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  Colin looked out at the crowd. “For those of you still recovering from injuries, we have a physical therapist who will be meeting with you at her office in St. Michaels. We’ll arrange the transportation, so let us know when you’ve worked out a schedule with your employer and we’ll make sure you get there on time. We also have a social worker on call twenty-four seven. She’ll be reaching out to each of you individually to set up your first appointment. These sessions will be private and completely confidential between the two of you, but we expect you to attend a minimum of at least one a week.”

  Ryan saw a few guys wince and figured most of them weren’t too excited about the prospect of talking about their feelings. He understood why it was a mandatory part of the program, but he didn’t blame them.

  “For those of you who are interested—and we expect everyone who is physically capable to participate—Will has put together a rigorous exercise program that he’ll be leading twice a day.” Colin glanced up, catching Will’s eye across the room. “And I can tell you from personal experience that it won’t be a walk in the park.” The two former SEAL teammates smiled, sharing an inside joke.

  “Lastly, over the next few weeks, we’ll both be meeting with each of you individually to go over your résumés, skillsets, and employment interests so we can find you a permanent position closer to your families and hometowns. As for your jobs on the island, we’ve secured temporary employment for each of you at a local business, which you’ll be starting first thing tomorrow.”

  Colin glanced down at his notes, reviewing the list of assignments. “Troy,” he said, looking back up and meeting the eyes of a short, stocky veteran near the front of the room, “you’ll be working with Don Fluharty at The Tackle Box.”

  Troy nodded, as if he remembered seeing the small general store at the foot of the drawbridge when he’d driven by it earlier that night.

  “Zach.” Colin’s gaze swept through the crowd, landing on a tall, brown-haired man near the middle of the room. “You’ll be working on Bob Hargrove’s charter boat as his first mate.”

  Zach lit up. “I get to work on a fishing boat?”

  Colin nodded and glanced down at his notes again. “Megan, you’ll be working with Lou Ann Sadler at Clipper Books.”

  Megan’s face broke into a smile. The pretty brunette in the wheelchair was pleased with her assignment as well.

  “Kade,” Colin continued, “you’ll be working with Gladys Schaefer at The Flower Shoppe.”

  A few people snorted as they tried to stifle their laughter, but most failed, and even Ryan’s brows lifted at that one.

  Kade McCafferty was the second tallest person in the room after Colin, which put him somewhere around six-foot-three. He was built like a linebacker, probably weighing close to three hundred pounds, and he was completely bald, like one day he’d just woken up and said ‘screw it’ to his hair and shaved it all off. Dark tattoos covered both arms and another huge tattoo on his left calf spelled out the word, ‘MARINES.’ He’d been one of the first to arrive at the inn that night and Ryan had spent some time talking to him earlier. He’d served five tours overseas as an infantryman. Front lines.

  The Flower Shoppe?

  That just seemed wrong.

  But Colin was already forging ahead. “I know some of you have already met Ryan Callahan.” Colin nodded to where Ryan stood and everyone turned to look at him. “Ryan is a marine biologist whose research has transformed the field of coastal ecology. He has a Ph.D. from MIT’s joint program with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and he’s spent the past ten years fighting to mitigate the effects of climate change and pollution on our most endangered waterways. Last year, he moved back to this island to open a nonprofit to educate the public on how to become better stewards of the Chesapeake Bay and help his father, a fourth-generation waterman, expand his oyster farm. They’ve recently combined the two operations into a single company with a big vision and they’re going to need a lot of help to get where they want to go.”

  “What’s an oyster farm?” one of the women asked.

  Colin looked at Ryan. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s an environmentally sustainable process of growing and harvesting oysters,” Ryan explained. “They start out as seeds, which we purchase from a hatchery, and then we plant them in the water like a regular farmer would plant seeds in the ground. It takes about a year-and-a-half for a farmed oyster to grow to market size, which is when we pull them out and sell them to restaurants, seafood markets, and wholesalers.”

  “Don’t oysters grow in the wild?” one of the guys asked. “Why do you need to farm them?”

  “The wild oyster population in the Bay was almost completely wiped out twenty years ago,” Ryan said. “Right now, it’s at about one percent of historic levels. There have been efforts to reestablish it, and it’s starting to make a very small comeback, but it still has a long way to go. Oyster farming is a way of continuing a centuries-old tradition of harvesting seafood from these waters without affecting one of our most important natural resources. We don’t take anything out that we don’t put there ourselves.”

  “Which brings us to our last two groups of people,” Colin said, segueing easily back to the point. “Hailey and Ethan, you’ll be working on the nonprofit side of Ryan’s operation. Paul, Jeff, Wesley, Matt, and Izzy, you’ll be working on the farm.”

  “No,” Izzy said.

  Seventeen heads turned to face her, and Izzy’s eyes widened, as if she hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud.

  Colin glanced over at her, surprised. “Is there a problem?”

  She looked like she wanted to shrink into the wall, to disappear completely, but knew it was too late. “I’d rather not work…on a farm.”

  “Why not?”

