A black wool blanket strung across the porthole acted as a makeshift curtain to keep out the midnight sun so I could get some shut-eye after a tense evening of goodbye texts and phone calls. At the end of every conversation, even the hour with Mom which was mostly her yelling about the engagement stunt, I said nice things instead of the usual 'talk to you soon' because last words were supposed to mean something.

Even if they weren't going to be the last.

I had to be nice, Queen Joronn maintained, because until I came home, Clara and Becky and Mom and Dad would lack closure. There'd be, after all, no body. Faking my death would prove to Jonathon Tveit that it was the two of us against the world.

In a whirlwind education that went way beyond Facebook stalking and bordered on creepy, I learned Jon was a man ten years my senior, bisexual, an avid lover of golf and cats. More importantly, he was my targeted love interest for the next six months or however long it took to uncover the painting.

Queen Joronn and her team knew about my past, but they didn't know my sex life in recent years and Nik clearly hadn't talked, or I had a feeling they wouldn't have been so casual about mentioning seduction. I managed to fudge my way through the topic whenever it was brought up, assuring them that I'd handle it. If I got sensitive in a bikini with Niklas, Jon would be lucky to glimpse a t-shirt and sweatpants. Hopefully the tour guide and part-time polar bear spotter was the upstanding gentleman his community's interviews claimed.

Maybe that was where the Queen's preaching about honesty would come in handy.

The boat we took to Svalbard jumped as it cut through water, doing little to assuage my fears. I forced those thoughts into the back of mind. If I got lucky, if I was observant, maybe I might learn the Rembrandt's location before I had to fake my death or jump in bed with a man I knew from a manila file folder.

Again the boat leaped, this time a mile high it seemed. I groaned into my pillow.

The end of Allie Stevens should have been a peaceful affair, a holistic healing from the faces and failures haunting me. So far the night had consisted of one stubbed toe and three trips huddled over the portside rail. While the Norwegian Sea tried its hardest to turn that into four, an owl-eyed clock nailed to the cedar paneling chimed once.

The room swayed left. Something heavy thumped against the floor and slid. Overhead a lantern swung, providing enough flickering light to illuminate a small diary on my cot. Masking tape fastened to the binding read 'Stevens.' Logan smiled at me from the corner of a water-damaged photo jammed between pages. 

With another toss the sea thrust a pen from underneath the nightstand and simultaneously punched me in the gut.

Before everything disappeared into shadows I snatched it all and on legs not meant for the sea lurched up the stairs and onto the deck, puffing my cheeks like the champion Hungry Hippo.

Cold air froze my throat on each inhale. Beneath a sterling sky, sunlight dimpled the sea. The turbulent churning was a product of my imagination, confined to my mind and by unfortunate extension, my stomach. If I wasn't before I was fully awake now, twisted over the rail, ready to return tonight's cod to the sea. Back home in Boston I was a duck boat veteran; hell, last summer was spent trout fishing on Lake Moosehead.

The trip of a lifetime had me wishing for a handful of Dramamine and a ginger ale.

This time the sickness passed. Exhausted, I pressed my back into the stern and sank onto scuffed fiberglass planks. The gentle winds of a calm night teased the diary's page corners.

What I held in my hands a short fall from the ocean was a memoir of my past life. With one little push the world would never knew how I felt when Joel from eighth grade history cornered me against a chain link fence after track practice and stole my first kiss.

I'd never been one of those little girls sitting on her bed and writing in her diary, but after my night with Josh my therapist thought it might help release the feelings I'd buried. So I wrote and I wrote and I kept writing until I found myself too busy and in love to pick up a pen anymore. By then, Logan and I had been dating for more than eight months and those dates stopped being magical and filled with anxiety. We were a couple, and the doubts that filled my mind were replaced by happy thoughts: moving in and marriage and starting out on our own.

In a way it was sad that I'd never tell that story but I had no one to blame but myself. Sometimes I wished my ACL had been torn in such a way that the damage was irreparable or that I had taken one year off for recovery before accepting a scholarship to Pentworth. If either of those things had happened I would never be here on a rickety boat in the Arctic Circle.

Did I turn to the first page or had the wind? The entry began with sorrow: crinkled spots and blurry letters where tears had fallen. Four lines down, a taped love letter ending in, 'To Allie, love, Logan.'

