When Sam disembarked in Friday Harbor the next afternoon, Ben was waiting on the dock. “What took you so long?” he asked. His hair was curling from the damp breeze. It always took her a while to leave after her shift was done; she had to wipe everything down, close out the register, and do a last sweep through the dining area for trash. He, meanwhile, strolled off, unencumbered, and had time to smoke a cigarette.

She took one from him. The lighter, too. “I didn’t know you were getting off this early.”

“I worked a double yesterday,” he said. “Feel like lunch?”

“I can’t.”

“Ah.” He squinted at the water. The ferry, behind Sam, blasted its horn twice. On the dock around them, people were strapping their kids into strollers and their dogs into complicated chest harnesses. He had waited for her, she guessed, because he wanted to sleep together; he’d disembarked in Friday Harbor a couple times before, under the pretense of taking Sam for a date at a restaurant in town. In each instance she had redirected him to her car’s backseat, where they could unzip themselves quickly enough for him to make the next boat out. He said, “You’re busy, huh? Packed schedule? You’ve got to go right now?”

“Yeah. I am. You should’ve found me on board.”

“I came by. You were on your phone all day.”

She’d been looking up the hours of outdoor outfitters. “Well,” she said. “Anyway. I do have to go.”

“What’s so important?”

“I have to run an errand, and then—you know. My mom.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ben said. “Sorry.” He knit his brows. The thick black fringe of his lashes framed his eyes, honey brown, with darkness. “What’s the errand? Want help?”

“You don’t need to.”

“But I want to,” he said.

Sam squinted at him. Wanted to, why?

The dock was almost emptied out. A single terminal attendant was picking up litter from the holding area. Sam ground her cigarette under her foot. Ben reached for her bag and she, after a moment, gave it to him to carry. He asked, “Where’re we headed?”

The “we” sounded off. In one instant, Ben could be silly, stupid, making fun, and then in the next he would unsettle her by asking her to meals. Texting on the days their shifts didn’t overlap. At times he acted almost like a boyfriend. He didn’t need to bother; Sam had enough to deal with.

“Kings Marine,” Sam said. “I’ve got to get something.”

Kings Marine didn’t have it. Its second floor was narrowly geared toward boaters, with crab traps and fishing guides and waterproof electronics for sale. Ben wandered across the floor, fingering buoys and woven black nets. “What are we looking for?” he asked.

“Bear spray.”

His palms stopped on a life jacket. “Really? What happened, it came back?”

“That biologist told me to get some,” Sam said. “In case.”

“I thought you didn’t trust her.”

When had Sam told him that? Sitting in the galley, tucked into crew quarters, waiting alongside him for the boat to dock—there had been too many opportunities for Sam to chatter. “I didn’t say that.”

Ben moved over to a barrel full of kayak paddles. “Sure.”

Sam was standing in front of a shelf of insect repellents. She picked up a can and put it back down. “She’s just super weird,” she said. “Holier than thou.”

“I get it. She makes you insecure.”

Sam turned away from the cans and toward him. He was smiling at her, he thought they were bantering, but her skin was hot. She said, “Fuck off.”

“Whoa. Feeling sensitive?”

“No, I’m great,” Sam said. “I’m fantastic. I just think it’s funny that you’re defending this person when she would never—she’s so out of your league.”

Because she was facing him, she saw the words land. He’d hurt her accidentally, but she in turn had tried to hurt him, and it worked: his smile dropped off. A wound opened.

Ben turned from her. After a second of silence, he walked away. Sam faced the row of repellents and picked up another can as if the mosquito illustration on it would transform into a bear.

Her eyes burned. She almost felt as though she ought to apologize, but—he owed her an apology, she thought—any hurt here was his fault. Wasn’t it?

Sure, there were qualities in Madeline that…did unsettle Sam, made her regret every interaction, told her to keep the biologist away. Madeline could not have made it more clear with the way she looked and wrote and carried herself that she and Sam were from different worlds. Sam shouldn’t trust her.

Except that was what confused Sam most. As foreign as Madeline’s life must be, she was also potentially recognizable…It didn’t make sense. Ben could never understand; Sam herself didn’t. But Madeline and Elena both made Sam want to follow their leadership. When Madeline gave directions, Sam was tempted, against her older sister’s guidance, to obey. That was the part that unnerved Sam, and intrigued her, and made her think about the biologist and write desperate emails and talk about her, apparently, too much.

Someone touched her back and she started. The cans clattered against each other. Ben was next to her, his hand lifted. He said, “Hey. I talked to a person who works here and they’ve got nothing. Let’s try somewhere else.”

They walked five minutes down Spring Street to the hardware store. At the entrance, Ben again put his fingers on Sam’s back. Small points of warmth—five dots of accusation. Low, Sam said to him, “It’s not what you think. I’m fine with her. It’s just best to not, you know, get close to what’s too different.”

“Right,” he said. “That’s why you won’t with me.”

“I don’t—”

“Because I intimidate you with my beauty,” he said. Winked at her. Those lush dark lashes, that relaxed and too-clever look.

She didn’t say anything else, and neither did he. They looked down separate aisles, came up empty, and reconvened at the help desk, where a man in a red apron offered to special-order Sam a canister. “So you’ve seen our bear?” he asked.

Sam nodded. Ben spoke up: “Right outside her house.”

“My goodness,” the man said. “It’s really getting bold. Do you know the Gerards? They saw it last week around their property, and now their outdoor cats are missing.”

“Shit,” Ben said. “That’s awful.”

The man shook his head. He was typing something on his computer. “Anyway, you’re not the first people to come in asking about this. Can never be too careful.” He hit a key. “The spray’ll be here in a week. It’ll run you fifty-five bucks—fifty-four ninety-five, technically.”

