Water from My Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

My hand in hers. She believed that our marrying here, in this turquoise water, would wash off the memory and pain of her first. I’d never been married, but that does not suggest I didn’t have memory and pain. I stood there, ankle-deep, envisioning her, the wind tugging her hair across her eyes, her cheeks. Draping her cover-up across her bathing suit. Bare feet. Tanned. That smile. Wading out to meet me. Taking my hand.
    Out of habit, I glanced at my wrist to check the time, but my watch still wasn’t there. Nothing but the tan line noting its absence. Shelly was going to ask, and I had to think up a story without lying to her face.
    Colin said he was coming over for the weekend on the Bertram—a sixty-foot sportfishing yacht powered by two supercharged Cat diesels producing more than a thousand horsepower each. Given its tanks and capacities, the Bertram had a range of several thousand miles and was the perfect vessel for longer voyages down to the Keys or even Cuba and points south. With three staterooms, a kitchen and living area, not to mention expansive areas on both the bow and stern to stretch out and get away or sit in the fighting chair and wrestle a tuna or blue marlin, it allowed ample room for Marguerite, Zaul, and Maria.
    While south Florida was beautiful in many respects, it suffered from one problem, which no politician could fix. In the event of storm or a natural disaster, there were only a few roads out. Which, when clogged with the millions who lived there, became a parking lot preventing a speedy exit. Colin had bought the Bertram more as a ferry for his family in the event that they needed to get out and could not. But, over the years, it had also become a great way to travel to the islands—which they did several times a month. Its forty-knot speed meant he could crank the engines, navigate out of the canals, skim across Stiltsville, and be in Bimini in less than an hour and twenty minutes.
    Shelly had planned to make rounds this morning; she had a few surgeries up and through lunch, then she was going to run a few errands, shop for a few things, and meet Colin at the dock at 4:30 p.m.
    I scanned the horizon for any sign of a boat, but still no Bertram.
    I’d been there a while when a glistening speck crested the horizon, but it was not the Bertram. For Shelly not to show meant one of two things: She’d had second thoughts, which I rather doubted, or something at work—something she couldn’t pass off to one of her partners—demanded she miss her own wedding. Colin, on the other hand, had been giddy at the thought of my marrying. Other than a pressing family need, I could think of no reason that Colin wasn’t standing on this beach. The fact that he wasn’t dropping anchor right now suggested something serious, and sudden, had happened to his family. For both of them not to show meant that “something” involved both of them: i.e, boat trouble, which was possible though unlikely, or Colin had need of Shelly professionally. As in, he needed a doctor.
    After standing in the water for what felt like an hour, I waded onto the beach and asked an older lady walking her dog down the beach, “You know the time?”
    She eyed her watch. “Quarter past eight.”
    Something was way bad wrong. I stood arms folded, lips pursed. I carried a cell phone, but I seldom dialed out on it and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to tell someone how to call me. Using the same phone on a regular basis was an occupational hazard because law enforcement agencies could use it to triangulate my position. Given this, Colin gave me a new SIM card every week—sometimes several times a week—and a new phone at least once a month. When I first got in the game, I tried to memorize each change, but after twenty new numbers and four new phones in less than four months, I gave up. Colin was the only one who knew my number, and as a testimony to his genius and his photographic memory, he never wrote them down. He stored