Page 154 of Gone Before Goodbye

“You go. I’ll walk down to the guesthouse.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. I need time to decompress.”

He nods, turns the bike off, heads toward the table. Maggie takes the path down through the vineyards. She heads into the guesthouse. She goes into Porkchop’s bedroom and opens the side pocket of his satchel bag. When she’s finished, she heads back outside. The golden haze is back. It touches everything. Colors are colors, but in a vineyard touched by this golden haze, colors are never stagnant; they become a living, breathing thing.

She stops at a quiet stretch near the guesthouse and leans against a tree. She stares out and soaks in the stillness. It’s over now. She gets that. You don’t get all the answers. That’s part of life. Soon she will go back home to…

… to what?

No Marc. No surgery.

That’s when she feels the cold steel press against the back of her skull.

A voice says, “You killed him.”

Maggie’s eyes close.

Nadia.

“I rechecked Trace’s phone records,” Nadia says through gritted teeth. She keeps the muzzle of the gun right up against Maggie’s head. Maggie doesn’t dare move, her eyes still on the golden haze and the pale blue sky. “You called him on your mobile phone the day before he left. You called him and told him something and suddenly he packed and flew to you.”

Nadia circles so that she is now in front of Maggie. Her eyes are wide.

“If you lie to me, I’m going to pull the trigger.”

Maggie doesn’t speak.

“Did you call Trace? Yes or no.”

“Yes,” Maggie says.

The women are face-to-face now. Nadia aims the gun at Maggie’s heart. “What did you say to him?”

A tear falls from Maggie’s eye.

Nadia’s voice is a snarl now. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him I visited the TriPoint refugee camp,” Maggie says. Her voice is tinny in her own ears, as though she’s speaking from very far away. “Or what was left of it. Most of the refugees had been relocated. I followed them. I found every survivor I could. They all told me that the militants who slaughtered them left the medical team alone. One woman named Aisha—she lost one arm and one leg. Chopped off with a machete. She’d been left in the sand to bleed out and die. But she didn’t. She used her one arm and her teeth to rip her clothes and create tourniquets. She said she saw Trace come back to camp. Marc was alive when he did. She was sure of it.”

Maggie looks into Nadia’s eyes and waits.

“So you thought—” Nadia begins.

“I didn’t think anything. I told Trace I needed to see him. That there were discrepancies in what I was told happened to Marc. I said we needed to talk. In person. Eye to eye. Like this.”

“And when he arrived?”

Maggie shakes her head.

“You killed him,” Nadia says.

“No.”

“Then—”

“Trace never showed. He ran instead.”