Chapter One
Petra
From the moment she first blinked awake to answer the phone, Petra Armstrong knew today was destined for the crapper.
This morning started with a five-thirty phone call that Petra snatched up on the second ring. “What?” she’d croaked. “Who?”
“I was at the emergency room last night.” It was her friend Tamika, and she sounded rough. “I have a bad case of norovirus, and it is truly an experience to behold.”
Petra flung her covers to the side. “Okay, I’m coming. Are you home? What do you need me to pick up?” She pulled her legs from the warm nest of blankets and planted her feet onto wooden floorboards that radiated cold into her bare toes.
“Nothing,” Tamika said. “Right now, I’m set. Diamond’s daddy came to pick her up last night to get her away from my kooties. He’s getting her to school today. And I’ve got backup to help me if necessary. Though child, I’m just sayin’, no one should come near me cuz no one needs to catch this mess.”
“I’m so sorry this happened.” Petra flopped back onto her pillow and pulled the covers back in place. The sound of ice pinging against her windowpanes made for the kind of morning when it felt good to snuggle under the covers. “Are you home now?”
“Home, and I’m all set up. I’m tucked into a sleeping bag that I laid out on the bathroom floor, and I’ve got bottles of electrolytes and a box of saltines within reach.”
“Gross.”
“You don’t even know the half of it,” Tamika’s voice was weak and raspy.
Petra looked at her phone to get the time. “Okay, you just rest and recover. I’ll call the airlines and cancel our seats.”
“You’ll do no such thing. Now listen, I know you hate changing things up. You are, my friend, the antithesis of spontaneity. And if I didn’t see first-hand how fast you shift gears to become the go-to gal in any emergency, I’d never believe it. You know it can take a lot of patience and cajoling to get you on board with a new plan. You’re like a barge on the ocean.”
“Too early. Too preachy,” Petra already knew what Tamika would tell her—go without me.
“Now—I’m saying this with love in my heart—you’re still going to St. Croix even though I can’t be there,” Tamika said. “Period. End of sentence.”
Yup. There it was. “But—”
“No buts. You just go on and pretend that I’m in the bathroom, which is, in fact, where I’ll be. You do what we planned. The only thing that’ll be different is that I’m not sitting next to you,” Tamika was using her mom-voice, the one she used on Diamond when Tamika was laying down the law.
Petra pulled her brows in tight. “But—”
“Uh-uh. Off you go. Have a cocktail on the beach for me. Call me from St. Croix and tell me you love it.”
Petra blinked at the patch of light on her wall made from the glow of the streetlamp.
St. Croix by herself; she tried on the idea.
Petra traveled alone all the time for work. She couldn’t remember a time when she went on a solo trip for pleasure. That wasn’t, in her mind, fun at all. Travel was for creating shared stories.
That wasn’t even the issue. Petra just wasn’t a St. Croix kind of person. She had only been going down to the island to support Tamika as she went to see where her parents got married, and to scatter their ashes in the ocean.
Petra couldn’t bring herself to make the shift from supporting a friend to being down there all alone and without purpose. “Cocktails on the beach feels kind of sacrilegious given our reason for going in the first place,” she said softly so as not to sound like she was rebuking her friend.
“I knew you’d say that. So how about this? Do a rethink and make this a retreat of sorts—communing with nature, stilling your mind, exercising your body, getting ready for your new job title.”
“That feels like it ticks the right boxes. Although, St. Croix isn’t a place I would’ve chosen to do on my own.”
“Listen, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Just keep going with the plans. Take nice hikes, enjoy beautiful sunsets, get good sleep, and maybe find a fine man to tumble around with. Cuz when you get back, you’re going to be busy saving the world.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” Petra laughed, “as soon as I get home.” She laid a cool palm on her forehead to focus her thoughts. “I’ll admit I was looking forward to eating without needing to cook and clean up after myself.” She tried to rally some enthusiasm so Tamika wouldn’t feel bad that their plans had gone awry.
“Admit it, you were just thinking about pizza in bed in front of a movie.”
“Guilty pleasure,” Petra retorted. “Don’t judge.”
Tamika was panting loudly, then mustered, “I shouldn’t have said pizza. Ugh. Got to go—in every sense of the word.”
