Chapter 1

Open Water

The first thing Cade noticed was how easy everyone looked when there was nowhere to be.

Out on the water, with the shoreline long gone and nothing around them but blue in every direction, people loosened in ways they never did on land. Their shoulders dropped. Their voices carried differently. Even the guys who usually moved like they were braced against something looked lighter under the sun.

Cade sat near the bow with one forearm resting across a warm metal rail, sunglasses in one hand, a sweating bottle of water in the other. The charter boat rose and fell beneath him in a slow, steady rhythm that was just enough to remind him how small it really was. The ocean flashed silver where the afternoon light hit it right. Salt clung to his lips. Every now and then spray reached far enough to cool the skin on his knees.

Behind him, Mason was laughing loud enough for the whole boat to hear.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Mason said. “Tell me this is not already better than every trip we’ve ever taken.”

“You say that every time you leave your apartment,” Jaxon answered.

“Because every time I leave my apartment I get smarter.”

“Doubt it.”

Mason threw his head back and laughed again, easy and bright, the kind of laugh that always made it sound like something good was about to happen. He was stretched out on one of the bench seats with his shirt open, tan already darkening across his chest and shoulders, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee like he had personally arranged the weather.

“It’s called perspective,” he said. “You should try it. Ocean. Sun. No emails. No manager with a face like a stapler.”

“That last part is the first smart thing you’ve said,” Eli muttered.

Eli stood a few feet away with one hand wrapped around the rail and the other holding a plastic cup that had mostly melted into ice and water. He had not sat down once in the last hour. Cade had noticed that. He kept drifting from one side of the deck to the other, like stillness might let some thought catch up to him if he gave it the chance.

Noah sat near the cabin door reading the label on a bag of chips for no real reason except that he always seemed to need something in his hands. He looked up and smiled to himself.

“You’ve been mad at your job for like three months,” Noah said to Eli.

“I’ve been mad at the whole setup for longer than that.”

“That sounds dramatic,” Mason said.

“It is dramatic.”

“That’s why you say it all the time.”

Eli looked out over the water as though it offended him less than the people he knew on land. “You ever get the feeling,” he said, “that everything people call a normal life is just a polished version of being trapped?”

Mason leaned up on one elbow. “No. Because I’m not writing a manifesto in a coffee shop.”

Jaxon snorted. Noah smiled into the bag in his hands. Even Rowan, who had been silent for most of the trip, looked up from where he was seated against the cabin wall.

Eli took the hit without much reaction. That was normal too. He said things like that often enough that the group had developed a habit of half mocking him, then realizing half an hour later that he had put words to something they had all been feeling.

“I’m serious,” Eli said. “Everybody acts like the point is to find the least miserable version of the same week and repeat it until your back hurts and your eyes go dead.”

“You are on a boat in the middle of the ocean talking like a hostage,” Mason said.

“That’s because this is the first decent thing I’ve done in months.”

Cade looked over his shoulder at him then, really looked. Eli’s hair was windblown across his forehead. There was a kind of brightness in him that only showed up when he was agitated, like frustration made him more alive instead of less. He had always been like that. Even in college, even on nights that were supposed to be easy, Eli always seemed to be standing one inch to the side of whatever everyone else was willing to accept.

Jaxon rose from the bench and crouched beside one of the storage latches built into the deck. He jiggled it once, frowned, then reached into his pocket for the small folding tool he carried almost without thinking.

“You brought that?” Mason asked.

“I bring it everywhere.”

“You brought a repair tool on a boat trip.”

“It’s a screwdriver, not a welding rig.”

“You are a deeply romantic person.”

Jaxon ignored him and started tightening the loose plate with short, efficient turns. His forearms flexed with each motion. He looked calmer the second he had something mechanical in front of him.

Cade watched that too.

Jaxon was at his best when something needed to be fixed. People did not always count, which was part of the problem, but bolts and hinges and crooked frames made immediate sense to him. Work steadied him. Sometimes Cade thought the only reason Jaxon got through normal life at all was because every so often something broke in front of him and reminded him the world still ran on matter.

