PART 2
I stared at Petty Officer Diaz.
“He said I went under at 5:12?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I held up my wrist with a shaking hand.
“Then how did I call him at 5:31?”
She took my arm and looked at the call log on my watch. Her jaw tightened.
“Ma’am, I need you to tell me everything you remember. Exactly.”
So I did. The picture. The vest. “It’s a joke.” “Better learn to swim.”
She radioed it in word for word.
By the time we reached the Coast Guard station, there were two sheriff’s deputies waiting at the dock.
Bryant was already there.
He was wrapped in a towel, soaking wet. He’d jumped in the water before radioing, so he’d look like he tried.
He was crying for the cameras of a local news crew that had heard the call on the scanner.
“I tried,” he was saying. “I tried so hard to reach her—”
Then he looked up.
And he saw me walking up the dock in a Coast Guard blanket.
I have never seen a face go that white.
He didn’t run to me. He didn’t say “thank God.”
He said, “How?”
That one word was on the news that night.
Cody broke first. He wasn’t a killer. He was a follower. He told the deputies Bryant said it would be “funny” to strand me, and that I’d “get picked up by some fisherman.”
Then they found Tiff’s video.
Me on the sandbar. Screaming. The boat pulling away.
And Bryant’s voice in the background, quietly, to Cody:
“Nobody’s coming back. Get the radio ready.”
The investigators found the rest.
Bryant had read our prenup very carefully.
If we divorced, he got nothing.
But if I died while we were married, my will left him our house and a third of my clinics.
He’d looked up the tide chart for that sandbar three days before his birthday. He’d searched “how long can a person float without a life jacket.”
He’d also been texting a woman in Orlando. “After the 14th, everything changes for us.”
Bryant was charged with attempted murder and making a false distress call to the Coast Guard.
He took a plea in the spring. Fifteen years.
Cody and Tiff testified against him.
I changed my will the day after I got home.
And then I did something I’d been afraid of for thirty-two years.
I learned to swim.
My instructor is a retired lifeguard named Fran. She’s 70 and she doesn’t let me quit.
Last month, I swam my first full length of the pool without stopping.
Petty Officer Diaz came to watch. She brought her whole crew.
When I touched the wall, they all cheered so loud the lifeguard blew his whistle at them.
THE END.
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Some people stay with you for your money and wait for the tide to come in. Make sure you have a way to call for help, and people who will answer.
What do you think Bryant deserved? Tell us in the replies.