Read Chapter 4: The Ship's Log

The purser’s office sat at the end of a narrow corridor off the main stairwell, its brass nameplate gleaming under the electric lights. Evelyn pressed herself against the wall as Julian worked the lock with a thin piece of wire he’d produced from his waistcoat pocket, his movements unhurried, practiced.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.

“Many times.” The lock clicked. Julian pushed the door open and slipped inside. “Though never with an audience.”

The office was neat to the point of obsession—ledgers stacked in perfect rows, a typewriter shrouded in its cover, a calendar pinned to the wall showing April 14 in crisp black numerals. Julian moved behind the desk and pulled open the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, thumbing through folders with quick, certain motions.

“Third class,” he muttered. “O’Leary, O’Leary…” He stopped. “Here.”

Evelyn crossed to his side, reading over his shoulder. The manifest entry was written in a tidy copperplate hand:

*O’Leary, Margaret. Age 64. Widow. From Ballydehob, County Cork. Destination: New York. Ticket No. 330911. Fare: £8, 2s. Paid in full—anonymous benefactor.*

Evelyn frowned. “Benefactor. Not ‘son’ or ‘relative.’ Just anonymous.”

“Odd,” Julian agreed. “You’d think an old widow paying her own way would be more common than one bankrolled by a ghost.”

Evelyn’s fingers traced the entry. On the line below, the ticket number had been recorded, then scratched out and rewritten. A clerical correction, perhaps. But the original number was still faintly visible beneath the ink—and it matched the ticket of a different passenger entirely.

“Julian.” Her voice came out thin. “Look.”

He leaned in, following her gaze. The scratched-out number corresponded to cabin D-58.

“Margaret O’Donnell,” he said slowly.

Evelyn straightened. “The name on your paper. The one that changed.”

“So she was originally booked as O’Donnell,” Julian said, pulling a small notebook from his pocket—his ever-present companion, she’d noticed, filled with cramped writing in a hand she couldn’t quite read upside down. “Then the ticket was transferred. Name changed. Cabin reassigned.”

“But why? And by whom?”

Julian shook his head. “The manifest won’t tell us that. Whoever arranged it didn’t want a paper trail.”

A sound echoed from the corridor—footsteps, slow and deliberate. Evelyn held her breath. Julian moved with alarming silence, sliding the manifest folder back into place and ushering her behind the door just as a key turned in the lock.

The purser entered, a portly man with a heavy mustache, muttering to himself about the dinner arrangements. He moved to the desk, rifled through a stack of menus, and left without once glancing toward the shadows where Evelyn and Julian stood pressed together, barely breathing.

When the door clicked shut again, Evelyn exhaled. Julian’s hand was still on her arm; he released it with a murmured apology.

“We should go,” she said.

But Julian had already turned back to the desk. His fingers brushed over a fresh stack of blank passenger lists—the ones set aside for the morning’s use, unmarked, unsullied. He slid one into his pocket with a motion so smooth she almost didn’t catch it.

“Julian.”

“What?” His expression was innocent, too innocent.

“Why did you take that?”

“Insurance,” he said. “Paper changes each loop. If the list gets lost again, we’ll need a copy.”

It wasn’t quite a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Evelyn let it pass—for now. They slipped out of the office, through the corridor, and back into the bright chaos of the main stairwell, where stewards hurried past with armfuls of linens and a quartet of children chased each other between the railings.

Evelyn’s head swam with the implications. The anonymous benefactor. The altered ticket. The name that had changed from one loop to the next, settling on Margaret O’Donnell, then shifting to an old widow who’d been booked under that very name before someone had scrubbed her identity clean.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

Julian’s jaw tightened. He led her to a quiet alcove near the third-class entrance, where the noise of the ship faded to a distant hum. “I think someone doesn’t want her found.”

“Found? By whom?”

“By us.” He met her eyes. “Evelyn, I’ve searched for the person on that slip for over a hundred loops. Every time the name changes. Every time I get closer, something pushes me away—a steward, a locked door, a sudden storm in the middle of a clear day.” He paused. “But this is the first time the name changed to a woman who was *already* on my list. Under a different identity.”

Evelyn tried to process this. The old woman—Margaret O’Leary, with her silver locket and her dead sailor son—she had been booked on this ship as Margaret O’Donnell. Someone had gone to the trouble of changing her name, paying her fare anonymously, and hiding her in third class where no one would think to look.

“Why would anyone hide her?” Evelyn whispered.

Julian shook his head. “I don’t know yet. But I think the answer is in her past—her husband, her son. The men she lost to the sea.”

The locket. Evelyn remembered its weight in her hand, the worn photograph of a young man in a sailor’s uniform, smiling with all the confidence of someone who believed the ocean could never hurt him. Margaret had clutched it like a rosary.

“She told me her son died in a storm,” Evelyn said slowly. “Off the coast of Newfoundland. His ship went down with all hands.”

Julian’s expression shifted—something sharp and knowing flashing through his eyes. “What was the name of the ship?”

“She didn’t say. Just that it was a merchant vessel, carrying cargo from Halifax.”

“Cargo,” Julian repeated, tasting the word. “Do you know what was being shipped out of Halifax in late summer of 1910?”

Evelyn shook her head.

“I don’t either. But I know a way to find out.” He glanced toward the bow of the ship, where the wireless room sat humming with the steady pulse of Morse code. “There’s a newspaper archive in the reading lounge. Ship manifests of every major port. If her son’s vessel is listed anywhere, we can trace it.”

“And if it’s not?”

Julian’s smile turned grim. “Then someone made sure it wouldn’t be.”

A steward’s voice rang out from the stairwell, calling Evelyn’s name—her own steward, the one who had interrupted them that morning with news of a disturbance. She recognized his reedy tenor, the anxious pitch of it.

“Miss Ashworth! Miss Ashworth!”

Julian tensed. “He’s looking for you.”

“I should go. He’ll raise a fuss if I don’t.” Evelyn hesitated, her hand brushing Julian’s sleeve. “Meet me after tea. In the reading lounge.”

“I’ll be there.”

She turned to go, then stopped. “Julian. The blank list you took. What are you really planning to do with it?”

For a moment, his mask slipped—and beneath it, she glimpsed something tired, something almost afraid. “I told you. Insurance.” He pocketed his notebook. “But if I don’t find the truth by the time we hit the iceberg, I want to leave a record. Something that survives the loop. In case I don’t remember next time.”

In case he didn’t remember. The words chilled her more than any ghost story could. Because if Julian, with his hundred-plus cycles, could forget, what chance did she have?

“You’ll remember,” she said firmly. “You always do.”

“So far.” He didn’t sound convinced.

The steward called her name again, closer now. Evelyn forced a smile and stepped out of the alcove, smoothing her skirts as she moved toward the sound of his voice. Behind her, she felt Julian’s gaze on her back—watchful, weighted, as if he were memorizing the exact shade of her hair in this light.

She would find him later. She would trace the ship’s records. She would follow the thread that led from a dead sailor’s photograph to an old woman’s locket to a name that had been erased and rewritten and hidden again.

But as she rounded the corner and saw her steward’s pale, nervous face, she knew the morning had already cost them more than they’d gained. The passenger records were a door—but behind it lay only more questions, deeper shadows.

And somewhere in the dark water beneath their feet, the iceberg was already waiting.