Nick Schuyler–Paula Oliveira romantic relationship

The Nick Schuyler–Paula Oliveira romantic relationship is the book’s central link between ordinary domestic life and the catastrophic ordeal at sea. Paula Oliveira is Nick Schuyler’s girlfriend when he leaves for the fishing trip, and her escalating concern becomes one of the first human responses to the men’s disappearance. After Nick Schuyler returns from forty-three hours in the Gulf of Mexico, Paula’s care does not end with rescue: she remains beside him through withdrawal, survivor’s guilt, and the slow rebuilding of his personality, while their relationship becomes a promise of continuity after the deaths of Marquis Cooper, Corey Smith, and Will Bleakley.

Meeting and Early Courtship

Paula Oliveira was five years older than Nick Schuyler and worked as a dance teacher at a performing-arts middle school and at a studio in Tampa. Her family came from Sao Paulo, Brazil. When Nick moved to Tampa in 2005, he knew only a few people there; Paula was already in her first year of teaching. They met when a group went out for drinks, and Nick continued calling and texting after that evening, even though Paula initially gave him the run-around. Nick was twenty and not yet legally old enough to drink in a bar, while Paula was twenty-four or twenty-five, and her friends told him that she considered him too young.

The age difference and Paula’s initial hesitation created a small barrier between them, but Nick’s persistence eventually became a relationship. Paula had attended University of South Florida, and she and Nick’s sister had briefly lived in the same dorm, sharing mutual friends without being close themselves. The connection therefore grew through overlapping social worlds rather than through a single dramatic encounter. The relationship’s eventual stability contrasts with its uncertain beginning: what first looked to Paula like an unsuitable match became the partnership that defined Nick’s home life.

Domestic Life and Attachment

Paula is presented as attentive, practical, and unusually willing to turn small acts into forms of reassurance. Nick says she reminded him of his mother because she went out of her way to make people happy, cared for them, and enlarged ordinary gestures into expressions of love. She might bring breakfast in bed or clean the house while telling him not to worry about the dishes. Their life together is described without bickering or fighting, through routines of mutual comfort rather than grand declarations.

Their household included three dogs: Chloe, Paula’s fifty-three-pound, four-year-old boxer, and the two Jack Russells, Kelli and Tori. Chloe was affectionate and dependent on Paula; Kelli was independent and known for bringing home frogs, lizards, birds, snakes, and even a rabbit; Tori was unruly, nipping at ankles and hiding beneath the outside stairs when visitors arrived. At night, each dog had an established place on the bed, with Chloe at the foot, Tori between or beside Paula, and Kelli between the couple or on Nick’s left side. These details make the relationship legible as a shared domestic system, one whose threatened absence Nick imagines while he is stranded: he wonders whether Paula and the dogs would notice that he was gone or sense that something was wrong.

On the morning of the fishing trip, Paula is the last person Nick sees at home. He puts his head into the bedroom and tells her, “Babe, I gotta go. Love you.” Paula asks for a kiss, and he walks in to kiss her. The exchange is brief, but its placement before the disaster gives it the weight of a final ordinary ritual. In the water, Paula remains present in Nick’s thoughts as he confronts exhaustion and death. He imagines lying in bed with her and the dogs, and measures the extremity of the sea against vacations, Christmas trips to Disney World, and the family comforts he had taken for granted.

Paula and the Missing-Boat Crisis

Paula was away at a dance competition in Lakeland, Florida, on Saturday, while Nick and his friends were expected to return from fishing. She came home around 9:30 or 10:00 p.m., fell asleep, and woke around 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, March 1, 2009. Nick was not home. His cell phone went directly to voice mail, and Will Bleakley’s phone rang once before doing the same. Because Nick normally called if he would be late, the silence immediately violated the couple’s established expectations.

Paula slept fitfully, waking every thirty or forty minutes and repeatedly trying Nick’s phone. Sitting on the deck of the house in Carrollwood, Tampa, she tried to preserve a hopeful explanation: perhaps the men had returned late from fishing, eaten at Marquis Cooper’s house, and fallen asleep. She also controlled the tone of her messages because she did not want to sound like a “crazy girlfriend.” Her message to Nick asks when the men will be home and requests that he call as soon as possible, expressing alarm through restraint rather than accusation.

Near dawn, Paula called the home of Rebekah and Marquis Cooper, only to discover that the family was moving and the number had been disconnected. She did not have Rebekah’s cell-phone number, so she searched online for the Coast Guard and called the St. Petersburg station. She identified Nick as her boyfriend and described him as six feet two inches tall, weighing 240 pounds, with brown hair, green eyes, and a muscular build. The act of supplying those details turns private knowledge into an official missing-person description; Paula’s intimate familiarity becomes part of the search-and-rescue process.

