She spread her hands in a gesture of helpless hopelessness, and Cammie nodded.

  “All right, then. Let’s get your boxes unloaded, and I’ll be on my way.” She reached over and smoothed her hand over Britt’s windblown hair. “Good luck, sweetheart. If you come back, and if I’m not seeing anyone…”

  Britt nodded, but they both seemed aware that it wasn’t going to happen. Even if Brittany did go back someday, she wouldn’t contact Cammie. And Cammie wouldn’t be likely to take her back.

  They unloaded Cammie’s trunk and moved the boxes into the cabin, setting them against the wall next to the couch. Cammie kissed her good-bye, with affection, but no real passion. Passion had never been the driving force behind their relationship, but what little they had shared was gone now.

  Britt sat on the porch long after Cammie’s car was out of sight, listening to the rhythmic surf and wondering at the small flame of relief she felt burning deep in her heart. She should be crying right now, sobbing tears of regret, but she only felt hungry. Her scheduled dinnertime was still hours away, but she was famished. She finally gave in and went inside to cook Cammie’s salmon—since Cammie wouldn’t be eating it. She’d be a better vegetarian starting tomorrow. And a better environmentalist, in some way. She’d prove it to herself and to everyone who doubted her. Starting tomorrow. For now, she was just going to eat.

  Chapter Eleven

  Tess got up early the next Saturday and hurried her dad through his morning routine of breakfast and exercises. He grumbled about her haste, until he was settled for the rest of the day with his game controller in hand. She grabbed the grocery list off the fridge and told her mom she’d be back in a few hours.

  Tess knew all her hurrying about might be for nothing. She had tried to call Brittany over the past few days, ever since their disastrous lunch, but she had been sent to voicemail each time. She had finally left a professionally polite message saying she apologized for her outburst and hoped they would still see her at the Center for her tour. Tess had no idea if Brittany would arrive at the time they had prearranged when she had originally called to schedule the interview at the diner.

  The rushed feeling of the morning stuck with her, and Tess was a bundle of nervous energy at the lab. She hated to disappoint Melissa and Jake by suggesting Brittany might not come, so she focused instead on cleaning every crevice in the building. They had followed most of her suggestions, and their desks were at least presentable, but Tess went on a dusting binge and had every fake plant in the place shining by the time she was finished.

  She stepped out the back door to make sure the grounds were in order, but the outside of the Center was gorgeous without needing any help from her. The tide was low, revealing a larger variety of sea life than Tess had seen during her higher tide visit. Clusters of gray-tipped mussels covered the exposed rocks, and just under the surface of the water, Tess could see colonies of aggregating sea anemones waving languidly in the gentle surf. Meager autumn sunlight splashed the water with daubs of gold.

  Tess hadn’t been surprised to find the boathouse lab in much more presentable condition than the work areas inside the Center. The delicate equipment provided the means for communicating with the ocean world, and Melissa and Jake kept everything spotless and carefully stowed. Salt water was a harsh medium, and the gear and delicate instruments wouldn’t survive long if not tended properly. The same level of care obviously didn’t extend to desktops and microwaves.

  The Center’s two boats were old, but well tended, and Tess noticed the Delta Flyer’s name had been freshly repainted in a bright neon orange. She couldn’t do anything but admire such pigheadedness. The name of the boat seemed inconsequential now, anyway. Insulting the donor was probably higher on the list of reasons to be denied a grant than choosing a potentially wrong name for a trawler.

  Tess stood balanced on one of the shore’s highest boulders, reluctant to leave her oceanfront perch and return to the parking lot. She had to go soon, though, because Brittany’s tour was scheduled to start in fifteen minutes. Tess sighed, about to turn away from the water.

  “Are you planning to jump?” The voice startled her. “I might not try to talk you out of it this time.”

  “Brittany. You came.” Tess jumped off the rock and her momentum carried her almost into Brittany’s arms. Not that she looked like she was about to reach out and catch her.

  “Obviously. And let’s go back to Britt. Brittany is too formal if we’re on an insulting-each-other basis.”

