His Horizon - Con Riley Page 0,5
even close to proving their fate. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t find them for you.”
Her nod was silent, her hold on him even tighter.
It was the brightness of the kitchen light this time, Jude decided, that made his eyes sting. He blinked hard a few times before he got out a whisper. “I mean it. I’m so sorry that I didn’t call to let you know for sure that I was coming home, this time. I meant to—”
“You meant to what, exactly?” Louise pulled back, fingers still twisted in his shirt, tethering him as if she feared he’d drift the moment her grip loosened. “Tell me that you’d stay half-way around the world, looking for them forever?” Her gaze was watery, red-rimmed eyes the image of their mum’s, but the jut of her jaw was all their dad’s. “I knew you’d want to, until you found some proof, Jude. But honestly, I also knew they both had to be d- dead”—she stuttered over a word Jude still avoided thinking—“I knew before you even left to find them. We both saw the weather reports; that typhoon was devastating. There was barely any chance they could have survived it.”
Jude had spent many a long night weighing up his mum’s nursing background, and his dad’s sailing knowledge, only to come to the same conclusion. Could any of their combined skills have counted for much against the full force of nature? “I know, Lou. I do. But I’m going back. After the summer season, I mean.” He couldn’t stay here, not until he knew for certain. Without the cast-iron proof of wreckage, the faintest trace of doubt still niggled. It was the same doubt that had made him cancel his return last time, spending almost every penny that Tom had paid him on following leads that thinned like smoke the moment he tried to grasp them. That doubt only increased whenever he remembered the care his dad had taken when building the One for Luck. It had been as buoyant as any of the luxury yachts the Aphrodite had berthed next to, and twice as full of provisions. If any hand-built vessel could withstand typhoon weather or shipwreck, it just might be her. It was bad luck that her geolocator had winked out right when it would have been most useful. Jude had used its data to replicate their sailing direction, information that had petered out days before the storm struck, just like his dad had plotted his planned course on maps pinned to the wall of the boatshed.
The boatshed.
He held Louise by the shoulders and gently pushed her back. “Lou. My key didn’t work when I got back, so I let myself into the boatshed first. Planned on bunking down there for the night, only—”
“You found Rob asleep there already?” Even under the bright glare of the kitchen lights, Jude struggled to parse his sister’s expression. “Isn’t he amazing?” she asked.
Jude had started to think so as well, towards the end of the contest, despite his gut feeling that Rob was only playing with affection that Jude couldn’t risk exploring. The amazement he felt whenever he’d been caught in Rob’s bright spotlight had always come with a sense of worry. Her question also didn’t exactly tell Jude how much she knew about them. Had Rob outed him to Lou? He hedged instead of asking.
“Why is he here, Lou?”
“Oh, Jude.” This time, the kitchen’s bright lights hid nothing, Louise’s expression close to hero-worship. “Rob came here to save us.”
Jude escaped his sister for a shower that he stood under for a long time. Steam filled what he’d always thought of as a small bathroom before working aboard a yacht schooled him on size. Now the room dimensions seemed generous as he scrubbed salt from his hair. The heat loosened muscles tightened by the last hard push home, and by worry at what he’d found here.
A door opened along the hallway outside—Louise done with her nightlong vigil now Jude was back, perhaps. Or maybe she was still listing all the ways Rob was the Anchor’s saviour, her expression very telling, as if Rob meant far more than someone average she’d hired for the summer.
There was nothing average about Rob.
Jude had realised that shortly after they’d first met, at the start of the contest. Rob had joked with the other contenders and poked fun at the judges, fearless, as though none of their opinions mattered a jot to him. Then as the pressure had ramped up,