While helping Lewis, my pill-pushing steward, up to C-deck to the infirmary, I learn he has a wife and baby back home.

“She wants to leave me,” Lewis tells me. “First week she doesn’t get an envelope with some cash inside, she’s going to find herself a new man. That’s the reason I had to start dealing. It’s hard to keep a marriage alive when you crew a cruise.”

I feel for Lewis. I feel for anyone who still hasn’t accepted the sea as their home, who still clings to the land-locked mistakes that have anchored them to their lives on shore. But I can only feel so much.

I hear them every day, the “back home” stories. Oh no, the storage center is going to put my locker up for auction and all my stuff back home will be gone. Oh no, my boyfriend back home says he couldn’t wait for me any longer and he’s going on J-date. Oh no, my mom and dad back home died in a suicide pact at their assisted living facility. Cry me a river.

“Are they worth it?” I ask Lewis. “Your wife and baby. Are they worth it?”

Lewis halts just in front of the infirmary door, my arm still holding him up under his shoulders. He looks up at me, a lock of his hair, damp with sweat, curling into an open-ended parenthesis on his forehead. Those young frightened eyes. Under different circumstances I might have taken him to my stateroom and told him to put his hands on my body and that’s an order. But having just broken both those hands, I decide the moment isn’t right.

“Look,” I say, grabbing his wrists, holding his swollen hands up for him to see. “Look at what hanging on to your life back home has done for you. You need to let go. You have all the family you need right here.”

We hear sobbing from inside the infirmary. I push the door open and find Donald, my chief medical officer, thrown back on his examining table, a bottle of J&B in his right hand. In his left, he’s holding a letter.

“They denied it, Skipper,” he tells me. “I’m all yours!”

I take the letter. A quick glace at the letterhead tells me all I need to know. “Massachusetts Board Of Registration In Medicine.” His appeal to get his license back has been denied again.

Not every cruise ship’s doctor has been declared unfit to practice medicine on dry land. Just most of them. Another freedom offered by the sea. Your talent is welcome. Your mistakes, forgiven.

For CMO Donald Rothschild, that isn’t enough.

“I’ll be stuck giving out Dramamine for the rest of my life,” he says. “I miss my practice.”

I let out a deep sigh. “You two should get along swimmingly.”

Donald opens his bleary eyes to see Lewis’s stricken face, and the pair of swollen hands held out before him.

“Are you through whining about those land-locked fools on the medical board?” I ask. “Because this boy needs a doctor.”

My Chief Medical Officer sits up, hands me his bottle, and seems to forget all about the letter I’ve already dropped in his biohazard basket. I sip his J&B while he gets to work, bandaging Lewis as skillfully as his inebriated fingers will allow. Lewis appreciates the care. He looks from Donald to me, and back to Donald. I can tell he’s starting to rethink where his real family might be.

A couple of passengers knock on the door, a husband and wife, the husband complaining of chest pains. I shush them and send them away. I don’t want them to ruin the moment.

I didn’t like breaking Lewis’s hands, but watching Donald tend to him, I’m glad I did it. In maiming my steward, I’ve reminded my Chief Medical Officer just how much the people on this ocean need his expertise, no matter what a stupid letter from a medical board might say. Tonight, I’ll go to bed feeling certain I’ve righted my ship.