The ferry from Friday Harbor left fourteen times a day—fifteen on weekends—to loop around San Juan Channel’s scattered islands. Every trip lasted at least sixty-five minutes. Too long. Sam spent that whole time, hours daily, tourist season after tourist season, in the galley making coffee for people who treated her like a peasant.

Like Cinderella picking lentils from the ashes, Sam was a nobody doing work that meant nothing, but no prince was ever going to pluck her out of this. She saw them all the time on the boat, those royal types: the usual wealthy with their salt-and-pepper hair and orthodontist-straightened smiles. The celebrities and Seattle tech millionaires, meanwhile, glowed at the gas station after getting to the island by private plane. They didn’t see her. They never would. Young as she was, Sam had lived long enough to know who could be counted on and who couldn’t, who could be trusted and who had to be put up with in order to pay the bills. Broad-shouldered men lined up before her all day long; it didn’t matter. Elena was the only one who would save her from this place. They were going to have to save each other.

Sam’s station was a little box trapped inside a big one, a high-walled beverage and snack counter at the center of a wide room lined by fluorescent lights and shatterproof windows. Outside those windows, the waves rippled, the clouds shifted. Sometimes a dock appeared. Passengers shuffled on and off. The dock receded. Under the lights, people yelled after their misbehaving children. They made ostentatious plans for how they would spend their vacations: kayaking? Beachcombing? Visiting the lavender farms? They stared through Sam to the food display cases and asked whether the boat’s prepackaged cinnamon rolls were any good. She said they were. They weren’t.