The phone clicked; the call had ended.
Petra wrinkled her nose, feeling a wave of sympathy-nausea sweep over her. Once it passed, she toggled on her bedside light, climbed from her bed, and headed toward her toothbrush.
She made it as far as the bathroom when, at five-forty, a text from the airline struck her with the next blow of bad news.
Winter weather elsewhere rerouted their plane. The airline was consolidating two smaller flights onto a single larger plane. Please check your tickets for your updated seating assignment.
Elsewhere? It wasn’t even six in the morning. What plane could have been in the sky when it hit winter weather?
Petra hadn’t upgraded and paid for a better seat on this flight because Tamika was pinching pennies as she saved for Diamond’s inevitable braces. Before she even tapped the link, Petra knew that choice would come back to bite her.
All through her military and FBI careers, Petra was taught to preserve her reaction space—keeping people or situations outside of arm’s length gave her time to observe, decide, and react.
On a plane, that wasn’t simple to accomplish.
When traveling for work, Petra did her best by choosing aisle seats on emergency exit rows.
Why yes, she was able and willing to be helpful should the plane go down.
Today, though, she’d be traveling in the backety-back-back. The farthest seat from an emergency door.
While Petra didn’t love flying, she also didn’t hate it. Flying was a conveyance, a means to get from Point A to Point B. So, the seats in and of themselves weren’t upsetting. It was just that the images of the upside-down plane on the Canadian runway with people dangling from their seatbelts and the exit with the jet fuel waterfall were all pretty vivid in her mind’s eye.
At the back of the plane, in her new seat, with a plastic indentation for a window and the toilet behind her head, Petra would be the very last passenger off the plane in an emergency.
Normally, Petra’s brain wouldn’t immediately go to the possibility of escaping a crash, but today kind of had the taste of a soup sandwich.
She rolled her lips in and gave herself a minute to adjust. “This is fine,” she cajoled herself. “You had a plan all along. In this seat or that, you can still work your plan.”
And she did have a plan. Borne of both nature and career training, she always had a plan. And a contingency plan.
In this case, her plans might be helpful, but they could also be making life so much harder than it needed to be.
Like Tamika, Petra was exhausted.
Unlike Tamika, Petra’s exhaustion was by design. She’d purposefully stayed up all night reading a thriller, thinking that once seated and up in the air, she could sleep through the whole event and not fight the fidgets and discomfort of being on a flight for seven hours.
Her plan had been to sleep until she and Tamika reached St. Croix, where the beautiful white sands and clear turquoise waters would surround them—it would have been good.
“It’s going to be good,” Petra rallied herself. She knew that Tamika would, for sure, suffer a guilty conscience if Petra didn’t go to St. Croix and come back with some good stories.
Petra did as was required of her—she got ready, got into a taxi, and got to the airport. She deposited her suitcase on the conveyor belt and made her way through security.
Sure, they lost her shoe in the X-ray machine.
Then, with her hands over her head, she got buzzed twice before she got a full pat down by TSA.
And when she filled her water bottle, the gasket was missing, so it leaked on everything.
But these were minor annoyances.
She reminded herself that it was a trick of the brain, amplified by fatigue, that made her hyper-aware of the things that went awry.
It was merely the idiom, “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
While linguists speculated that the phrase dated back to ancient Rome and that it referred to getting out of bed on the left side (sinister being the Latin word for left), Petra had always believed that it was a reference to waking up with bad thoughts or to a bad turn of events—a direction of the mind and environment more than the person’s actual body placement. After all, who would get out of bed on the left if they knew that bad would follow them around all day? “Yeah, that didn’t make any sense at all,” she murmured under her breath as she hiked her way toward the gate.
There were, in fact, psychological studies that supported the theory that the way you woke up determined the way the day lay ahead. Those first moments imposed a rudimentary lens through which the brain saw things unfold.
It was a survival filter.
On sunny, happy days, the brain relaxed. On high-stress days, the brain agitated the waters to see what hidden awfulness lay beneath.
After all, it was the brain’s job to keep its body alive.
And since Petra woke up to a shit show, a shit show today would be.
Tomorrow, she’d wake up to a glorious sunrise, and life would be golden.
Right?
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