  She straightened her spine, visibly mustering her courage. “I would like to request to switch with someone.”

  “I’ll switch with her,” Kade said.

  A few people laughed.

  “I appreciate the team spirit,” Colin said dryly, “but we put everyone in each position for a reason. If something changes over the next few weeks, we can make adjustments. Right now, we’re confident that everyone is where he or she is supposed to be. Let’s move on with the rest of the introductions and the tour so that those of you who are working with Ryan can make it an early night. You’ll be leaving here before sunrise tomorrow to get to the farm by 0500.” Colin looked over at Ryan, making it clear that the discussion was closed. “Is there anything else your staff should know?”

  Ryan watched Izzy squeeze the straps of her pack. He caught the flash of fear in her eyes, and then something else, something that looked like anger, as if she were somehow offended by the assignment.

  What could she possibly have against working on an oyster farm?

  Suppressing the urge to speak up, to tell Colin that they should give her another job, he reminded himself that he wasn’t in charge of this program. He was just one of the employers. He had to trust that Will and Colin knew what they were doing.

  They were the ones who had served. They were the ones who could relate.

  A wet nose brushed against his fingertips and he looked down as Zoey, his chocolate lab, nuzzled his hand. “Wear gym clothes,” he said, “because you’re going to get dirty.”

  Two

  The next morning, Izzy woke, her heart racing, her hair drenched in sweat. Fumbling for the lamp on the bedside table, she found the switch, almost knocking it over in the process. A small circle of light filled the room. She blinked, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings. Pale blue walls. Gauzy white curtains. A small wooden desk beneath the window.

  She was at the veterans’ center, she remembered. On Heron Island. She took a few deep breaths, slowly peeling back the sheets. Her limbs felt heavy and awkward, still tethered to the memory of the nightmare—the same one she had every night. Her clothes were soaking wet and sticking to her as she climbed out of bed. Goosebumps rose on her bare arms when a blast
of air conditioning hit her. She shivered, searching for her pack, rooting through it for a change of clothes.

  She pulled out a clean T-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts. Still holding them in her hands, she turned and spotted the dark outline of sweat on the sheets. Shame rolled through her. It didn’t matter when this happened at home. At home, she could hide it. At home, no one needed to know. But, here, if anyone found out that she’d been waking up in a pool of her own sweat for the past nine months, they’d know something was wrong.

  Checking the clock on the bedside table, she saw that it was only 0415. Maybe no one else was up yet. She stripped the sheets, balled them up in her arms, and slipped quietly out of the room. The house was dark, but there was a nightlight in the stairwell, and a small table lamp burned in the entranceway. She made her way to the laundry room, remembering where it was from the tour the night before. Finding the door open, she turned the corner and froze.

  There was someone else in there. A man. One of the other veterans—the massive ex-Marine covered in tattoos—was holding his own set of sheets, which were completely soaked through.

  “Night sweats?” Kade asked.

  Izzy said nothing, mortified.

  He held out his hand. “It’s a big washer. I’ll put them both in.”

  Her arms tightened around the sheets, unable to hand them over, unable to accept help.

  Sensing it, he walked over and took them from her. He shoved them into the washing machine with a double dose of soap. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he said gruffly, then brushed past her and headed up the stairs.

  Izzy stood, unmoving, listening to the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, then the upstairs hallway, then the faint creak of a bedroom door opening and closing, until there was nothing but the low thrum of the washer beginning to fill with water beside her.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  She hadn’t expected to relate to any of the other veterans in this program. She hadn’t expected…to care.

  She didn’t want to care.

  But knowing that there was at least one other person suffering through the same hell as she was each night, especially someone who looked like Kade, made her feel a little bit less ashamed.

  Backing out of the laundry room, she walked down the narrow hallway and paused in the doorway to the kitchen. In the past, whenever she’d been upset about something, she would have headed for the kitchen. She would have cooked something.

  The simple act of putting food together had always soothed her. But not anymore. Not since…

  A woman’s place is in the kitchen.

  The voice—the same voice that haunted her dreams every night now—had her shuddering. She took the stairs two at a time, retreating to the safety of her room. She shut the door and leaned against it, feeling much more rattled than she wanted to admit.

  All she’d ever wanted was respect. All she’d ever wanted was to matter, to not be invisible. She’d never asked anyone for a handout. She’d never asked anyone for anything without giving twice as much in return. She’d spent twelve years in the Army working her way up from the bottom of the ladder. Only to be knocked off it again, violently, by a man whose life she had saved.

  Now, she was back to being invisible. And working on a farm.

  Walking slowly over to the clothes she’d pulled out of her pack earlier, she picked them up one by one. She wasn’t a stranger to farm work. She’d spent most of her childhood working on farms—picking onions in Arizona, apples in Colorado, just about every vegetable that could be grown in Texas. She’d joined the Army at eighteen to put the memories of that life far behind her.

  And she’d never once looked back.

