The Woman in Cabin 10

As Lo eats a solitary breakfast, she replays last night’s events and is not only sure that the girl was there, but that she had interrupted the girl in the middle of something. Despite Nilsson’s approach of interviewing the staff, Lo also doesn’t believe that the girl, with her expensively maintained nails and hair, could have been just a maid. She suspects that Nilsson wants her to start questioning her own account. She doesn’t blame him, knowing that bad publicity could ruin everything for the Aurora, its owner, and its employees.

After being startled so suddenly in the middle of the night, Lo is convinced that she heard something. What’s more, she knows “what it was like to be that girl—to realize, in an instant, how incredibly fragile your hold on life could be, how paper-thin the walls of security really were.”

Lo briefly considers getting the borrowed mascara tube DNA-tested, then realizes how pointless that would be. She tries checking her email and sees there’s no Wi-Fi connection. Then Ben comes into the restaurant. He’s still apologetic about the previous night. He tells Lo that after he left her cabin, he’d ended up playing poker with Bullmer and Lars Jenssen until four o’clock in the morning. Lo considers telling him about what she heard last night, but isn’t sure she trusts him.

Trying to find her way back to her cabin, Lo wanders onto the deck and finds Tina there, smoking. Tina teases Lo about her hangover, and Lo wants to leave, but forces herself to stay and network. She’s heard rumors of Tina’s ferocity, especially toward other women, from Rowan. But she wonders what it must have been like to forge a career in Tina’s day, “clawing your way up through the ranks of the old-boys’ network.”

Lo is repulsed by Tina’s recommendation of alcohol and sex as the best remedy for a hangover. But Tina abruptly switches gears to ask about Lo’s career hopes. She tells Lo she’s always looking for “savvy little things with a bit of ambition.” Lo tells her she’s on a staff contract that doesn’t let her freelance. She immediately suspects she’s fumbled this exchange, but “right at this moment … my career didn’t seem as important.”

Lo sizes up Tina, too, wondering if she could have been involved in the girl’s disappearance. She asks, “Did you have a good time last night?” Tina shoots her a fierce look in response, warning her that “a clever girl like you knows better than to make enemies in this business.” Unsure what’s just happened, Lo returns to her cabin and finds that room service has cleaned it thoroughly while she was gone—and the borrowed tube of mascara has vanished.

The chapter is followed by a news article from the Harringay Echo, dated to the following Saturday, which reports that Lo is missing and has not been heard from since Tuesday. The article says that an Aurora spokesperson claims that Lo was thought to have left the cruise early when the boat stopped at Trondheim, so no one raised an alarm about her disappearance until Friday.