Everyone thought I joined the Svalbard permafrost expedition to lick my wounds in the one place outside the media's grasp. No one knew that in a few short days Allison Lise Stevens would be dead. Officially, forever, dead.

Not-knowing if I could change—or who I wanted to become—scared me. Between tears and tired eyes the text blurred. The metal against my back was cold and uncomfortable; I turned my cheek to rally against my body and failed. Sleep came.

Bony fingers gripped my shoulder. "Wake up."

I jumped, shutting the diary between my legs.

The withered face of Kasper Guastad, who'd soon be nothing more than a skeleton if he kept with his bad habits, loomed inches away. His eyes gleamed hellfire red, then I spotted the lighter in his hand.

"Can I help you, Professor?" I asked, sucking in fast breaths of frosty air. "You scared the crap out of me."

Ash trapped beneath his nails deposited sooty marks as he hauled me vertical. "This is the wrong place to sleep. Overboard is a short fall, Allison."

With all the lies in my future, hearing my old name made me apprehensive. The sooner ditched the better, but it was on the passport and rifle registration so I let it slide. It was mine until Jon and I made a new one.

"Twenty-four hour daylight is hard to get used to," I said, massaging out Kasper's iron grip. For a man entering his sixties, he was stronger than you'd think. You had to be, to spend your days toiling in the unforgiving arctic. He was a tall, bearded man, with a lean chest and wiry muscles filling what had once been an imposing frame. Only his brown eyes, where a scientist's curiosity shone bright, ever seemed to be truly alive, as the rest of his body decayed from a lifetime of chain smoking.

"Of things that kill, time is most fatal." Wispy eyebrows rose as another thought wriggled off his yellow tongue. "And polar bears."

The northern archipelago was a vast and imposing wilderness. I loved the bears, but encountering one in the field was low on my list of priorities if not high on my list of possible death scenarios. "How many actually inhabit Svalbard?" I asked.

"Hundreds. Thus Longyearbyen requires you bear arms outside the settlement." The professor lit up an Ashford and stared across the horizon. Snow caps and stark shorelines rose from the dark waters instead of Boston's mechanically constructed skyline. Keening gulls and wind, not drunks and rockers, serenaded us. He fiddled with the lighter in his pocket, a signal I'd come to interpret as his polite version of saying 'we need to talk.'

Obediently I stood beside him, declining a drag. "We've been over this. I don't smoke."

"Quite a prudent thing you are." He blew a ring at my face. "Why?"

Resisting the urge to cough, I said, "In elementary school we visited the Museum of Science and passed the smoker's lung exhibit. I was sixteen before I allowed candles on my birthday cake."

Kasper made a dismissive sound in the back of his throat and drew another long puff. "Interns here are rare; none of mine have been American. Why come to the island of Spitsbergen?"

"You already know."

He turned. "What if Jon asks you that?" Queen Joronn trusted Kasper to keep my secret under wraps. He was supposed to help me if I needed something or ran into trouble, especially if Jon showed any reluctance toward me.

"Queen Joronn paid me to come." In the form of a hefty stipend and an extra zero on my savings account figure. "I could use the money."

"What about disappearing?"

"After he trusts me," I recited dutifully. "I've got it."

Unconvinced, the man focused dubiously on the diary, which I held tighter against my chest. These words were private, none of his business, but I couldn't say that to someone who'd gone so far out of his way to help. Allie wasn't, I wasn't, that type of person.

"Did the queen allow you to take that?" he asked.

Embarrassed, I looked away. "I didn't want my parents reading it, especially if I'm coming back from the dead one day."

"You mention the Prince in there?"

"I might," I said.

He turned the cigarette thoughtfully. "You need destroy it before Jon finds it. It'll undermine your progress if you tell him you're over Prince Niklas and you've got a catalog of your feelings for him."

"I will," I promised, tracing the binding. "That's why I'm out. What's in here, a lot of it I never told anyone."

"Do you want to?"

"Doesn't matter."

A thick cloud of smoke shrouded his smile, curling past his intelligent brown eyes. He leaned against the rail. "You've allowed the past to dominate the present. Read me some and be done. You'll feel better."

The diary pages held sudden weight, making separation difficult as they clung to each other in a desperate attempt to keep their secrets safe. Resolute, I pulled them apart. A fresh pair of eyes, a new perspective, and a burden lifted: maybe this was needed to figure out how I wanted to change.

We were still hours offshore and had all morning ahead. In a mist of perfumed sea air, I began.