  For the first time since she’d begun picking alongside her mother and grandmother at the age of seven, she’d had a job she could be proud of, a job that people would respect. She’d built a life for herself in this country, an honorable life, a life of service and sacrifice, so she could have a future that was better than the one her mother and grandmother had left behind in Mexico.

  She’d had no idea how easily it could all be taken away.

  Peeling off her wet clothes, she changed into the clean ones and washed up in the small bathroom. Not even bothering to glance at her reflection in the mirror, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and crossed the room to the window.

  Expecting the same view—those same haunted, broken trees she’d seen in the storm the night before—she was surprised to find that it looked nothing like that now. It had stopped raining. The slightest hint of sunlight was lightening the horizon, and the water stretched out as far as she could see in every direction.

  A row of condensation from the heat and humidity clung to the glass. She slid the window open. A solitary heron glided over the shoreline. A few songbirds were waking up, cheerfully chirping from the branches of the leafy trees in the yard. It was so quiet. And so peaceful.

  She jumped when someone knocked on the door.

  “Yo.” Kade stuck his head into her room. “Your van’s outside. Better get moving.”

  He disappeared back into the hallway, but she noticed that he left her door open a crack. Closing the window, she tucked her wet clothes into a laundry bag on the floor of the closet and followed him down the stairs. She spotted the blue van in the driveway and walked outside. A few of the others turned to look at her, then looked away.

  She wasn’t surprised. She knew that a group of them had stayed up after she’d gone to bed the night before, hanging out in the living room, getting to know each other. They were already forming into sub-groups. Finding commonalities. Forging friendships, alliances.

  She didn’t need to form alliances. She wasn’t here to make friends.

  “Is this everyone?” the guy in the driver’s seat asked, counting heads as they filed into the van.

  Izzy climbed into the back, taking a seat in the corner.

  “I don’t know,” one of the guys in the middle of the van answered. “Is Kade coming with us?”

  “No, he’s going to The Flower Shoppe,” another commented. “Remember?”

  A few people laughed.

  “I don’t know about this oyster farm thing,” the guy in the passenger seat said, “but it’s got to be better than working in a flower shop with some old lady.”

  More laughter broke out as the van began to move.

  “If he’s not coming with us, what’s he doing up so early?” The guy sitting beside Izzy checked his watch. “It’s not even 0500 yet.”

  “Maybe he wanted to practice his arrangements,” the guy in the passenger seat joked.

  “Make a wreath for his hair,” another piped in, inciting more laughter.

  The van bumped over a pothole and Izzy looked out the window, tuning them out. There was a time when she would have jumped in, dishing it out with the best of them. But she didn’t have it in her anymore. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d joked around with a group of guys, let alone laughed.

  “You ever eaten an oyster?” one of the guys in the middle asked the guy beside him, after they’d finished ragging on Kade.

  “Naw, those things are nasty. You?”

  “Yeah, one of my buddies ate, like, a hundred in a contest once. He threw up afterwards.”

  A few people laughed.

  “Aren’t they supposed to be some kind of aphrodisiac?” another guy asked.

  “Only if you eat them raw,” the guy in the passenger seat shot back.

  More people laughed, provoking a fresh string of jokes and comments, each rowdier and raunchier than the last.

  The guy in front of Izzy twisted around to face her. “You ever eaten an oyster, Izzy?”

  Izzy watched a fox streak through the grasses, its bushy red tail betraying its position until it ducked into a gap between two fallen trees, disappearing completely. “I can’t remember,” she lied.

  * * *

  Ryan watched the van turn up the driveway. Beside him, his father, Cooper “Coop” Callahan
, leaned against the shed, smoking a cigarette. “You know you’re nuts for trying to pull this off.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dad.”

  Coop took another drag. “I can keep selling to Dusty. I’m fine with the way things are.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Ryan said. “And you shouldn’t be either.”

  Ryan couldn’t help the spark of frustration he felt toward his father. Was it wrong to want more, to believe in more? Oyster farming was still relatively new in Maryland, but he had watched it take off in other states—California, Washington, Massachusetts, Rhode Island. Even Virginia, their neighbor to the south, was claiming a healthy stake in the aquaculture industry. He’d been studying the business models of the most successful farms for over a year now and he was hungry to follow in their footsteps.

  If they could pull this off, it would mean more jobs for the islanders, a revival of the waterman culture that was fading away, and reestablishing a precious natural resource that had been devastated from decades of overfishing.

  Coop dropped his cigarette on the ground, crushed it with his boot, and left it there. Ryan bent down, picked it up, and handed it back to his father. He pointed to the aluminum can on the ground marked, “butts.”

  His father rolled his eyes and tossed his cigarette into the can. “You should be working on a research paper to present at some fancy conference to a bunch of other smart people like you—not hanging out here with me.”

  Ryan ignored him. It was the same argument they always had. When Ryan had quit his position at the lab in Baltimore, his father had accused him of throwing away his future. But all Ryan had ever wanted was to move back here and work on the water again. The higher he got in academia, the more papers there were to write, the more pressure there was to publish, and the more conferences there were to attend. He didn’t want to work in a lab and analyze data on a computer screen for the rest of his life.