Linda moved. The injection was quick, the sting barely registering against everything else, and Scarlett had approximately four seconds of fighting it before her legs stopped cooperating entirely. Dr. Petersen caught her on the way down.
The last thing she felt was the cold wet sand under her knees.
The last thing she heard was the water, indifferent and endless, moving against the shore.
The last thing she said was his name-not Reid, but the one she'd been trying not to say, the one she'd been carrying for three days like a stone at the center of her chest, the name that belonged to a man she hadn't met yet, who was at that moment boarding a private jet somewhere over the North Atlantic with his jaw set and his amber eyes cold and a file folder on his knee that contained a copy of a life insurance policy with her name on it.
She didn't know his name yet.
She would learn it soon enough.
The night took her down and the ocean kept moving, uncaring and vast, and somewhere out in the dark three miles off Wren Island, something began to change.
The Gulfstream G650 descended through low November cloud over Hilton Head Island at eleven forty-three in the morning, and the press was already on the tarmac.
Ethan Calloway watched them through the oval window as the plane taxied-a herd of them, print and broadcast and digital, elbowing for position behind the aluminum security barriers. Forty-two by Zach's count, his assistant having apparently spent the last twenty minutes of the flight inventorying them through binoculars with the sort of dedicated anxiety that distinguished good assistants from merely adequate ones. Broadcast trucks from three local affiliates. A wire photographer with a telephoto lens the size of a small appliance. People with microphones, people with tablets, people who appeared to serve no function except to exist and vibrate with collective anticipation.
They'd found out somehow. They always found out somehow. Ethan had asked his communications director to manage the arrival quietly; she'd done her best, which meant the information had gotten out through only four separate channels instead of the usual seven.
Money moved, and money moved information, and that was simply the arithmetic of being a Calloway.
He put on his sunglasses.
The Talon Air flight attendant opened the cabin door and the stairs deployed into weak, colorless November light. Ethan stood, straightened his jacket-charcoal Brioni, no tie, the small concession to what passed in his world for informality-and descended.
The shouting began before his second foot hit the bottom step.
"Mr. Calloway! Do you have any comment on your brother's disappearance?"
"Ethan! Just one photograph-"
"Mr. Calloway, what's the family's response to the coast guard's decision to suspend active-"
"-reports that Atlantic Crown Cruises faces significant liability exposure given that the vessel was-"
"Ethan! Over here-"
He walked through the noise the same way he walked through all noise: without acknowledgment, without hurry, with the particular quality of indifference that wasn't actually indifference but was instead something considerably colder. Two of his security detail materialized at his flanks. The press surged against the barriers and the barriers held and Ethan covered the thirty yards to the waiting SUV in under a minute.
The door closed. The sound of the world outside reduced to a muffled ambient roar.
Beside the driver, in the passenger seat, a man in a county-issued jacket was pressing a paper napkin to his forehead with the expression of someone who had been professionally managing a crisis for four days and had recently begun to doubt his own competence. He turned around with the careful smile of a man trying to project calm about a situation that was demonstrably not calm.
"Mr. Calloway. I'm Mayor Hargrove-county liaison, as you know from our correspondence. On behalf of Beaufort County, I want to offer our sincere-"
"What's the current status of the search," Ethan said.
A beat. Hargrove recalibrated visibly.
"The coast guard officially transitioned to recovery mode this morning. The 72-hour-"
"Who authorized that."
"The-the harbor master, sir, in consultation with the district operations commander. Given the elapsed time and the weather conditions-"
"Rescind it." Ethan opened his folder. "My general counsel filed the appropriate requests with the Beaufort County Maritime Authority at nine-thirty this morning. The coast guard district commander will receive follow-up from my office within the hour. The transition to recovery status is premature and I'd like it walked back." He glanced at Hargrove with an expression that fell several degrees short of a request. "I trust that won't present any significant administrative difficulty."
Hargrove nodded rapidly, a man finding it easier to agree than to explain why he disagreed. "Of course. Of course, I'll-yes. I'll make the calls."
"Good. Continue."
The briefing took fourteen minutes. Hargrove told him what he already largely knew from the emails and the file his team had assembled: the accident on the night of the fourteenth, the distress call at 8:47 PM, debris located. No body. No Reid. A young woman pulled from the shallows at dawn by a shrimp boat captain, transferred to Coastal Memorial with hypothermia and lacerations. Search suspended this morning.
Ethan listened to all of it with his eyes on the passing landscape through the tinted window-the resort end of the island, the long avenues of live oak draped in Spanish moss, the golf courses and the resort complexes and then, as they turned north, the quieter parts where actual people lived. The salt marshes. Modest houses on stilts. A charter fishing operation closed for the season, its sign faded to near-illegibility. The part of Hilton Head that didn't show up in the brochures.