Page 12 of High Season

The medication had been a feature of her life ever since Tamara died.

It had been crucial, back then, to get Nina through nights where she would wake up screaming, torn from dreams of her sister’s broken body.

She still remembers those grasping, consuming visions, so terrifying that she would refuse to go to bed.

She developed a trick of eating as little as possible in the evening, cutting her dinner into smaller and smaller mouthfuls, pushing food around her plate, so that she would be too hungry to fall asleep.

The feeling of control it gave her was addictive, even back then.

It was the first time Nina had understood how badly she needed that power.

As she navigated the difficult months of the trial, and then those strange, lost years when Tamara’s death faded into the distance, Nina stopped being able to imagine existing without the pills she swallowed with her morning orange juice.

They blunted the sharp edges of her mind, made the world manageable, even when the other kids whispered about her on the playground or dared one another to ask what it was like to see a dead body (the fact that Nina had not, as it turned out, actually seen a dead body didn’t seem to bother them.

It was as close as any of them had got to seeing a dead body, and that was good enough for them).

She had a scaffolding around her life that held her up, and medication was the central beam.

It wasn’t until she started her master’s degree that she considered stopping. In a lecture on the dangers of prescribing to children, Nina realized that she didn’t actually know what it was like to not be on the cocktail of pills that she had been taking since she was five years old.

How could she assess children—perhaps even refer them on to doctors who would dish out the same medications that Nina had been on for years—if she didn’t even remember what she felt like without them?

By the time Nina summits the hill, her body is coated in a thin veil of sweat, and her chest is on fire.

There is a tang of bile in her throat. She has to stop at the side of the road, bending over double, expecting herself to vomit.

When she doesn’t, she straightens up and keeps running.

She runs until all she can focus on is the in, out of her breath, the ache of her knees and hips each time her feet strike the ground.

Just as she has done on so many mornings since she first threw away the foil packets that had filled her bathroom cabinet for years, Nina runs until she can’t feel anything anymore.

When she reaches the end of her planned route, she still can’t stand to go home. Instead, she walks all the way down to the beach. She sits on the damp sand, not caring that her leggings are getting wet. The sound of the waves is colossal against the quiet of dawn.

It feels like she is sitting on the edge of the world.

It’s almost seven by the time Nina gets back to the house. The endorphins have hit, that much-promised runner’s high threading like a current beneath her skin.

The morning feels clean and fresh and full.

A better day. She’ll do what Blake says, she thinks.

She’ll delete the email. Maybe she’ll block the sender.

She’ll go home tomorrow, back to her life in London.

To her flat with Ryan, and her new job. All the good things that she has managed to wrestle out of the bad things that happened to her family.

All the ways that she is not defined by the death of her sister.

Nina expects everyone to still be in bed. Evelyn and Blake are late sleepers, and even Ryan, who is up at the crack of dawn to work out and take his endless supplements back in London, often sleeps until midmorning whenever they leave the city, his body seeming to demand a break.

Nina unlocks the side door quietly, prepared to tiptoe upstairs. To shower, and then perhaps to coil back into bed beside her boyfriend, to wake him slowly with her touch.

She stops dead when she hears voices drifting in from the kitchen.

“She’ll be in a good mood when she gets back. It’s later that we’ll have to keep an eye on her.”

Nina doesn’t move. It’s Ryan, his back to her, his hands resting on the kitchen island. Seated on the chaise longue closest to the window, she can make out the top of her mother’s head.

“I’m worried, you know,” Evelyn says. “We tried so hard to protect her at the time. I knew this degree of hers could only lead to trouble. Child psychology, of all things! Such a ridiculous idea. Most people would want to move on. To forget about it. Not be confronting what happened to them, over and over again.”

“She’s good at what she does,” Ryan says, and Nina feels a stir of gratitude toward him. “And she cares about her work. She genuinely wants to help people.”

She should go in now. Evelyn would never know that she’d heard.

“But I’ve often wondered how much of it is really about helping people, and how much of it is a way of dealing with the guilt,” Ryan says.

“A way of figuring out what happened to her, I suppose. I think that’s why she did her dissertation on child memory formation and trauma.

Like, if she can figure out what she doesn’t remember, and if she can figure out why she doesn’t remember it, she might be able to convince herself that she told the truth. ”

Nina’s skin turns to ice.

“But she does remember,” Evelyn’s voice is knife-sharp. “It’s hardly the kind of thing that you forget.”

“Not everything,” Ryan says. “She doesn’t remember everything.”

There’s a quiet then. A stillness. Nina has to force her breath to slow. She is almost scared that, if she doesn’t, they might be able to hear the beating of her heart.

“I hate to ask you this,” Ryan says, “but did you ever wonder if it was the truth? If Josie Jackson really did do it? Did you believe Nina, right from the start?”

A silence. Evelyn is taking much too long to answer.

“I had to,” she says at last. “What other option was there?”

Nina’s stomach drops. She takes a step back. There is an ache in her temples, her throat. The threat of tears.

She cannot listen to this. She cannot hear her own mother and boyfriend doubting her. Sounding just like the people online, so quick to tear her down.

She goes upstairs, treading slowly on the stone steps, careful not to make any sound.

She goes to the farthest bathroom and switches on the shower, so hot that she has to stifle a squeal when the water hits her skin.

She washes away the sweat and the sand, scrubs as if she could buffer away the terrible, awful feeling that nobody believes her.

When her skin is scarlet with heat, she emerges and stands naked, dripping on the bathroom floor.

She lifts her phone up from the sink. She had left it there this morning, when she was changing for her run.

Another lifetime now, it feels. When she presses the unlock button, the still image of truecrimefangirl_2002 flushes the screen. Smiling. Gleeful. Goading Nina on.

Nina clicks into her emails and pulls up the message that started this entire thing. She taps against the small reply icon. Begins to type.

Hi , she writes. I think I’m ready to talk.