Page 123 of High Season

“Eric,” she says.

He looks at her. His eyes are gentle in the dusk light. Kind. She is going to have to break his heart.

“I need to tell you,” Hannah says. “About the worst thing I ever did.”

FORTY-FOUR

2024

For the last twenty years, Hannah has not sought Blake Drayton out.

She has stayed away from the main strip of the town on her visits back to the Côte d’Azur. Always picked the quietest spots on the beach. Intentionally avoided anywhere she might run into the Draytons.

But the day after meeting with Imogen and Josie, Hannah walks up the road to the pink house for the first time since the day that Tamara Drayton died.

The coral-colored stone, a touch more faded than she remembers it. The large, wooden front doors that she was never able to use, always going in and out of the back entrance, always hidden, always staying quiet.

Hannah has had enough of staying quiet.

She lifts one hand and knocks, hard, on the door.

For a long moment, she thinks that nobody is home. In the distance, a cricket calls. The air stands still.

Then, she hears a scuffle of movement behind the door. Feet on hard tiles. The slide of a bolt.

She is expecting staff. A housekeeper. For a bizarre half second, she almost expects to see Patricia Jackson.

She is still struck by this, still humming with the strangeness of expecting a dead woman to answer a door, when the door swings open.

Standing face-to-face with Hannah is Blake Drayton.

He is completely different, of course. His shoulders have filled out, his chin squared. His hair is shorter, the blond sweep of his fringe that used to drive girls crazy cut back. His eyes have dark circles, the hint of age.

Hannah might even have second-guessed that it was him, if not for the way he moves, the puff of his chest. The things that she recognizes in him are the things that don’t change about a person, even when they get older, even when their face and body grow and shift. The self-assurance. The way he takes up space in the world. The confidence that Hannah always longed for.

“Hannah fucking Bailey,” he says, a twitch of amusement on his face. As if he has been expecting her to come here all along.

Hannah fucking Bailey lifts up her chin.

“We need to talk,” she says.

He hesitates for just a second. In that second, Hannah thinks of Tamara. She thinks of all the ways things might have been different.

She thinks of all the chances she has missed to put things right.

“Well,” he says. “I guess you’d better come in.”

The pink house is not how Hannah remembers it.

Memory is duplicitous like that. The pink house is a place that has lived for years in her mind, as a shrine to a time that no longer exists. A place that Hannah has revisited so often in her memories, each version shifting slightly—reformulating rooms, reshaping the fall of the light, the color of the walls—until the image no longer resembles reality.

The hallway is smaller than she remembers. She can see right through to the kitchen and onto the small back terrace, even though she could have sworn that it was tucked out of sight. The smell is different—mustier and slightly damp—and yet still she catches the scent of Evelyn’s perfume. Blake is so different—gone is that goldensheen of youth—and yet she still feels something within her turn toward him. Some ancient attraction, a Pavlovian response to the way he looks at her. When she looks back at him, she is seventeen again.

She feels that tug of longing, and she hates herself for it.

“Can I get you anything?” he says. “A drink? Some water?”

He seems so relaxed. So at ease, when Hannah’s heart is a drum roll.