When he comes back to the surface, he spits out his snorkel. “You should come get a closer look. There are tons of starfish and abalone, and I think there’s a giant Pacific octopus in the crevice of that rock.”

“Oh my God!” I say, scurrying back.

“It’s not a giant giant Pacific octopus,” he says with a sideways grin. He tugs my arm. “Come on.”

I take a few deep breaths to get my heartbeat under control. “Giant octopuses eat people.”

“In the movies,” he says with a shake of his head. “It’s only like a foot long.”

“That’s not so giant,” I say warily, looking at the rocks below me.

“Give it a try,” he says, tugging my arm again.

I fix my snorkel in place and look at him through my mask, eyes wide.

His slips his mouthpiece in and gives me a nod and a thumbs-up.

I thumbs-up him back and then he’s gone, leaving a ripple on the surface as he dives under. I stick my face in the water and see him below, shining his flashlight into a crack in the rock. Taking a deep breath through the snorkel and setting my resolve, I kick and drop below the surface. I beeline for Blake’s side and press against him, where he’s peering into the crevice.

There’s something wiggling in there for sure, but I can’t see what it is, and I don’t dare get within tentacle reach.

Blake looks at me and I shrug. He tucks the flashlight back in his dive belt and reaches for the flat metal thing with a green handle. He slips the blade under the big oval shell attached to the rock and pries it loose.

When we break the surface, he spits out his snorkel and hands the oval to me. Underneath the rough brown shell is soft, white . . . something.

I poke it. “What is this?”

“A nine inch abalone,” he says with an amused smile.

“Fine, but what do you do with it?”

He grins. “It and a few more of its abalone friends will be dinner tonight.” He takes it back and slips it into a small mesh bag hanging off his belt at his hip, where his holster usually is, then positions his snorkel and dives again. I follow, looking toward the open ocean on my way to the rocks below, just to be sure no one from out there is crashing our party. Blake swims us around the rock, and it’s amazing: starfish and urchins, fish and crabs.

We dive again and he hands me the knife and points to an oval shell. I try to slip it between the shell and rock like he did, but I find the abalone is stuck tighter than I would have thought. It takes a bit of wrestling, but I’m finally able to pull it loose. He pries up another one and we slide them into his bag, then surface again.

“Three is our limit,” he says. “But those are all nine or ten-inchers, so we’ll be feasting tonight.”

Something tugs at my ankle and I scream, picturing giant octopus tentacles. When I yank, my leg doesn’t come loose and I scream again, my heart leaping into my throat. “Get it off me!”

Blake dives under and I feel his hand on my calf. I kick hard, trying to free myself, but he holds my leg steady. And when he lets go a second later, I’m free. I’m already kicking back toward shore as fast as I can when he catches me.

“Kelp,” he says when we drag ourselves out of the water.

“Kelp eats people too?” I say, my heart still racing.

“No,” he says, tipping his head at me. “But people can drown in it if they get tangled then panic.”

“I wasn’t panicking!”

He laughs and pulls off his mask and hood.

I rip off my mask and storm back up the sand to our towels. But considering I’m still in my flippers, it doesn’t feel very stormy. I spread a towel and sit, pulling off the rest of my gear. Blake peels out of his dive suit, and I try not to notice how his wet T-shirt hugs every contour of his chest.

But then he pulls it off over his head and I can’t help staring. “So . . . we defied death.”

“That was amazing,” I concede, peeling off my T-shirt.

He pulls two bottles of water, a bag of grapes, and some crackers out of his backpack, and we nibble. When I’ve had enough, I lay back on the towel with my arms overhead, soaking up the warmth from the sand below and the sun above.

The sun feels so good, and the warmth lulls me into a drowsy half-dream where I can almost forget everything that’s happened over the last few months. I can almost pretend that I’m more to Blake than just his job.

“Sam,” he whispers in my ear.

“Hmm . . . ?” I answer lazily, without opening my eyes.

“We should head back. The tide’s coming in and the dive shop closes in an hour.”

When I open my eyes, the sun has moved across the sky. “Was I asleep?” I ask, propping up on to my elbows.

“For the last hour.”

I sit and realize my suit is dry. “It’s so peaceful here.”

He looks around and something a little mournful passes over his face. It makes me wonder again about his dad. “It is. It’s one of my favorite places.”

He stands and reaches for my hand, pulling me up. We pack up and trudge back to the parking lot with all our gear, and Blake loads everything into the back of the Escalade.

The gunshot comes out of nowhere, and Blake has me on the ground in a heartbeat, his body over mine. He swears under his breath as he looks wildly around the parking lot, and I realize, in nothing but his swim trunks, he has no gun.

But then the bang comes again, and an ancient Volkswagen Beetle rolls into the parking lot, a plume of black smoke in its wake. It backfires again as the engine chugs to a stop.

“Christ,” Blake says, rolling off me. “Are you all right?”

My left hand feels sticky, and when I sit up and look at it, I see the gouge in my palm. My knee’s scraped too, but not bleeding. “Yeah,” I say as he pulls me up by the hand. “I’m okay.”

He takes my shaking hand in his rock solid one and opens my palm, poking at the skin around the cut. “It’s not too deep,” he says. He lets me go and opens the storage compartment in the back of the Escalade, pulling out a first aid kit. After cleaning me up with a betadine wipe and covering the cut with a Band-Aid, he pulls a fresh T-shirt over his head and straps his chest holster on over the top. Then he ushers me to the passenger door, unlocks the glove box and pulls out his gun, tucking it into the holster.

He climbs in behind the wheel. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

“It’s all right. You were just doing your job.”

He turns and his eyes lock on mine. “I don’t want to do my job anymore. I’m sick of trying to be supercop. I’m sick of following orders and doing everything by the book.” His jaw tightens and his eyes go distant. “None of it is going to bring him back.”

“Who?” I ask gently.

His eyes focus again and he just looks at me a long moment.

My chest constricts with the pain in his expression. “Your father?”

He tips his head into the headrest and stares at the roof. “Caroline wasn’t just my sister. She was my best friend.” He lifts his head and looks at me. “My dad shipped us both off to live with my aunt and uncle when I was one and Caroline was two. I guess he did the best he could on his own, but this job means long hours and a lot of travel, so he had to give something up. He chose his job over his kids,” he says, rubbing a hand down his face. “When I was old enough to realize that, I hated him. My aunt made my dad take us for a week every summer, but from the time I was thirteen, all I ever did with our time together was try to make his life a living hell. That was when he stopped bringing us here.

“When I turned eighteen and didn’t have to see him anymore, I stopped coming. For five years I pretended he didn’t exist. And then Caroline died. The night they flew her body home, Dad came to Houston. I didn’t want him there and I told him so. Said if he wasn’t part of Caroline’s life, he didn’t get to care that she was dead. It got pretty ugly. Punches were thrown. But then we talked. All night. As backward as it seems, part of why he gave us up was because he loved our mom. I guess it was too hard after she was gone . . . looking at us and being reminded of her all the time.”