  Tess did her best to look abashed, but she could tell Britt was trying to hide a smile. “I’m sorry, Britt. I was rude, and I should have given you more time to explain. When I start thinking about what’s happening with the whales, I get out of control sometimes.”

  Britt shook her head. “You could possibly have phrased your comments in a kinder way, but what you said was true.” She paused and looked with unfocused eyes at the ocean over Tess’s shoulder. “I had a hard time admitting this to myself, but I was starting to think I was some sort of hero, gallantly tossing aside my home and job to do something noble. Corny and self-centered, I know, but sometimes it’s been the only thing keeping me going forward and not back.”

  Britt had been beautiful to Tess from the start, standing on the beach when they’d first met, but now it seemed as if her openness and determination and intelligence were adding planes and angles to her appearance, giving her a depth of attractiveness that took Tess’s breath away. “You are brave. I know exactly how hard it can be to follow your own path and not the one your family or boss has chosen for you. You should be proud of what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I need a good dose of humility instead of pride.” She turned her gaze back to Tess. “I’ve been doing some research since our…meeting. I didn’t have time to really study each grant topic before, but I have been reading about the Southern Residents. I hadn’t realized how bad the situation was for them, and I don’t blame you for being as reactive as you were. Randall Chemical wasn’t dumping PCBs in the Sound, but they were getting away with minor spills and accidents. If that becomes acceptable and defensible, then it’s a small step to allowing larger companies to do the same thing on a more devastating scale. It’s why I left, Tess. I was looking at a picture of a tiny dead bird, and suddenly I saw the bigger context.”

  Tess took a deep breath and pushed away the despair she felt when she or anyone else brought up the endangered orca pods. Her feelings were compounded by her relief at her restored relationship with Britt. She was about to move them past the uncomfortable emotional part of the day and suggest they start the tour of the Center when Britt made a hissing shh sound and pointed toward the water.

  “Don’t turn around too fast, but there’s a thing out there. An animal, I mean. Don’t scare it away.”

  Britt watched in fascination as the furry creature balanced a red, spiky shell on its belly and ate out of it while watching her and Tess. “It looks like it’s at a movie, eating from a bucket of popcorn.”

  Tess laughed. “And we’re the main feature. Apologies at the Seashore. Rated two flippers up.”

  “What is it?” Britt asked. “Some kind of seal?”

  “A sea otter. I’ve seen the same one out there almost every time I’ve come to the Center. Lots of good eats in this inlet, like that sea urchin.”

  “Oh, of course.” Britt chided herself for not recognizing the animal. Her perspective was different out here, seeing creatures in their element and not in artificial ponds and streams. “I’ve seen them at the aquarium before, but never up close like this, out in nature.” She took a step back from Tess. “Are you going to go ballistic because I’ve been to an aquarium before? I can add it to my offenses against nature. I’ve got quite a list going.”

  “Some aquariums have educational and research value,” Tess said with a mock serious frown. “I’ll refrain from scolding you until I administer a test and find out how much you learned while you were there.” Her expression softened into something sad. “Don’t feel you have to be careful about everything you say and do around me. I’m far from perfect and I won’t get judgmental with you again. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Britt smiled as the otter finished his meal and began to wash its face with frantic swipes of its paws. She gestured toward it. “I suppose seeing animals like this is commonplace to you.”

  “Are you kidding?” Tess turned toward her, and Britt recognized the flare of excitement in her blue eyes. “I will never take this for granted. Did you know sea otters were completely eradicated from this shoreline by 1910? All gone, shot for their fur. But in the seventies, some were captured in the Aleutians and reintroduced along the Washington coast. They’re classified as endangered because of their limited range and susceptibility to oil spills, but they’re here and the population has been slowly growing. It’s always special to see them.”

  Britt watched the otter flip over and plunge out of sight. “What a shame if they had disappeared forever.”

