rapidly cooling the constant humidity.
“Sunyi, tie up. We get off this boat.”
Sunyi…
Just as I didn’t understand how I’d become employed as a Balinese fisherman, I didn’t know how I’d earned that name.
I’d asked one of the village girls a few months ago what it meant and ended up smoking double the usual amount that night.
The Indonesian word meant desolate, dead, lonely.
I thought I’d hidden who I was at heart.
But these people recognised me instantly.
“Sunyi. Go.” Gede pointed at the horizon where lightning forked, dousing the evening with white electricity.
Shit.
Pushing off in a powerful stroke, I swam to the plastic bottle bobbing a metre or so away. The mooring was tethered to the reef below, ready to hold the boat as the swell grew bigger. With storms like this, it was safer to keep the boats offshore rather than hauling them up the sand.
The second I’d secured the small vessel, Gede threw the net overboard with the small catch from today and jumped in after me. Kadek turned off the engine, glanced at his most prized possession, then dived in and struck off for the beach, leaving Gede and me to haul the net and its bounty through choppy current.
What I loved about working with these guys was their quietness. Conversation was not needed amongst the serenity of fishing. And I didn’t speak their language, so when they did talk, I had no pressure to participate.
However, in the middle of an angry ocean, Gede cocked his chin, and grunted, “Orang kulit putih.”
My eyes shot to the shore.
I didn’t know their language, but I knew a few words. Just enough to get by, including the name they’d given me and orang kulit putih.
White person.
I scanned the beach, the sand no longer pristine but dark with rain. Kids ran toward the community tucked within the jungle, leaving a single woman staring out to sea.
A woman with white skin.
Chocolate hair.
Bravery and pushiness and home.
I let go of the net.
She’d found me.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Hope
* * * * * *
I COULDN’T MOVE as Jacob stepped from the ocean, dragging a net with a Balinese man, rain mixing with the saltwater already on his skin.
His shirtless chest was leaner than at Cherry River, but the muscles and strength I was accustomed to rippled with every stride. The blue swimming shorts he wore had a tear on one thigh and a hole by his hipbone, revealing a story of someone who’d spent more time in the ocean than on it.
Our eyes locked. My heart galloped. Jacob didn’t look away as he muttered something to the man and gave him the net.
Striding toward me, he raked both hands through drenched hair—white hair that set off his rich tan and highlighted dark eyes. With the lightning framing him from behind and the droplets splashing on his perfect skin, he looked as if he was the missing son of Poseidon.
My knees shook as bare feet brought him closer. Four years had been cruel and kind to him. Cruel because they’d stolen any remainders of childhood and kind because, in the wake of a boy, the man who stood before me was utterly breath-taking.
Wild as his surname baptised him.
Savage as the loneliness in his heart.
Every inch of me trembled to touch him. To lick at the rivulets of liquid as they waterfalled down his flat stomach. To kiss the tight lips as he studied me. To hug the hardness he’d wrapped himself in.
I’d come here to give him more news of death.
To tell him his grandfather was dying, and that he had such a small window to say goodbye.
Yet in that rainy, stormy moment, my mouth forgot words and my heart forgot Michael.
I was just Hope.
The embodiment of faith, belief, wishes, and daydreams.
I hoped with every fibre of my soul that Jacob would be kind, that he’d healed, that he’d let me love him.