breath, feeling like he’d held that in forever, despite their talk last night. “I missed that spark that makes your blue eyes even bluer the first time you see something. And yes, I had moments of greatness in the discoveries I made, but I was always pushing through, trying to forget what I’d done to you. Only I never could, because you were—you are—a part of me. Hurting you means hurting myself.”
She lifted her chin almost defiantly and said, “I agonized over the idea of you not missing me. So, as awful as it sounds, I’m glad to hear that you were tortured by it, too. You thought I’d hate you if you stayed. I have to believe you knew what you were doing, and I think hating you would have been worse than being left behind. Hate eats away at you. Hurt makes you stronger.” She leaned back on her elbows and closed her eyes, tipping her face up toward the sun. “At least that’s the way I’m looking at it. But I don’t want to dwell on the past, so tell me something I don’t know. I want to hear about all the good stuff.”
Needing to be closer to her, he moved from his towel to hers and lay beside her, propped up on one elbow.
Turning smiling eyes to him, she said, “What are you doing?”
“Proving I’m not that stupid kid anymore.”
“By squishing onto my towel?”
He put his arm around her waist, tugging her closer, and said, “By not letting you get away.”
“Okay, Casanova. Woo me with your stories.”
He told her about how he and Luis had gone over Luis’s calculations, worked through maps and historical data, and Zev had found an error in Luis’s calculations, which had put him too far east to find the wreckage. Over the next year and a half, they searched a five-mile area around the new coordinates. “In addition to the treasures the Black Widow was known to have on board, it had eight cannons. We used a proton magnetometer to detect metal beneath the seafloor. The magnetometer can’t detect gold and silver, but it’ll pick up the ships’ anchors, magnetite ballast stones, cannons…When it picked up an enormous mass, we were pretty sure we’d found the site. But we had to dig farther beneath the ocean’s floor—”
“Without harming any buried artifacts,” she said excitedly.
“Exactly. Luis had heard about a guy who had built an apparatus that would fit over his ship’s twin diesel propellers to direct the prop wash down to blast the sand away without harming potential artifacts. I called my father to ask his advice on the best way to build it. He ended up helping fund the project and hooked us up with an engineering buddy of his who was able to connect us with a team to build the equipment faster than I ever thought possible.” He told her about living on Luis’s boat and years of unearthing treasures, describing the process from start to finish, and she was as mesmerized as she used to get when they’d watch archaeological documentaries. “We spent every second we could at that site for just over five years, until it became clear that anything more to be found would be few and far between. There was a bunch of legal hoopla to go through, and we’d ended up getting only a portion of what the treasures were worth, which was still more than either of us could ever spend. But I’d have done it for free. The thrill of discovery was fucking amazing.”
“A moment of greatness.” She lifted up on her elbow with stars in her eyes. “Tell me more.”
“Luis is semiretired now. He no longer dives, but he oversees a team of divers who still dive a few months out of the year. He said he’d found his treasure and it was high time he tried to find a good woman to keep him warm at night. Guess he was tired of the likes of me.”
“I guess so,” she teased. “If you were lonely, then I’m sure he was, too. Did he have women friends, or anyone special to keep him company?”
“We didn’t bring women on the boat, if that’s what you’re asking. He’d hook up with women when we were inland, but our lives weren’t focused on finding long-term relationships. He just scratched the occasional itch. But treasure hunting is not an easy life, and by then he was nearing sixty. He’d had enough, and he had more