We broke the surface into a blast of Carolina light. It was the kind of white that didn’t come from the sun alone, but from the way the water magnified it, sent it ricocheting off every flat surface: the deck, the wet chrome of the rails, the bleached arms and shoulders of the other divers already hauling themselves up the ladder. The world had gone from bathyscaphe-silent to high decibel, all at once. I had a vague sense memory of being born—of what it might feel like to get shoved from a floating, muffled cocoon into the full-volume mess of being alive.

The deck was already back to normal. Or, more precisely, to its post-dive pecking order: Karma was half out of her wetsuit before I cleared the back ladder. Her blonde hair was stuck to her head in a wet rope, but she didn’t look winded.

Brian and Mike were slapping each other’s shoulders, swapping their depth numbers and making a joke about which one “came up fastest.” “Men,” I thought, but I was still smiling. Mike tried to make his wetsuit sleeve into a noodle and hit Brian with it. Brian faked a punch to the stomach. Bros being bros, except these were the kind of dads who scheduled their heart attacks between soccer practice and crossfit.

Mario had already commandeered the galley table, elbowing open a battered leather logbook and starting to write, the ink blurring in little pools from his still-wet hand. “Twenty-four minutes,” he announced, not looking up. “Not too shabby.” He spoke like he was logging shipments, not minutes of his own life. Fresh from his fake beating by Mike, Brian chimed in, “If you stopped smoking, you’d stay down longer.” Mario gave him the stinky eye.

The sound was a relief after forty minutes of listening to nothing but my regulator’s hiss. But it all felt a little removed from me. I was still turning the coin over in my glove, the tiny, impossible warmth of it pressing against my palm through the neoprene.

The world spun around me, but I felt stationary, suspended, like I was still underwater and the rest of them were the ones floating up and down. Karma was calling for a gear check. A handful were swapping out their tanks. Brian was holding up cans of Red Bull and waggling them at anyone who’d take it. But I didn’t hear most of what they said. The coin took up all the bandwidth in my head.

It had an edge like a dull razor, with the ghost of some old etching on the flat face. Even in the bright sun, the coin looked gray and cold, but it was warm. Not the way metal holds heat from your hand, but like it made its own. Every time I tried to let go of it, I found myself gripping it tighter.

I tucked my mask under the strap of my BCD, my stomach growling for lunch, but the hunger was a distant signal. Why me? The question was a low hum beneath the deck chatter. The coin felt like a secret I wanted to shout from the rails and also tell no one, ever. I curled my hand around it, letting the other divers’ voices blur into meaningless sound.

Braden surfaced last, a dive master’s habit. He broke the water and hung there for a beat, letting the air hit his face before hauling himself onto the platform. His shoulders were broad, back muscles flexing as he pulled up. He caught my eye before his mask was even off. His gaze dropped to my BCD pocket, where the coin was hidden, then snapped back to my face. A question asked and answered without a word.

I patted the pocket. Just once. The whole conversation took less than a second.

Karma was in the middle of telling the captain about “the current at the second site,” her voice tuned to project across the deck. I heard her say something about a thermocline and visibility, but it sounded like she was underwater herself, the words blurring together.

I caught myself grinning before I could stop it. Braden shook his head, just the faintest movement, a not-quite-scolding that said: You’re going to get us both in trouble. Then he turned away to help one of the regulars strip out of a wetsuit that had gone inside-out.

I wanted to say something, or at least make a gesture, but the moment had already passed. He was back to work, and I was left standing there, wet and awake, feeling like we’d just robbed a bank together and nobody else had even noticed.

The galley table was already a mess of masks and fins. I elbowed past it, dug into my dry bag, and pulled out my go-to surface interval snack: a sleeve of Nutter Butters. It was pure vending machine fuel, and I didn’t care.

Predictably, Brian clocked it within ten seconds. “High-performance athlete, right there,” he said, waving a half-eaten protein bar for emphasis. “Fueling up for that next big push.”

I made a show of tapping the nutrition facts panel. “It’s all about the macros,” I said. “And the emotional support sugar. Your protein bar isn’t any less bioengineered.”

He looked at the back of his package noting the white lettering and laughed. “You’re not wrong.”

Braden was across the deck, perched on the rail with a shaker bottle and what looked like a protein wrap. He had taken off his suit and was showing off a gloriously tanned and muscled chest with his wetsuit tied at his waist, feet in neoprene booties.

He didn’t so much as glance at me and my cookies, but I could still tell he was watching me somehow. The captain was showing him a blip on the fish screen. He leaned in, heads close, and I could hear the captain’s briny drawl even over the wind.

I ate my cookies and listened to the others argue about whether the viz inside the next wreck would be better on the incoming tide or the outgoing. Mike thought the plankton would settle. Mario said it didn’t matter, “the sand always wins.” The only one who seemed to care was Karma, who took it as a challenge and started explaining the tidal physics to anyone within earshot.

Mostly, though, she was working her way into Braden’s space. She had the patience of a pickpocket, sidling closer each time she asked him a question or pretended to need clarification on a chart. Braden played it cool—attentive, polite, but never giving her more than a sideways nod.

I couldn’t tell if I was watching a negotiation or a chess match. Either way, I was glad to be on the sidelines, sleeves sticky with cookie dust. I rested a hand on my BCD pocket, feeling the hard, secret outline of the coin through the fabric.

It only took about ten minutes for Karma to make her move. She slipped into the narrow space beside Braden, one hand resting lightly on the rail, body angled toward him in that proprietary, practiced lean. Her voice was lower, almost intimate, and she kept her head tipped just enough to keep his attention anchored.

Braden let it happen. He wasn’t stiff or defensive—just receptive in a way that made it clear he was used to being the object of focus. He answered her questions, nodded at her theories, even laughed once at something she said about “off-gassing nitrogen and bad habits.”

He didn’t rush or cut her off, but he didn’t feed her any extra energy, either. It was like he’d put himself in a kind of social neutral. I watched this from across the deck, picking at the crumbs in my lap and throwing them into the waves. Why hadn’t he looked at me once since Karma arrived? She had made herself the center of the conversation, and he let her.

What was he doing? Why was he letting her get that close? Something snagged in my chest, uncomfortable and unwelcome. In denial, dread rising, I refused to acknowledge the feeling that ate at me and what it meant.