Read Chapter 20: The Last Boats

The collapsible boat hung from its davits like a half-finished thought, canvas sides flapping in the wind that had begun to bite with something beyond cold. The officer—a young man with a bloodless face and a voice gone hoarse from shouting—had his hand on Élodie’s shoulder, pushing her toward the gunwale.

“Women and children. Now.”

She had Rose’s hand in one fist and Louis’s collar in the other, the boy half-asleep against her hip, his breath coming in shallow, trusting puffs. The boat was nearly full. Faces turned up at her from inside it, pale moons in the dark, some weeping, most silent in that terrible, waiting way.

“Élodie.” Tom’s voice came from behind her, rough with strain. He had one arm pressed against his ribs, the other hanging useless at his side, the broken limb wrapped in a makeshift sling of torn linen that had already soaked through with seawater. Or blood. She couldn’t tell anymore.

She looked at him. The ship groaned beneath them, a sound so deep it felt like the world itself was clearing its throat.

“You will come,” she said. Not a question.

“I’ll follow.” He said it too quickly. She knew what that meant. She knew this man well enough now to read the lie in the set of his jaw.

“Tom.”

“There’s room in the next one.” He glanced past her, toward the collapsed crane where the last remaining boat—a flat, fragile-looking thing—was being dragged across the deck by a team of men who moved like they were already dead. “I’ll be right behind you.”

The officer’s hand clenched harder on her shoulder. “Madame. The boat is going down now.”

Rose began to cry. Not the dramatic wail of a child throwing a tantrum, but a thin, exhausted keening that cut through the wind like a wire. Élodie felt her own resolve crack along familiar fault lines.

She could board. She could take these children to safety. That was what a good woman would do. That was what the rational woman would do, the one who had planned her escape from France with meticulous, desperate care, believing that order could save her.

But her feet would not move.

She looked at Tom, at the dark stain spreading across his side, at the way he swayed slightly with each new tilt of the deck, and she understood with terrible clarity that if she stepped into that boat, she would never see him again. She would watch him die from a distance, and she would live the rest of her life knowing she had chosen to let him.

“Take them,” she said.

The officer blinked. “Madame?”

She shoved Rose forward, pressing Louis’s hand into the girl’s. “Take them. Both of them. They are my sister’s children—their mother is already in the boat.”

It was a lie. Marie was not in the boat. Marie was somewhere below, in the chapel, or in the flooding corridors, or drowned already in the black water that was climbing the grand staircase like a patient, hungry thing.

But the officer did not know that. He saw two children and a woman who was not their mother, and he made his calculation in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

“Get in,” he said to Rose. Then, to Louis, who had woken enough to cling to the girl’s coat: “You too, son.”

Rose looked back at Élodie, her eyes wide and dark and suddenly, terribly old. “You said you would stay.”

“I will find you,” Élodie said. “Whatever boat you land in, I will find you. Do you understand me?”

Rose nodded. She did not believe it. Élodie could see that in the set of her small mouth, and it hurt more than any physical blow.

The officer lifted them over the rail and set them into the crowded boat like parcels of cargo. Louis began to cry, a raw sound that tore through the night, and Élodie felt her chest split open along its seams.

“Go,” Tom said, and for a moment she thought he meant her. But he was already moving, staggering toward the aft deck where a group of men were straining against a jammed watertight door, their shouts swallowed by the roar of water below.

“He’s going to kill himself,” Élodie said, to no one.

The officer grabbed her arm. “You. In the boat. Now.”

He was stronger than he looked—or she was weaker than she had believed. Either way, she found herself lifted, her feet leaving the deck, her hands scrabbling for purchase on the canvas gunwale as the officer shoved her down into the crowded space. Bodies pressed against her on all sides. Someone’s hand gripped her knee. A woman was praying in a low, frantic monotone.

“No,” Élodie said. “No—I have to—”

“Lower away!” the officer shouted.

The boat lurched. The davits screamed in protest, metal grinding against metal, and for one terrible moment Élodie felt the world drop away beneath her.

She looked up.

Tom had reached the watertight door. He was braced against the frame, his good arm hooked around a steel lever, his bad arm hanging useless as he threw his whole body against it. The door was jammed on something—a crate, a body, a piece of the ship’s own guts—and the water on the other side was pressing it shut with the force of an entire ocean behind it.

