“Hannah,” Donovan said, pushing his way into the conversation as gently as he could. His hand touching the other woman's forearm was, he hoped, comforting. “We can't take Jason with us. We would like to, but there are plenty of good excuses for him to stay behind. Like losing Allison was just too much. Or he’s not ready to be on the water. Or maybe he can’t travel at the last minute. So, you picked up a new crew.”
In that moment, he wished he had Christina Pines’ ability to push people into thinking what she wanted them to. They had come to get Hannah to first agree to the trip, and then agree to take on a new crew—mainly them. Eleri had already struck out, and Donovan could feel that he was about to, too.
Hannah shook her head. She wasn’t buying any of Donovan’s arguments. “Jason needs the job. He's my right hand. Allison and Neriah are both gone. I have to have someone I trust on board. Honestly, I think the whole thing looks suspicious if I take on a completely new crew.”
She made a compelling argument. But Donovan and Eleri were unable to give their most important response: What if something had to happen that revealed what they really were? There would be nowhere to escape, and no way to hide it from Hannah. . . or Jason.
NightShade was the FBI’s best-kept secret. If they ruined that? Well, Westerfield would have their heads.
“I’m not going out without Jason.”
Where Donovan had thought he would have the upper hand because he wasn't Hannah's friend, he now found he had nothing. Leaning back, he conceded that advantage to Eleri, though it didn’t give her much of an edge.
They left ten minutes later.
“First off,” he said, irritated as they climbed into the hot car. He was certain he would not miss this while they were on the ocean. “What the hell just happened in there?”
“We surrendered.” Eleri shrugged as if to say What could they do?
“I got that. But why?”
“Because Hannah was right. And the harder we fought her, the more it became clear we had something to hide. We’re just going to have to hide things from Hannah. If we're hiding it from her, we can hide it from Jason, too. We can't go out without Hannah.”
Donovan was beginning to think he’d had a really stupid idea in making Hanna retrace her steps. But Eleri was still making her case. “Hannah knows the scenario. She knows where they stopped to get specimens. If anything happened to Hannah, even if she just got a stomach bug, we'd be dead in the water.”
Donovan swallowed hard, disliking Eleri’s choice of words as much as he disliked the new plan. But he conceded, there were no better options. Eleri wasn't wrong.
They had three days before the six of them hit the water. Hannah, Jason, GJ, Noah, and Eleri and Donovan. Everyone but Donovan and GJ would be diving in teams. At least, that was the plan—attempting to figure out where Allison had gone, and what she had seen. As there were no threats against Hannah or Jason, they needed to figure out what Allison and maybe Neriah had seen when they were underwater.
GJ was already compiling coordinates, using information from Allison and Hannah's old lab notebooks to find points to stop. She was adding information from where Blake Langley had obtained his original oyster clutches—the ones that had tipped him off to the problem and kick-started his second round of testing.
GJ had held up the notebook to them. “The fact that Blake's oysters came from a place almost in line with Hannah and Allison's trip is really concerning to me. That's why I think we need to check.”
Their trip would take them to the oil rigs Hannah and Allison had stopped at. Using the coordinates, they found the one stop that seemed to have no man-made structure associated with it. Out in the middle of the ocean, this seemed to have simply been a point where they stopped. Yet somehow, Allison had gathered barnacles.
So far, Donovan hadn’t been able to trace any known shipping container, research vessel, or other boat that had been in the area during the time Allison and Hannah had passed by. So it was difficult to say what Allison might have taken her samples from, since her notes were vague on that part.
Eleri had been contacting authorities in Nassau, attempting to find out if any headway had been made on the piracy case in which Allison and Hannah's initial research vessel had blown up. Noah was gathering dive equipment and backup gear, figuring out what would fit in the space on the boat. The whole while, Donovan’s stomach turned.
He was the one who’d recommended getting on the boat. He’d possibly done it so that no one had to recommend it to him. He knew going out into the ocean was inevitable, given the case, but he wasn't looking forward to it.
Eleri promised him that being on the boat was very much like being on land—as long as he didn't go diving. There was absolutely no worry that he would go diving. He was not only not scuba-certified, but he wasn't even a solid swimmer. He was determined to be the nerd in the life vest, twenty-four-seven.
Telling himself that at least he wasn't the only non-diver was a little soothing, though he was already convinced that GJ would be able to handle the water with far more grace than he would. Still, he knew he had to go. This was the job.
There was one small, comforting factor in leaving the land. Leaving the land meant leaving his brother. It meant leaving the sordid history of his mother behind.
Wade had called the day before. He’d made it into Donovan’s house to check for intruders. Not only did he not scent that anyone else had been in the house, but the scarf was still in the drawer.
Donovan had needed more than just a moment to absorb that. He'd gone to the box still on the hotel room table and pulled the very same scarf out. Holding it in his hands, he sent Wade a picture. Immediately, Wade sent back a picture of the scarf at Donovan’s. The shot showed exactly where he had found it, which was exactly where Donovan had left it.
That meant that the scarf in Donovan’s hands was not stolen from his drawer. The picture of his mother wearing the scarf must have been a picture of a duplicate. Donovan had sniffed it again. And again and again. Still, Amisha Bannerjee had worn this scarf. This one that he had in Florida with him—she had worn it plenty.
He thanked Wade. It wasn't a small favor. But it had given him a big answer.
No one had broken into his home. At least Donovan hadn't missed that.
He had been setting a timer each night. One hour was all the time he allowed himself to dig into his brother and mother's history. But even in the three hours that those nights afforded, he had found far more than he wanted to know.
His mother had given birth to Bodhi Banerjee. As best Donovan could remember—or stitch together from the dates in his own past—that birth had occurred a mere five months after she’d left Donovan and his father.
And that's exactly what she had done. She had given him the scarf and left him behind with his father. She’d been pregnant at the time, though seven-year-old Donovan had had no clue.
He found himself running at a constant simmer under the surface. Though at first, he’d managed to hold it back—telling himself not to be angry at her until he knew more—now he knew more.
The information he'd dug up revealed that she’d gone on to get work and an apartment, by saying she was single and had only the one young child. She’d said she was widowed. She’d used her limited English and gotten herself a job in a factory. She had raised Bodhi Bannerjee on her own. Donovan still didn't know if the factory work had done her in, or if she'd simply had a hard life, traveling all over Calcutta selling rags and phuchkas for loose change before finding her life tossed into a far worse situation with Aiden Heath.
As he searched his own memory, Donovan found nothing indicating his mother didn't love him. But she hadn't died. He didn't know if she had faked her own death and done a good enough job for Aiden to believe it—or if she’d managed to get away and he’d simply let her leave. That didn't seem likely.
Maybe that part didn’t matter, because the hard part was that she had left Donovan behind. She’d had Bodhi and she’d given her younger son fifteen years of her life, more than twice as long as Donovan had gotten with her.
Rubbing salt into the fresh cut of Donovan’s new knowledge, Bodhi had turned out to be a complete piece of shit. Though the brother angle was fascinating, Donovan realized what he was looking for was not his brother, but a connection to his mother. He’d found it. And it was disconnected.
He couldn't help the bitterness that roiled in him.
Getting on the boat the next morning felt like leaving it all behind—leaving the memory of his mother, leaving the trail he’d followed to find her behind him on the shore. He was leaving his brother, too, because his brother was built like him. And while Donovan might have enough friends and be brave enough to get on the water, he knew Bodi Heath would not be.