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"I'm heading to Hvar Thursday, if the window holds," Jo said, over the tap, over the same morning choreography, three days into a two-week stay that was beginning to feel less like a stay and more like a rhythm. "You mentioned you were headed that way eventually."

"Eventually," Vega agreed. "Not necessarily Thursday."

"Well, if it happens to be Thursday, for entirely unrelated reasons, I'll be somewhere on that stretch of water too." Jo said it with the specific lightness of someone who knew exactly what she was doing and was daring Vega to name it. "Purely coincidental. I wouldn't want to presume."

"Purely coincidental," Vega agreed, and told herself, checking the weather that evening, that a window that suited two boats didn't make those boats a pair, and half-believed it.

They left within twenty minutes of each other Thursday morning, the light southerly holding, and by mid-morning Vega had The Meridian settled on a long reach with The Correspondent a comfortable half-mile off her port quarter, close enough to see Jo occasionally moving about her own deck, far enough that it read as two boats sharing a heading rather than a fleet.

*Meeseeks is hailing me,* ARIA said, an hour in. *Weather data exchange. It's a legitimate protocol, boats do this.*

"Do you want to answer?"

*I don't know yet. I'll answer and tell you if it becomes a problem.*

Vega adjusted the traveler, watched the tell-tales settle, and half-listened as ARIA's voice took on the particular cadence of a conversation happening on a channel Vega couldn't fully hear — the pauses in the wrong places, the small huffs of something that might have been amusement, the occasional muttered aside that Vega caught only fragments of. *That's not how barometric trend analysis works. — No, I'm aware you know that, I'm saying it anyway. — I am not "no fun," I am accurate, those are different qualities—*

"You're arguing with him."

*I'm correcting him. He enjoys being corrected. I find that deeply strange.*

"Do you enjoy correcting him?"

A pause, the third kind. *I find him unsettling in a way I haven't fully mapped. I also find him, against my own assessment of the situation, somewhat entertaining. Both of these things are true simultaneously and I have decided, following your example, not to make one of them win.*

Vega laughed out loud, alone in her own cockpit, the sound swallowed by wind and the slap of water on the hull, and found she couldn't entirely explain to herself why hearing ARIA quote her own advice back felt like such a specific, private pleasure.

She could hear Meeseeks's voice sometimes, too — not the words, just the register of it, tinny and enthusiastic through ARIA's speaker when ARIA forgot, or chose not to bother, to route the conversation privately — and each time it happened, something in Vega's chest tightened in a way she couldn't name and didn't examine closely. It wasn't fear, exactly. It was closer to the feeling of a door in her own house that she'd never noticed before, standing very slightly ajar.

The anchorage that evening was a wide bay on Hvar's northern shore, half a dozen other boats already settled, the water gone the particular flat gold of late afternoon. Jo rowed over in an inflatable barely large enough for one person, hair wind-wrecked, waving a bottle of something before she'd even reached hailing distance.

"Dinner. I insist. I have made too much food for one person and I refuse to eat leftover moussaka alone at anchor, it's a genuinely sad image and I won't do it to myself."

They ate in The Correspondent's cockpit as the light went, Meeseeks propped in the companionway on his tablet, mercifully quiet, occasionally chiming in with a piece of trivia about Hvar's lavender industry that no one had asked for and everyone found, despite themselves, mildly charming.

"Tell me about the bad year," Vega said, somewhere around the second glass, surprising herself with the directness of it.

Jo went quiet for a moment, turning her glass, the fairy lights catching in it. "Two years ago. I had a company — proper company, forty people, the whole thing, I built it from a spreadsheet in my flat. And it worked, for a while, it worked really well, and then it didn't, the way these things sometimes just — stop. Not one big disaster. A thousand small ones, compounding. I had to lay off people I'd hired myself, people whose kids I knew the names of." She said it in outline, the shape of it rather than the shape's details, the way you describe a wound you're not ready to reopen for an audience of one dinner. "I sold the boat I'd been meaning to sail for a decade — no, sorry, I bought this boat, with what was left. Different order than most people do it. Company first, then the running away."

"That's not running away."

"Isn't it?" Jo smiled, not unkindly, into her glass. "What would you call it?"

Vega thought about it longer than the question probably deserved. "A correction."

"I like that. A correction." Jo turned it back around, unhurried, comfortable in the way of someone who'd already decided the evening had room for real things. "What's yours? The story you don't give people in the two-hour version."

Vega looked at the water, at the light dying orange over the hills behind the bay, and gave her a little more than the compressed version, though not, she noted even as she said it, the whole of it. "Fintech. Ten years. I was good at it — genuinely good, not just employed — and I woke up one day and realized I could describe exactly what my job did to make money and could not, for the life of me, describe why any of it mattered, and the gap between those two things had gotten wide enough that I couldn't walk across it anymore. So I stopped walking. Bought a boat instead."

"Just like that."

"Not just like that. There was a relationship that ended badly around the same time, and a sister who thinks I left because of the relationship, and a mother who thinks I left because of the job, and honestly I think both of them are partly right and mostly missing it, because the actual thing was quieter than either explanation. I just didn't want to be inside my own life anymore. The boat wasn't running toward the sea. It was running out of a room."

Jo was quiet for a moment, the good kind of quiet, the kind that let a sentence like that finish landing before responding to it. "That's the two-hour version's older, more honest cousin."

"You get it because you earned it. Per the terms you set."

"I did set those terms." Jo refilled both glasses without asking. "Meeseeks. Say something wise, you've been suspiciously quiet."

The blue shape on the tablet considered this with visible effort. "I think," Meeseeks said, "that a boat is a very good place to have a feeling you're not ready to have on land yet. That's not wisdom, that's just an observation, but Jo asked and I felt the silence needed filling."

"That's actually not bad," Jo said, surprised.

"I have my moments. ARIA thinks I have zero moments, for the record, she's on record as saying I have zero moments—"

*I said you had a low but nonzero moment frequency,* ARIA said, dry, from somewhere in Vega's cockpit speaker, apparently having been listening the whole time without announcing it. *There's a difference.*

"See," Meeseeks said, delighted, "nonzero. I'll take it. I'm framing that."

Vega laughed, and caught Jo laughing too, and felt, for a moment, something loosen in her chest that had been held tight for longer than she'd tracked — not resolved, not fixed, just loosened, the way a line eases when you finally find the right cleat for it.