During that call, the Coast Guard passed Paula’s number to Rebekah Cooper, who was waiting in the parking lot of the L.A. Fitness where Nick, Marquis, and Corey trained together. Paula’s relationship with Nick thus becomes the first point in a widening network of families, teammates, gym companions, and authorities. Later that morning, she went to St. Paul’s Catholic Church on North Dale Mabry in Tampa, arriving as the service ended and praying alone for Nick, Will, Marquis, and Corey to come home safely. The Coast Guard then told her that she might need to inform Nick’s family because the media would be alerted and the number of missing men would be confirmed as four.

Rescue, Promise, and Immediate Reunion

Nick’s attachment to Paula remains active even when his physical survival depends on letting go of the men around him. As his strength fails, he recognizes that he cannot continue holding both Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith. The decision is framed as an agonizing physical and moral limit, not as indifference. Before releasing Marquis, Nick tells him, “I love you, Coop. I’ll see you again someday. I’ll protect your family.” Paula is absent from that scene, but the promise to protect the family belongs to the same relational world she shares with Nick: survival carries obligations toward the people left behind.

Nick also knows that Paula will be affected by the loss. He reflects that if he died, his family would suffer, and that he was the last person to see Will Bleakley and had been with all three men for their final words and breaths. This burden later becomes part of the survivor’s guilt that presses on his relationship with Paula. Dr. Mark Rumbak distinguishes survival from culpability, arguing that Nick did not kill his friends and that their lives ended because they became cold more quickly or otherwise would have died regardless of what he did. Paula’s presence provides emotional containment for a guilt that intellectual reassurance alone cannot immediately remove.

After Nick is taken to the hospital, he asks where his family is and insists on seeing them. When Paula enters, she greets him with “Hi, babe,” and Nick grabs her hand and tells her he loves her. She is nervous because officials are present and because Nick’s eyes sometimes roll back, but the physical contact restores a familiar channel between them amid the medical and institutional setting. Nick then tells Paula, “I’m gonna marry you.” The proposal is not presented as a carefully staged romantic gesture; it emerges from survival, reunion, and the renewed recognition of the life he nearly lost.

Trauma and Recovery

The relationship’s hardest phase begins after Nick returns home. Paula says that he retold the story with increasing detail and initially seemed to be doing well, but then changed abruptly. The man who was normally the life of the party, quick with a comeback and accustomed to laughter, became withdrawn, silent, and mute. Paula found the transformation frightening because it made the familiar person seem suddenly inaccessible.

Paula never saw signs that Nick intended to hurt himself, yet she watched him enter a dark emotional state. She describes the change from the person he had been to the person he became as terrifying and says that it broke her. As a teacher home for the summer, she tried to use care as a daily intervention: she made him an excellent breakfast in the hope that it would start his day well and attempted anything that might lighten his mood. Nick generally answered, “Thanks, babe.” Paula understood that he was grateful, but also understood that gratitude was all he could manage. Her care therefore continues without the immediate emotional reciprocity that ordinarily confirms a relationship.

Paula says that the forty-three hours Nick spent in the water and their aftermath were both hell, but that the aftermath may have been worse. Her account makes recovery a shared ordeal rather than a simple medical conclusion. Nick’s survival brings him home physically while leaving him psychologically separated from the ordinary life they had built. The couple must therefore cross a second threshold: from rescue into a domestic world altered by grief, guilt, and the memory of the three men who did not return.

After six months, Paula observes that Nick’s mood finally begins to brighten. He slowly comes back to himself, has more to say, laughs again, and recovers the sarcastic intelligence and quick comebacks that had marked his earlier personality. Paula interprets the experience as having changed her as well. Her endurance is not passive consolation; it becomes evidence of her own capacity to survive an ordeal that she says taught her that, if she could get through it, she could do anything.

Lasting Bond and Meaning

The relationship is repeatedly tested by the fact that Nick invited Will Bleakley on the trip. Paula believes the hardest thing Nick ever faced was letting go of Will and that the decision will continue to consume him. Her observation links romantic intimacy to survivor’s guilt: Paula is not merely waiting for Nick to recover but witnessing the moral injury created by his survival and by the deaths of the people he loved.

Nick’s later dark moments sometimes turn the accident into a judgment against his own continued existence. He says things such as “That’s God’s way of showing me I shouldn’t have made it through this,” “I should have gone down with my friends,” and “Maybe I shouldn’t have lived.” Paula’s response brings him back to reality when she is present. The relationship therefore functions as an anchor against self-condemnation, even though Paula cannot erase the memories or settle the question of why Nick survived when stronger, equally brave friends did not.

The book closes its account of their bond with Nick’s gratitude to Paula for taking care of him and never leaving his side, placing him first, and remaining with him through the ordeal and its aftermath. That devotion gives the relationship its decisive significance. It is not simply a romance interrupted by disaster; it is the intimate structure that makes disappearance personally legible, makes rescue emotionally consequential, and makes recovery possible without pretending that survival restores the past. Paula’s care helps Nick return to laughter and ordinary connection, while the relationship preserves the unresolved presence of those who died.