Ricardo Moreno

Tenth anniversary. Final night at sea. One velvet box, one diamond eternity ring, and twelve hours between Carter and the rest of his life with Chloe. They don't get twelve minutes. When the dead pour from the dining halls of the Siren of the Seas, Chloe shoves Carter over the rail with a single word - Jump - and the Gulf Stream tears them apart. He wakes on a mangrove key the pelicans have already abandoned, a salt-scarred speck of sand and root he names Pelican's Perch.
She wakes on a drifting cruise ship with four strangers, a sealed bridge door, and the patient, wet sound of something on the other side that never tires and never sleeps. Carter has a spear, a rainwater tarp, a frayed cord around his neck holding the ring he never gave her - and Claws, a half-feral tortoiseshell cat with lime-green eyes and a hiss like tearing Velcro, who drifted in on the same current that stranded him.
Chloe has a captain's logbook full of lies, a flare gun with nothing left in it, and the slow understanding that the world didn't end overnight. Someone hid the symptoms. Someone didn't want to cancel the cruise. Between them: a hundred miles of open water, a highway of barnacled, bloated dead riding the current north, and the question that gnaws harder than hunger - is the person on the other end of the ocean still alive, or am I clinging to a ghost?Solitude of Sand and Salt is a maritime survival epic about the small, stubborn things that keep us human when the tide turns against us: a ring on a nylon cord, a cat that won't be tamed, a name spoken aloud to an empty horizon so the silence doesn't swallow it whole.
Before they can find each other, Carter and Chloe will have to outlast the sea, the dead, and the doubts that whisper louder than either. The Gulf Stream takes everything. Sometimes, if you're lucky and mean and lucky again, it gives something back.