Rowan rose to his feet and moved toward the back of the boat where a shaded overhang gave him space to stretch. He was the oldest by a year or two, broader through the shoulders than the rest of them, with the sort of stillness that made movement look more deliberate when it came. He rolled his neck once, set both hands on a support beam overhead, and leaned back into a deep stretch.

Mason pointed. “Look at this guy. Vacation pull day.”

Rowan did not answer.

“I’m serious,” Mason said. “Do you even know how to relax?”

Rowan straightened, one hand still around the beam. “I am relaxed.”

Jaxon looked up from the latch. “That’s the least convincing thing I’ve heard today.”

“Not true,” Noah said. “Mason said he could grow a beard if he committed to it.”

“That was a hostile misquote.”

Mason grinned and held up his jaw like evidence. “It’s in progress.”

“Your face looks thirteen,” Noah said.

“It looks elite.”

“It looks temporary,” Eli said.

The laughter came easily after that. Even Cade smiled, though he kept it to himself.

This was why he had agreed to the trip.

Not because he cared that much about the itinerary or the fishing or the whole idea of spending a few days on a private charter off someone’s cousin’s connection to someone’s uncle with money. It had sounded excessive when Mason first pitched it. It still sounded excessive now, honestly. But they had all been moving apart in the quiet way that happened after college, after short jobs turned into longer ones, after girls and rent and different schedules and low grade exhaustion started closing over the spaces people once left open for each other.

A trip like this felt stupid enough to work.

A few days offshore. No signal most of the time. No one pretending they would all meet up next week when everybody knew they probably would not.

He had told himself that was all it was.

Still, sitting there with the sea laid flat around them and the sun making everything cleaner than life ever felt back home, Cade had the uneasy sense that each of them had brought more onto the boat than a bag and a change of clothes.

Mason had brought the performance version of himself. The louder one. The brighter one. The one that could turn any room into a party and make people forget to wonder what happened when the room emptied out.

Eli had brought the anger he dressed up as thought.

Jaxon had brought the same silent irritation he had carried ever since taking that job he hated and then refusing to quit it because quitting would make him feel like he had lost to something.

Rowan had brought whatever weight sat behind his eyes these days, the thing none of them asked about because he would not answer anyway.

Noah had brought watchfulness. He always did. He noticed everything and offered almost none of it unless someone asked.

And Cade had brought the feeling that he was twenty four years old and already being shaped into a man whose whole life would be spent handling things for everybody else.

He tipped his water bottle back and finished what was left.

From inside the cabin, the captain stepped out with a folded chart in one hand and a phone in the other, turning the phone as if he might get a better signal by changing the angle. Captain Morales was in his late forties, thick through the middle, permanently sun-browned, with the calm face of a man who had seen enough water to stop respecting anyone else’s nerves. His deckhand, a tall kid named Theo who could not have been more than nineteen, followed behind him carrying a crate of bottled drinks down toward the built-in cooler.

Mason lifted a hand. “Captain, tell them this was my best idea.”

Morales glanced over without slowing. “No.”

“That was too fast. You didn’t even consider it.”

“I did. Still no.”

Mason pressed a hand to his chest. “Unbelievable.”

Morales smiled once, thin and brief, then looked back at the phone screen. Cade noticed the smile disappear almost immediately.

Noah noticed it too. Cade could tell by the way his gaze shifted.

Theo knelt at the cooler, set the crate down, and started loading drinks inside. Jaxon had already finished with the latch and was turning the tool over in his fingers like he wished something else nearby would fail so he could keep going.

“So what’s everybody doing when we get back?” Mason asked, looking around as though he were hosting something. “No vague answers. I mean actually.”

“Working,” Jaxon said.

“That’s not a plan. That’s a sentence.”

“It is if your plan sucks.”

Mason clicked his tongue and turned to Rowan. “You.”

Rowan gave him a flat look. “Working.”

