Page 75 of Viking Vengeance Cruise

I approach carefully, not wanting to startle her. “Beautiful view.”

She jumps anyway and spins around, her eyes wide behind her round glasses. “Trixie! Oh my goodness, you scared me.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” Although in my defense, I announced myself with a compliment to the view, which is the gentlest ambush known to womankind.

“No, it’s fine. I just...” She trails off and turns back to the ocean. “I needed a minute. Away from the group. Is that terrible?”

“Not even a little bit. Leading fifty women through an artillery fortress sounds exhausting.”

“You have no idea.” She gives a hollow laugh. “I keep waiting for someone else to step up and take charge, but everyone keeps looking at me like I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.”

“You seem to be managing fine.”

“I’m faking it,” she admits, adjusting her glasses. “Astrid made this look easy. She’d just decide something, and everyone would fall in line. But when I try to do it, people argue or ignore me or wander off to take selfies with cannons.”

“She watches the water the way widows watch a horizon,” Magnus observes, drifting closer. “Searching for answers, or searching for a way out. In my experience, women who search the sea that hard eventually find me. And then they stop searching.”

Terrific. Now I’ve got a ghost running a commentary on a grief spiral while nominating himself as the cure, and I can’t even shush him without looking unhinged.

I lean against the fortress wall beside Sienna. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How are you really doing? With Astrid’s death?”

Her shoulders sag. “I don’t know. Some days I’m fine. Some days I can barely get out of bed. Today I’m somewhere in between.” She goes quiet for a moment. “I keep thinking about how she died. Frightened and suffering. And I was standing right there, Trixie. Twenty feet away with a drink in my hand, and I couldn’t do a thing.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“Maybe. But I should’ve paid more attention. Should’ve noticed if someone was upset with her. Should’ve...” She stops and shakes her head. “I don’t know. Done something.”

“Astrid had a lot of people upset with her,” I say carefully. “From what I’ve heard.” From what I’ve heard is doing heavy lifting there, seeing as I’ve spent this entire cruise collecting grievances against the woman the way other tourists collect magnets.

“She did.” Sienna’s voice is barely audible over the wind. “She had very high standards. Very specific ideas about how things should be. Not everyone appreciated that.”

Word for word what she told Marina and me back in Gothenburg. Either the woman rehearses her grief, or somebody handed her a script and she’s sticking to it.

“Did you appreciate it? Her high standards?”

She looks at me, and the rawness in her expression nearly knocks me back a step.

“Sometimes.” She shrugs. “Sometimes I thought she was brilliant and inspiring. Sometimes I thought she was cruel and controlling. I think both things can be true about the same person.”

“That’s very wise.”

“Or very confused.” She turns back to the ocean. “My daughter’s in a dark place right now. She has been for a while. And I keep thinking about how Astrid would’ve handled it. Tough love and firm boundaries and zero tolerance for excuses. But I can’t do that. I can’t just cut her off. She’s my daughter.”

My heart aches for her, and no amount of sea air is going to fix it. “A dark place? Dark how?” I ask gently.

“Just... struggling. With life. With choices.” Sienna’s voice cracks. “I wish I could do more to help her. But I don’t know how. And I’m raising her three kids while she figures things out, and some days I wonder if I’m helping or enabling or just making everything worse.”

Three kids.

This woman is herding fifty book club members through a fortress and running a three-child household on a broken heart, and I had the nerve to feel overwhelmed by the buffet line this morning.

“You’re doing what you can,” I offer. “That’s all anyone can do.”

“Is it enough, though?”