  “Yes, and not just on an individual species level,” Tess said, moving into full teacher mode. She walked over to the edge of the boulder-covered shoreline and pointed at a mass of nondescript looking seaweed. “One of the sea otter’s favorite foods is the sea urchin, like the one we just saw that little guy eating, and sea urchins love to eat kelp. Without the otters here to keep the urchin population in check, they devastated the kelp beds. Kelp isn’t as cute as an otter, so that might not seem like a bad thing, but it is. Hundreds of little crabs and fish and other creatures use kelp beds for shelter, food, places to reproduce. The loss of the otter had effects beyond the disappearance of one species.”

  Britt was slow to process the story Tess was telling because her delivery was impassioned and wonderful to watch. She was like a star going supernova when she got fired up about the sea creatures she loved so much. Once the full impact of her words registered in Britt’s mind, though, she recognized a connection to other research she had been doing over the past few days.

  “It’s similar to hunting wolves to extinction in Yellowstone, isn’t it? When they were no longer around to keep the elk populations in check, the elk ate and trampled most of the vegetation in the riparian areas, destroying the shady places where fish spawned and birds made their nests. I’ve seen photos taken before and after wolves were reintroduced to the park, and the difference is amazing.”

  “Exactly,” Tess said, jumping off the boulder from which she had been orating and coming back to Britt’s side. “The ramifications of losing a single species are often devastating to a carefully balanced ecosystem. You’re interested in wolves, too?”

  “Research. One of the other grant applicants is the Makah Wolf Sanctuary.”

  “Ah. Another worthy cause.” Tess started walking toward the main building. “You seem to be getting a wide range of information from these grant proposals.”

  “Yes, but the more I study them, the more connections I see. I never would have expected wolves and sea otters to intersect like this before.” Britt thought back to the times she had defended her company on the stand. She had been aware of linear cause and effect, of course. Dump harmful chemicals in a fish pond, the fish die. But the more she studied the different research groups that wanted her money, the more she saw nature as a web, not a straight line.

  “It’s all connected. I believe a very wise person once said that to you.”

  “Yelled it at me, is more like it. In the middle of a crowded restaurant.”

  Tess snorted as she opened the back door of the Center. “Nothing in La Push is crowded.”

  “Hey, there was a guy sitting at the counter. He was a crowd compared to other times I’ve been there.”

  Tess seemed about to respond, but once they got through the doorway, she stopped and Britt ran into her back. Britt heard a voice coming from the other side of the doorway, but she couldn’t see who was speaking with Tess blocking her way.

  “Hi, I’m Melissa, and this is Jake. Welcome to the Hoh Marine Center.”

  Britt walked around Tess, who seemed rooted in place. She was about to greet Melissa and shake her hand when she looked past her and saw what had likely made Tess stop so fast. A small shrine—there was no other word for it—had been set up on one of the bare desks with a propped-up book, a fake potted plant, and a framed photo of Tess that looked like it had been found online somewhere and printed out in black and white.

  “It’s you,” she said, pointing at the photo and laughing at Tess’s obvious embarrassment. She looked like she was about to hurl the plant at her coworkers. “You didn’t mention that you wrote a book in the grant application.”

  “She’s too modest,” Melissa said.

  “Yeah, modest. Exactly the way I’d describe her.” Britt actually had a list of words to describe Tess back in her cabin. They ranged in nature from infuriating to admirable, and modest was distinctly absent.

  “Hey,” Tess said. “I’m the humblest person I know.”

  Britt grinned at her before picking up the book and flipping it over to look at the back cover. There were words describing what the book was about, but Britt only caught one or two of them. Blah, blah, blah…killer whales…blah, blah, blah. Britt was sure she would find the subject matter and writing of the book interesting at some point, but for now all her attention was engaged by the back-cover photo of Tess standing on a bluff, resting her hand on the gnarled trunk of a fir tree as she stared at the water below. Her curls were tousled by the wind, and the vivid colors of a sunset tinted her pale skin and blue eyes with shades of gold. Damn, she was hot. Britt was all too aware of Tess’s attractiveness in person, but the photo captured something wild and precious below her surface. She knew she’d be ordering the book as soon as she got back to her computer.