He might as well have said a year and a thousand dollars. An eternity and a sack of precious stones. This was time and money Sam did not have. Ben had moved a few feet away, to the side of the desk, to toy with a display rack of fishing lures. In his hands, the feathers and hooks.

She said, “Can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure,” Ben said. “Shoot.”

“Can I borrow fifty-five dollars? For ordering this thing? And then I’d pay you back next Friday?”

He pulled away from the lures. The make-believe, for a moment, dropped, and Ben showed himself to Sam as he really was: reluctant. His pretty mouth was tight. Despite all his invitations, he wasn’t her boyfriend at all, was he? Just an island visitor, a guy who came to San Juan for the season and fucked her.

He’d gotten off the boat today to rub that in her face. Ben assumed she was ignorant because he had lived a bigger life than she had. He’d grown up elsewhere, served in the Coast Guard Reserve, traveled. What had Sam learned from these years at home, meanwhile? What lessons did she have to carry with her? All she knew was exactly what she’d tried to tell him: never, ever turn to a stranger for help.

“Never mind,” Sam said.

“No, I—” He hesitated. “Sam, you just…How much?”

“Forget it.”

Ben’s usual face was back on. He reached as if to touch his wallet but didn’t actually go into his pocket. His arm hovered there. “If you really need it,” he said, “it’s no problem.”

“No,” she said. “I’m good.” His hand fell to his side. He was controlling himself now, but he was relieved. Sam knew. She pulled out her phone, both to check the time and to look away from him. “It’s late.”

Ben followed her out of the store, up Spring Street, toward the harbor where her car was parked. She stayed a step ahead so he couldn’t touch her anymore. He was talking about another deckhand. Some argument they’d gotten into, the funny things Ben had said in response. Sam was thinking about fifty-five dollars: two twenties, a ten, and a five. Only a few bills, and yet more than she had, more than he thought she was worth.

His family was better off than hers was. It was obvious. He’d gone to two years of college but never talked about student loans. He wore Red Wing boots, name-brand, nice stuff, and had a newer cellphone. His parents were together. They were retired, he’d told Sam, during one of his talks with her before or after sex, in the bantering runup or the soft comedown.

Sam’s mother would never get to retire. Even if she hadn’t gotten sick—she would have never been able to afford it. The sisters themselves needed a human sacrifice in order to stop working even for a short while. Yet Ben, strolling beside her, carrying her bag, had everything. Fifty-five dollars a hundred times over, probably. More. He was playing, during the pandemic, at working life; he occupied the job Sam hadn’t been offered and a place on the boat where she’d been kept from shifts; he acted like he knew her reality, but he had no idea. What Sam had been through. How much four bills might change.

They reached the parking lot. At its edge stood an art installation Sam had walked past ten thousand times before: a carved wooden post showing a woman embracing a mountain lion. Sam needed to get off this island already. Interrupting Ben’s telling of a story he’d heard about the first mate, she said, “Bye.”

He halted, regrouped. “You’re sure you don’t have time for a meal?” She shook her head. “Do you have a couple minutes, even? We could just hang.”

Ah. Right. He would give her nothing when she needed it, but now that he’d walked eight blocks round-trip with her, he could get what he wanted in the first place. The backseat, the locked doors, the fumbled clothes. “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

He pouted, fleetingly. “What’s your shift tomorrow?”

“Morning. Five.”

“I’m not on until two.”

“Okay,” she said. She didn’t care. She was over it: Ben’s body, his talking, his thrusting, his jokes. Their connection to each other had run its short course.

She unlocked her car. Ben was lingering. He asked, “Are you all right?”

“Sure.”

He tipped his head at her.

She couldn’t help herself. What he had to say didn’t matter anymore, but still. “Why do you even have this job?” she asked.

“What does that mean?”

“Why? You have a degree. Isn’t there something better you should do?”

“What, cure cancer? I like being on the water,” he said. Sam shook her head. He protested: “So? What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

“Okay, except you’re pissed off, it’s obvious.”

“I’m not,” she said. “Like what you like. Who cares? I’m fine.”

“Come on,” Ben said. The sun was high and the breeze was blowing off the water. She could see every individual hair in the stubble on his cheeks. The peach fuzz on his earlobes. Looking at him made her remember the closets they’d hid themselves in, his face too close to focus on, his fingers deep inside. His voice so different there from what it sounded like out here, with the tourists passing and the gulls calling behind. “This is about the money?”

“No.”

“I can lend it to you if you need it. I told you that.”

“I just think it’s shitty that you have this job,” Sam said, “when you could do something else. Whatever. You’re always talking about going back to school. Why don’t you do that? Because there are people here who could really use what you have. People who don’t have a lot of other options.”

“The job was open and I applied,” he said. “If they wanted it, they should’ve applied, too.”

Sam found this infuriating. The car door handle was warming under her hand. How casual he was, how wrong. “You think I’m stupid,” she said. “You’re the stupid one.”

He made a face. “I don’t think that at all. You need to calm down.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“You’re overreacting. You’re this pissed because we—”

“It’s not about the money,” Sam said. And it wasn’t. It was but it wasn’t—it wasn’t about this money, these particular fifty-five dollars, but about all the money, his parents’ imagined money, the money in this country that was kept away from her family, the money in the pockets of the passengers they ferried back and forth. All the things other people had. And she had nothing. She had less than that.

It wasn’t fair that Ben should move around, rent his own place, go fishing when he felt like it. It enraged her. His total lack of appreciation for what he had. It wasn’t about the money; it was about him, and her, and where they came from, and the whole world, which was twisted and threatening and completely unfair, which demanded that Sam defend herself but never gave her any of what she needed to try.

“Forget it,” she said. “Seriously. We’ve wasted enough time together. I’ve got to get back home.”