Page 2 of High Season

TWO

Nina had told Ryan what happened to her sister on their second date.

He had been sitting across from her, pouring her a glass of red wine.

“So,” he had said. “Do you have any siblings?”

The restaurant hummed around them, as if Ryan hadn’t asked Nina the question that she had spent most of her life dreading.

“It’s a bit complicated,” she had said.

And it had all begun there.

Nina had met Ryan two weeks earlier at a recruitment fair in a drafty university hall.

Ryan ran a technology start-up that had a stand, and even though Nina didn’t have the slightest interest in data programming she lingered, picking up a leaflet and pretending to read.

He had asked her if she was considering a career in the tech sector, and when she admitted that she was already signed up to do a psychology master’s next year and had only come along to keep her best friend Claire company, he had grinned.

“A master’s in psychology?” he said. “Well, clearly you’re too smart to work for us.”

She had liked him immediately.

“Why psychology?” he had asked her on their first date, at a cocktail bar with views over the Thames.

Nina had taken a sip of the too-sweet mojito she already regretted ordering and considered her answer.

“I want to be able to understand people,” she had said.

“Do you think that you need psychology to understand people?”

“I think that you need psychology to understand yourself , never mind other people,” she had said, and then been faintly embarrassed by how easily the answer came.

What it might say about her. She did not want this smart, older guy who seemed so self-assured to think she was the sort of person who didn’t really know or understand herself, in spite of her psychology degree.

But he had just nodded, and pushed his square-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose in a way that Nina found sweet, and slightly nerdy. Attractive in a way she couldn’t quite quantify.

“Good answer,” he had said, as if it were a test and Nina had passed.

It was Ryan who had suggested dinner for their second date.

The idea had felt strangely adult, a performance of romance that Nina wasn’t used to.

Dinner dates were the things that her mother used to go on, and the words evoked memories of perfume and silken dresses, her mother patting her hair in front of a long mirror and telling Nina and Blake that there was food on a plate in the refrigerator if they got hungry.

Nina was more accustomed to university romances.

Sleeping with a guy long enough during her first year to eventually be called his girlfriend.

A friend with benefits she had fallen for two terms before who got a place on a graduate scheme in America, and had looked at Nina with genuine disbelief when she suggested there might be something more between them.

But she liked how confident Ryan was. How intelligent, and interesting. She liked that he seemed completely oblivious to celebrity gossip, furrowing his brows and saying Who? when Nina referenced Kris Jenner.

She liked the way he looked at her with approval in his eyes. The way it made her feel.

And now, she was sitting across the table from him, knowing that what she was about to say could change everything.

“I’ve got a brother,” she said. “Blake. He’s twelve years older than me.”

From the table next to them came the rise and fall of laughter. A murmur of conversation.

Nina took a deep breath.

“And I had a sister,” she said. “She and Blake were twins. But she died when she was seventeen.”

She had Ryan’s full attention now.

“Oh my god,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“But still. That must have been terrible.”

“I don’t really remember much about it,” said Nina. “I was only five.”

She lifted her drink and took a long, slow sip. The heat of the alcohol slid straight through her. She set down her glass harder than she had intended.

“It was actually a pretty big thing, at the time,” Nina allowed. “She was killed by somebody.”

Ryan didn’t speak. Didn’t move.

“There was a trial,” Nina said. “A girl whose mother worked for us, the housekeeper’s daughter. She used to spend all her time around our house. Babysitting me, or helping out with the housework. She was sixteen. I had to give evidence.”

For the first time in Nina’s life, the words came easily.

It was something she’d talked about so rarely, even though it was often the first thing that people knew about her.

She hadn’t even told Claire until they’d been friends for over a year, one night after drinking cheap merlot out of coffee mugs, sprawled on Nina’s bed.

“I already knew,” Claire had confessed, her mouth stained red. For the first time in all the months Nina had known her, she was bashful rather than brash. Embarrassed for Nina, for thinking that she had a secret, when all the world knew.

Ryan’s eyes widened.