  Britt attempted to put the book back in its original position but knocked it over twice before she got it to stand upright. She had to pull herself together since she was here in a professional capacity and not as another Tess groupie. No drooling on the shrine.

  “Do you mind if I look around?” she asked, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the several radios broadcasting throughout the room. Couldn’t they agree on a station?

  “Go right ahead,” Tess said. She gestured at Melissa and Jake, obviously trying to get them to interact with Britt and show her around the lab, but neither one seemed inclined to act as tour guide. Melissa stood near the black-and-white photo of Tess, chewing on the fringed end of her cat-eared hat. Jake was hovering in between a rack of rain slickers and a desk, obviously prepared to dive behind either one of them if the need presented itself. Britt wondered if their shyness was the reason Tess had been chosen to meet her for the interview, or if Tess had wanted to see her, too.

  “Why don’t I give you a quick tour in here, and then we can go out and see the research equipment in the boathouse.” Tess led Britt over to a series of whiteboards. “Melissa and Jake are tracking the reported positions of the local orcas. The T stands for transients, and you can see one of the transient pods was spotted in the Strait this morning, traveling east toward the San Juans.”

  Tess went on to describe the different pods and families, how many killer whales were in each one and where their preferred hunting grounds were located. Britt reached out and traced the morning route taken by the J pod. Somehow, they had transformed from a few photos in Tess’s book to a living, loving family unit. Britt had gone from not knowing much about them and their situation to really caring about their survival. Tess’s stories and descriptions had helped her understand, but Britt recognized that the depth of emotion she felt was her own. She wasn’t following some whim or having a breakdown out here on the Peninsula; she was finally honoring a very real part of herself that had been buried too long.

  She turned her attention back to the Center and her need to figure out the type of work they were trying to do. “If these pods are endangered, why can’t you relocate other orcas to this area like they did with the sea otters?”

  Tess sighed. “It just isn’t feasible with killer whales. They live in matriarchal pods, and for the most part the children remain with their mothers for their entire lives. Strange killer whales would be isolated and wouldn’t have much chance of being accepted into a family unit. Breed and release programs don’t work either because captive breeding is a notorious failure when it comes to orcas.”

  “And the issues that made numbers begin to decline in the first place,” Jake said, his voice coming from somewhere behind the slickers, “would still be present, so even if entire healthy pods were relocated to the Sound, they’d face the same problems as the residents—harassment from sightseeing boats, pollutants, declining Chinook salmon populations. Until those are…”

  He stopped midsentence as he, Melissa, and Tess turned in sync toward one of the desks. “What is it?” Britt asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Did you hear them?” Tess asked, nodding at a radio. “They’ve spotted some offshores just a few nautical miles from here. Come on.”

  Did she hear what? Britt had heard a lot of noise—including an old Bon Jovi song and some staticky chatter, but she decided to take their word for it and follow. They ran out to the dock, and she noticed the name of the boat as Tess was reaching out a hand to pull her on board.

  “What a cool name for a boat,” she said, ready to go to warp speed after some killer whales. “Voyager is my second favorite Star Trek series.”

  “Put this on,” Tess said, ignoring her comment and tossing a life jacket in her direction. Melissa and Jake shared a high five behind Tess’s back, and Britt wondered if it was some sort of pre-whale-seeking-expedition ritual.

  Britt moved to the front of the old trawler and sat on a bench. The other three seemed to know what they were doing as they unmoored the boat and pulled away from the dock, and she didn’t want to get in the way. She had been on a Caribbean cruise with Cammie last spring, but she had been bored by the vacation since there was nothing to do but eat, drink, and get herded along on rushed excursions. This promised to be much more thrilling, partly because she had a chance to see some killer whales up close and mostly because she didn’t have much faith in the rusted old boat’s ability to stay afloat in the ocean swells. She had come to the coast searching for change, and potentially drowning at sea was certainly different from anything else she had ever done.