The morning before the hurricane I cheated on my husband for the third time.

I suppose it had been a mistake for us to move here. “But, Dosy, sweetheart, I thought you loved the ocean!” my husband Jackson had spluttered. “You always said it was your favorite place growing up.” Actually, I had said that exactly once, on our honeymoon in Barbados right before I cheated on him for the first time with a floppy-haired BC college student who was on summer vacation with his lawyer parents and two little sisters. But the ocean where my father had moved us for no more than ten months while I was still a girl was off the coast of Maine—a quiet, lonesome place haunted by morning fog and the shrieks of gulls from outside my bedroom window. Sometimes, if you listened hard, you could even hear the slow, soft singing of whales in the distance. It was the saddest, most desperate sound I have ever heard, and yet I always ached to hear it once more. Everything there was colored a chill gray and smelled like wet fish and cold.

My husband moved us to a very different kind of ocean off the gulf of Southern Florida where he was accepted for the year as a high school music teacher. He is a jazz pianist though, and figured he could also find work in one of the myriad of pirate-themed crab shack bars strung out along the beach for Christmas-to-Memorial-Day snowbirds. “It’s either that or keep bummin’ around here,” he told me. “Not that there aren’t Ruby Tuesdays that need you to waitress down in Florida.” He popped the cork off a bottle of champagne that we usually saved for New Year’s and birthdays, his cheeks flushed, eyes bright behind rimmed rectangular glasses. “Can you believe it, baby? A job offer on the ocean!” He kept shaking his head, over and over again. I swear that man was almost going to cry. We lived in Kansas City at the time.

I’m not an ocean girl; that’s not my problem. I’m not a city girl or a country girl or a desert girl or a mountain girl either. And I didn’t cheat on my husband with three different men because I’m a barfly or a black heart or a lifelong fling. All I know is that every time it’s happened - first in Barbados, second in a cabin by Lake Huron when we were visiting his parents, and third here, today - I’ve been by the water. It does something to me. It gets under my skin through my veins into my bones and fills me with a restlessness I can’t explain.

That, and there was Chase the assistant marine biologist who worked bi-weekly at the local resort’s sea life exhibition.

I first met Chase when we moved down here in late August, back when the air seemed to crinkle it was so hot and the sand crusted over and burned the soft skin of your bare toes. I was waitressing five nights a week, my husband beginning his teaching job during the day. It seemed as though none of the pirate crab shack bars were in any dire need of a jazz pianist for now.

For those first few weeks I spent most of my days lying out on the shore, occasionally wading into the tide to splash my neck and arms with lukewarm saltwater, and trying to avoid getting sand kicked in my face by the bronzed, boozy vacationers playing Frisbee nearby. As evening set in I would then sneak into the local resort’s women’s locker room to shower and change before catching the bus to work. The fourth day into this routine I found myself halting before entering the locker room to wander around the little touristy marine life exhibit they had set up next to the tiki-inspired, conch shell-bedazzled seaside bar. A pinch-faced woman with lank blonde hair was standing behind the help desk counter, pointing out a brochure to a couple who looked as though they had just escaped from Pleasantville, USA. I deliberately avoided her gaze; I always afraid she was going to rat me out for using the locker room and not actually belonging to the resort.