“You gave evidence when you were five?”

“I had to,” Nina said. “I was the only one who saw.”

“You saw?”

His voice was quiet now.

“Yes,” said Nina. “I saw.”

“God,” he said. “That’s… well. It must be awful. To have seen that. How could you…”

He shook his head, the words seeming to fail him.

“It must be terrible for you. To be able to remember seeing that.”

Nina swallowed.

“Memory’s strange,” she said. “It’s hard for me to… the details. You know?”

Ryan didn’t say anything, and Nina staggered to fill the space.

“I mostly remember the trial,” she said.

“And the aftermath—being taken into a room and asked to draw what happened. I remember exactly what I drew. The pool. My sister—Tamara. Her name was Tamara. And her. Bending down. Pushing her under the water. Josie Jackson. She denied everything, of course. Said that I must have made the whole thing up.”

She paused to take a sip of water, her mouth suddenly too dry after too much wine.

How could she explain it? The gray rooms and long corridors.

The year of Nina’s life that seemed lost to that drawing, entire days and weeks stretching out between the felt-tip lines.

The blue of the pool. The black squiggle of Tamara’s hair.

The fluorescent pink of Josie Jackson’s arms.

And all the years since. How she had had to move schools because the other girls seemed afraid of her, as if death was catching.

How, even though the police and the social workers spoke gently to her—telling her she’d done the right thing, that Josie Jackson was a bad person and needed to be punished—Nina had felt a bolt of guilt so intense that she had become obsessive about strange things.

Handwashing. Counting. Flicking light switches on and off.

Believing that if she didn’t track her steps in units of one hundred then some omnipotent force would take another member of her family away.

Chewing each mouthful exactly twenty times until her jaw ached and she had no appetite left.

Developing an intense anxiety around food, hiding it in napkins and flushing it down the toilet.

Of course, she had had years of therapy.

Stuffed animals, and concerned-looking doctors.

The nerve-ending fizzle of pain if anyone ever asked Nina if she had a sister.

The way Nina still had to change the channel or leave the room if a courtroom drama ever came up on the television in her university common room.

Nina couldn’t explain these things, and so she didn’t. Instead, she looked Ryan straight in the eye.

“The funny thing is that when I think of it now, that’s what I see. That picture. It’s a trauma response, I suppose. It’s easier to remember the picture than the real thing.”

She was speaking too quickly, running out of air. She took a deep breath.

“That’s why I want to be a psychologist, really,” she said. “I want to help other people—children especially—who’ve experienced trauma at a very young age. I want to be able to show people that you can survive it.”

Ryan’s brow furrowed. He was looking just beyond her. As if he hadn’t heard what she’d said.

“But if you don’t remember it,” he said, “how do you know you weren’t making it up? Kids make things up all the time, right? They make believe. How do you know that you were telling the truth?”

Just then, the waiter turned up with their mains.

He topped up their waters, asked if they’d like any sauces, delivered a steak knife to the side of Ryan’s plate with an aplomb that suggested he was delivering a ceremonial sword rather than a simple item of cutlery.

By the time he left, the question seemed forgotten.

Ryan had moved on. He was already asking about the verdict.

How high the cost of a life really was for the woman who killed Tamara, his curiosity shifting into sympathy.

Later, Nina would learn that Ryan was the kind of person who threw out big questions without thinking about the consequences.

That his mind was always whirring, searching.

It was the kind of blue-sky thinking that his investors were always saying he had, the looking outside the box that had made him a start-up CEO at twenty-two.

Always inquisitive, always moving quickly on to the next curiosity.

So Ryan had forgotten the question.

Ryan had forgotten the question, but Nina had not.

She could not. Nina would never forget Ryan asking her that question, because it was the first time that anyone had ever said the thing she had always wondered.

The hum of fear and guilt that had lodged itself in the back of her brain and refused to budge.

The thing that she had always ignored, pushed down, starved out.

And now Ryan, with his straightforwardness, his lack of complication, had simply said it out loud. And now, Nina could only think about that question.