Page 1 of High Season

ONE

TWENTY YEARS LATER

The dinner party had been Ryan’s idea.

He had suggested it a week ago, when he and Nina were having drinks at his members’ club in Soho—an anniversary date that had morphed into an impromptu celebration of the job offer that had landed in her inbox that morning.

“Your first proper, grown-up job,” he had said. “That’s worth cracking a bottle of good wine for, surely.”

Nina had tried to rebuff the idea at first. She was twenty-five, after all, and it had taken her much longer than most to arrive at the promised land of full-time employment.

The fact that she had only just secured her first salaried wage—something that almost all her friends had enjoyed for years—felt like an embarrassing admission rather than something to celebrate.

But Ryan was adamant. He would plan it all.

Nina wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.

Now they’ve had several bottles of good wine, more than Nina has kept count of.

She’s tipsy; a starry haze has settled over the evening, the sun melting just below the rooftop beyond their flat.

The table is strewn with empty plates, still slicked with salad dressing and seafood shells, everyone too drunk to suggest clearing up.

Nina sits on the windowsill, her glass half-empty, her white wine warmed through with the early summer heat, as Ryan tops up everyone’s drinks.

“Cheers.” Her brother Blake leans over from his seat on the sofa to clink his glass against hers. “You worked hard for this, you know. You deserve it.”

Nina can tell that he’s drunk by the way the rims of their glasses tap together slightly too hard, a tiny tsunami of wine sloshing over the edge.

She has worked hard for this. A postgraduate degree and years of clinical training, not to mention the endless job applications, the slog of rejections before, finally the offer that came through last week.

An assistant clinical psychologist role at a small London clinic.

“ Child psychology, though,” Blake says now, shaking his head. “Bit close to the bone, don’t you think?”

“So you’ve said,” says Nina. “About twenty times, actually.”

She gives him a gentle nudge.

“Come on, Blake,” she says, smiling. “You understand why.”

He sits back heavily in the chair. “I just think it’s a bit… morbid, isn’t it? You know that Mum’s still hoping you’ll change your mind.”

Nina takes another sip of her wine. Chateauneuf-du-Pape Blanc. Their mother’s favorite.

“That’s not all she’s hoping you’ll change your mind about,” Blake says.

He reaches out for Nina’s hand.

“Come back this summer,” he says, his voice wheedling. “Please. It would mean a lot to Mum. It would mean a lot to me .”

“You know I can’t,” Nina says.

She starts to stand. Extracts her hand from Blake’s.

“I’ll go and sort pudding.”

“Nina, don’t be like that. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine, Blake. Just not tonight, OK? Not when Ryan’s put so much effort in. We’ll talk about it another time.”

Later, Nina fills the sink full of scalding hot water.

The flat has two dishwashers, but she likes to wash up by hand.

She likes to look out over the city through the kitchen window as she scrubs, a small, mindless task as voices drift from the living room.

Blake and Ryan are discussing her brother’s flight to the South of France tomor row, his plans to spend summer with their mother at the family home on the C?te d’Azur.

Her best friend Claire is fussing with the antique record player that once belonged to Nina’s grandfather.

Nina piles pans into the sink to soak. Outside the enormous sash window, the sky has that strange cerebral quality that only comes at the cusp of summer. Pink clouds blossoming against a purple twilight. Heat crawling upward as if trying to escape the city.

Nina always forgets how suffocating London gets at this time of year.

How the air tastes of car fumes, the roads tangled up with people escaping for cooler patches of the country.

Smoke from balcony barbecues. Sweat rising from bodies packed into tube carriages.

The warm tarmac, the rubbish starting to stew and bake in unemptied bins.

Not for the first time, she has the overwhelming urge to take Blake up on his offer.

To go back to the place that somehow, in spite of everything, still feels like home.

“God, I would kill for this kitchen.”

Claire marches through the industrial glass doors that lead from the lounge, a pile of plates stacked up in her hands—three scraped, only Nina’s almost untouched.

