I had thought, Dad, I’m going on my honeymoon, not into a war.

I remember the exact look on his face when he gave it to me — a little sheepish, a little stubborn, the look of a man who knows he’s being overprotective and is going to do it anyway.

He’d said, humor an old man.

Put it somewhere Flynn won’t find it, and forget it’s there, and I’ll feel better about you being out on that ocean. And I’d tucked it into the false bottom mostly to make him happy, the way you accept an umbrella from a parent under a clear sky.

It never once occurred to me that the danger he was quietly bracing against was already sleeping beside me every night, with his arm around my waist and two white pills in his other hand.