“Jesus Christ. Noah?”

Noah crumpled the empty chip bag neatly between his hands. “Summer class starts again next month.”

“Boring.”

“You asked.”

“I asked for something worth hearing.”

Noah smiled. “I’m also planning to remain alive.”

“Better.”

Mason looked at Cade. “You.”

Cade leaned back against the rail. “Same as usual.”

“That is maybe your worst quality.”

“What is?”

“You answer like a witness under oath.”

“That’s because your questions are bad.”

“Wrong. My questions are elite.”

Mason turned toward Eli with a flourish. “Save us.”

Eli took a breath through his nose and looked off toward the horizon before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe leave.”

“Leave what?”

“All of it.”

Mason laughed, but not as hard as before. “You have to name at least one concrete thing.”

“Fine. The city. The rent. The fake networking garbage. The jobs that eat your whole day and somehow still make you feel useless. The whole performance of acting grateful to be exhausted all the time.”

Jaxon shut the tool and slid it back into his pocket. “That I get.”

“Exactly,” Eli said, pointing at him. “He gets it.”

“I get hating work,” Jaxon replied. “I’m not saying I want to vanish into the woods and become a prophet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I like indoor plumbing.”

Mason barked a laugh. Noah shook his head. Even Cade let out a breath through his nose.

Eli did not smile. He was still looking outward.

“I’m serious,” he said again, quieter this time. “Doesn’t it ever feel like everything is backwards?”

There was a beat of silence after that.

The waves tapped against the hull in a deeper rhythm than before, or maybe Cade was just paying closer attention. Somewhere below, something metal knocked once, then settled. The boat’s engine droned steady under all of it.

Mason sat up fully now, elbows on his knees. The grin had not vanished, but it had thinned around the edges.

“It’s not all backwards,” he said. “Some of it is. Not all of it.”

Eli glanced at him. “You believe that?”

Mason shrugged. “I believe most people make life worse than it has to be.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It kind of is.”

“No,” Eli said. “That’s just a better attitude inside the same cage.”

Jaxon groaned. “There it is.”

“What?”

“The cage thing. You say one decent sentence and then ruin it by sounding like a guy who wants to start a commune.”

Noah laughed before he could stop himself.

Eli finally smiled, but only a little. “A commune with standards.”

“That somehow sounds worse,” Mason said.

Cade let the conversation move around him. That was usually how it went. Mason would throw sparks. Eli would give them meaning. Jaxon would act annoyed and secretly engage anyway. Noah would notice where everybody actually stood. Rowan would speak when he had to. And Cade would keep track of the temperature in the room without ever saying that was what he was doing.

He had done it for years.

At parties. On road trips. In apartments full of people pretending not to be upset. In parking lots after fights that almost happened. At dinners where somebody always drank too much and someone else needed to be driven home.

Sometimes he wondered if anyone else had noticed that he was tired.

Not physically. Not in the obvious sense. Just tired in the deeper way, the way that came from being the person who rarely got to drift because somebody had to make sure everybody else did not go too far.

The ocean stretched around them without edge.

For a moment he let himself imagine disappearing into it in a softer, less literal sense. Not drowning. Not danger. Just falling out of the shape of his life and not being expected to climb back into it by Monday.

The thought unsettled him enough that he stood.

“Bathroom?” Mason asked.

“Stretching my legs.”

“You’ve been sitting for five minutes.”

“Exactly.”

Cade moved past Noah and into the narrow shadow near the cabin, then down the short side passage toward the stern. The deck shifted underfoot with a slightly sharper pitch than it had earlier. Not much. Just enough for him to glance up.

The sky ahead was still bright, but off to the right a darker band had begun to gather low over the water. It sat almost flush with the horizon, too far away to mean much yet, except that it did. The line was wrong. Too dense. Too sudden.

Captain Morales was standing near the helm now, not looking at the group anymore. Theo had stopped unloading drinks and was helping secure one of the loose storage bins against the side rail.

Cade slowed.