She deposits them on the countertop and runs her fingers down her linen skirt as if checking that she hasn’t dropped the dregs of four sticky toffee puddings down herself.

She hasn’t, of course. Nina’s best friend always looks astonishingly put together, with her rotating selection of pastel-colored headbands and the same signature lipstick that she’s worn every day since Nina met her when they were both eighteen, on their first day of university.

Nina had stayed close to home, in London, her mother insisting that she wouldn’t be able to cope with a big move.

Still, she had been terrified on her first day, embarrassed that her mum had insisted on their private driver dropping her off at her halls of residence.

She had clutched a bottle of gin that she had planned on using as a peace offering for her new flatmates as the porter informed her, one eyebrow raised, that John Lewis furniture deliveries had been arriving for her small single room all week ( Well, you can’t sleep in a bed that someone else has already slept in , her mother announced when Nina had called her, mortified, as the porter looked on).

Claire had bowled into the shared kitchen just as Nina, red-faced, oversaw a Fortnum & Mason order that the delivery driver had insisted on transporting straight to her refrigerator.

“Gin!” she had announced, spotting the forgotten bottle abandoned on the countertop. “It always makes me a bit loopy, but I never learn. I’ve got tonic in my groceries somewhere, if you want to do a trade?”

It was one of the things that had drawn Nina to her. Claire seemed like someone who was completely unfazeable.

“Ryan’s flat is incredible ,” Claire continues. “How much did he pay for this place again?”

Nina doesn’t remind her that it isn’t Ryan’s flat.

Not anymore. It’s their flat now. Has been since Nina moved in eight months ago.

But Claire’s mistake is understandable. There’s so little of Nina in the swathes of marble, the engineered-wood floors, the way the entire flat is rigged up with gadgets—speakers and smart systems running through the walls like veins.

Nina makes a mental note to put up some pictures before Claire comes round again.

She should ask Blake what happened to all of the art that their mother had in storage.

Perhaps she could find something a little more like Nina.

“It needed work. He got a good deal,” Nina says, even though it’s not exactly true.

She hates talking money. Wants to avoid getting into a discussion about how Ryan is technically letting her live here for free, an agreement that started when Nina was job hunting and which has yet to lapse.

She’s offered to pay rent, of course, but Ryan said that it wouldn’t be fair when only his name was on the mortgage.

“Hey, your brother is looking good tonight,” Claire says, lowering her voice. “Did you say that he broke up with… what’s her name?”

“Jazmin?”

“That was it. Jazmin. Because I kind of got a vibe from him over dinner. Did you notice?”

Nina turns away to hide her smile. She’s used to people being this way around her brother. She had barely even got a chance to know Jazmin before Blake mentioned, in passing, that he had a date with a girl he’d met at an art gallery opening.

“What about Jazmin?” she had asked.

“Oh, Jazmin ,” Blake had said, as if Nina was bringing up a long-lost acquaintance rather than the girl they’d all been out to dinner with the week prior. “Well, we wanted different things.”

As usual , Nina had wanted to say. Blake is in his late thirties, but he seems so far from settling down that Nina sometimes feels embarrassed by how early she herself has fallen into long-term coupledom.

She has become used to meeting a new girlfriend of Blake’s every few months, some sweet and beautiful woman who seems completely besotted with her brother.

“You know Blake,” Nina says. “He can turn on the charm when he wants to. Don’t read too much into it.”

“Right,” says Claire. “Oh well. My turn eventually.”

She bumps her hip against Nina’s to show that she’s joking.

“Hey, your phone was going off, by the way. Want me to grab it for you?”

“It can wait,” says Nina. She pulls the plug from the sink so the water can drain, disappearing in a swirl. She is here. She is with all of the people that she cares about the most. “Whoever it is, I’m sure they can wait.”

Claire sways slightly on her feet, wraps her arm around Nina and pulls her close.

“I’m so proud of you, babe,” she says. “You’re killing it.”

And somehow, Nina can’t quite bring herself to point out Claire’s poor choice of words.