The men around him were backing away. They had given up. They were moving toward the last boat, toward the chance at life that Tom was spending with his own.

Tom saw Élodie watching him.

For a moment, the world went quiet. The screaming, the praying, the groan of the dying ship—all of it fell away, and there was only his face, lit by the dying glow of a lantern someone had abandoned, his eyes finding hers across the impossible distance.

He smiled.

It was a terrible, reckless, wonderful smile, the smile of a man who had already decided what he was willing to lose.

“Tom,” she whispered.

He turned back to the door. He put his shoulder against it. He pushed.

The boat dropped another foot.

The officer’s hand pressed down on Élodie’s shoulder, forcing her to sit. “Stay down, damn you.”

She looked at the boat. At the faces around her. At Rose, who had wrapped her arms around Louis and was staring at Élodie with an expression that was not a child’s expression at all.

“I’m sorry,” Élodie said.

“What?” the officer said.

She did not explain. She simply moved.

It was not graceful. She was wedged between a heavyset woman and a crying man, and her coat—the one Tom had given her, the one that had kept her alive this long—caught on the gunwale as she climbed. The boat tilted. Someone screamed. The officer shouted something that was lost in the wind.

And then she was falling.

The sea did not catch her gently. It hit her like a wall of glass, cold so absolute it stole the breath from her lungs before she could even think to scream. She went under, and for a moment, there was only blackness and pressure and the terrible silence of water that has swallowed a thousand voices.

She broke the surface gasping, her arms flailing, her fingers closing on something solid—the rope of the boat’s falls, still dangling from the davits above.

Above her, the officer was leaning over the rail, his face a mask of fury and, beneath it, something that looked almost like admiration.

“You are the most foolish woman I have ever met,” he shouted.

“I have been called worse,” she shouted back.

She pulled herself hand over hand along the rope, the cold gnawing at her limbs, her soaked dress dragging at her like a second, drowning skin. The boat was still descending, the waterline rising to meet it, and she used the last of her strength to swing herself onto the deck just as the bow plunged another foot into the sea.

She landed hard. Her knee cracked against steel. Pain lanced up her leg.

Ahead of her, Tom had thrown himself against the watertight door one final time. She saw the lever move. She saw the door begin to close.

And she saw the shadow moving behind him, rising out of the stairwell like something conjured from the deep.

“Tom!” she screamed. “Behind you!”

He turned.

The shadow was a man—or the shape of one, sodden and barely upright, his face half-torn, one arm trailing in the grip of the water that poured up from below.

William Hargrave.

He was not in the smoking lounge anymore. He had moved, or been moved, and now he stood before the closing door, his mouth open in a soundless cry.

Tom lunged for him. His good arm hooked around William’s chest and hauled—once, twice, the door grinding shut, the water rising, the sea roaring in through every gap and seam like it was hungry.

The door slammed closed.

Tom fell backward, William on top of him, both of them lying in the shallow wash of the flooding deck.

Élodie reached them in three staggering strides.

Tom’s face was grey. His lips were blue. The bandage at his side had come unraveled, and the blood was not seeping anymore—it was flowing, dark and steady, pooling beneath him on the wet, tilting deck.

“You absolute fool,” she said, dropping to her knees beside him, her hands pressing uselessly against the wound. “You absolute, impossible fool.”

He looked up at her. His eyes were bright with something that was not pain, not fear.

“You jumped out of a lifeboat,” he said.

_“You_ tried to close a watertight door with one arm.”

He smiled again, that same terrible smile. “We’re even, then.”

Behind them, William Hargrave coughed seawater onto the deck. He lifted his head, his eyes finding Élodie’s with a clarity that did not belong to a dying man.

“The chapel,” he said. “She’s not in the chapel.”

“What?” Élodie said.

“The mailroom,” William rasped. “She told me. Before I left. She lied about the chapel. She’s going to the mailroom.”

Louis’s red ribbon. The water pouring through the mailroom’s loading doors. The place where Marie had said her husband’s body was waiting.

“Why would she go there?” Élodie asked.

William’s eyes fluttered closed. His voice was barely a whisper.

“Because that’s where she left him.”

The ship groaned. The deck tilted harder, and the last boat—the fragile collapsible that the men had been dragging—slid past them, empty and abandoned, straight into the sea.