Page 22 of High Season

She told him how she had initially ignored the email.

The people from the production company were not the first who had contacted her.

She had, when she had first been released from prison, agreed to a few interviews, hoping to be able to scrape together enough money for a new start.

She had felt idiotic and humiliated when she’d seen the results.

The worst had been a magazine spread by a journalist who had seemed so kind when they’d met up but had written the article as if they were entirely convinced of Josie’s guilt.

When I meet Josie Jackson she has the look of someone who has seen and done the darkest imaginable things, read the opening line.

After that, Josie had decided that she would talk to nobody. So far, she’d stuck to her decision.

And yet, in spite of her insistence to Calvin that she wouldn’t be participating, Josie had found herself filling out an application form to access her case file.

She had told herself that it was nothing to do with the documentary.

That it was a part of her legal history.

No different, really, from how other people kept copies of their birth certificates or marriage licenses.

That she would probably be denied access anyway.

When she got a phone call to say that the file was awaiting collection, she had been as shocked as if she had never applied for it in the first place.

“And then when I got it, it just sat there, staring at me,” Josie says.

“Or at least, that’s how it felt. All this information, and what was I meant to do with it?

All this stuff that people have talked about, and posted about in stupid online forums, and speculated over for years, and now I had it.

It would be mad to just keep it in a desk drawer, wouldn’t it? ”

“But you don’t want to do the documentary?” Nic says.

“I thought I wanted to do the documentary,” Josie says. “When I came back here, with the file, I’d sort of talked myself into it. Like, what did I have to lose?”

Nic nods.

“Right.”

“But when I met up with that producer and she was asking me if I did it… it just sort of brought it all back. All the questions, and all the people doubting me. Why would I put myself through that again?”

“But you gave them the file.”

“I didn’t want it. In fact, I wanted it as far away from me as possible. And they wanted it, and… I don’t know. I suppose it made sense, in the moment.”

Nic leans in closer.

“But what if this documentary could actually be a good thing? It feels like these people are taking it seriously. What if this could change people’s minds about what happened?”

Josie shakes her head.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “What they’re like. How they twist your words. Turn the slightest thing you say against you. And besides, what are they going to do? Are they going to turn back time? Are they going to give me back all the years I spent in prison?”

Nic’s mouth slides shut.

“Look, I’ve had years to come to terms with what happened,” Josie says. “I know it must seem like this huge, big deal to everyone else. But to me, it’s my life. I can’t change it. All the worst things have already happened, and now it’s time for me to move on.”

“I get it,” says Nic. “But what if people believed you this time? What if the police actually did reopen the case? What if they found out what really happened that day?”

“But what if they didn’t? What happens if I put myself out there again, let everyone know where I am and what I’m doing, only for them to decide that I’m some evil kid killer all over again?

” She can hear her voice rising, her words coming fast. “I’ve done that before.

I’ve been through all of this. I am not going to let them tear me apart again. ”

“OK, OK.” Nic holds his palms out flat toward her. “Look, you’re right. We don’t have to talk about it.”

“I understand,” says Josie. “Why this might seem like… I don’t know.

An opportunity. But honestly? I’ve seen this kind of thing dozens of times before.

A new podcast, or some TV special comes out, and all of a sudden people go crazy about the case.

But it doesn’t change anything. It never does.

And pretty soon, people forget. They move on, and I’m still here, still trying to put some semblance of a life together, still standing in the wreckage. That’s what nobody understands.”

Josie crumples her napkin, wilted with grease.

“At the end of the day, Nina Drayton has never changed her story,” she says. “And as far as the record goes, she was the only witness.”

She takes a deep breath. She is thinking about Tamara. She thinks of her often, even now. She can see her so clearly. Ripped jeans, even in the summer heat. The smell of cigarette smoke and perfume.

“I’ve had years to come to terms with this. Over half my life. As long as Nina Drayton says I’m guilty, I’m guilty. I’ve accepted it. I’m trying to move on. And I just wish everyone else would, too.”

Nic looks thoughtful.

“But what if Nina did change her story? What if—”

“Hey, lovebirds!”

“Oh god,” says Josie. “Don’t tell me that’s—”

“Fancy seeing you guys here.”

Gabby swoops up to the table, dragging Calvin behind her.

“You look so cute together!”

“Sorry,” says Calvin, red-faced. “We didn’t realize you’d be here.”

“You don’t mind if we join you, do you?” Gabby is beaming, sliding into the seat next to Josie.

“Gabby.” Calvin looks like he wants the ground to swallow him up. “They’re on a D-A-T-E.”

“I did actually do my exams in prison, you know,” Josie says. “I know how to spell.”

She glances at Nic, their unfinished conversation still hanging there, unsaid. There’s a flicker of a discussion that passes between their eyes. Is this OK with you? The intimacy of it surprises her.

“It’s cool,” says Josie. “As long as you guys get the next round in.”

“It’s a deal,” says Gabby. “Calvin. To the bar!”

The night is so different from what Josie is used to.

She is used to dark, discreet bars. Toilets with UV lighting. People who talk more than they listen. People who drink because they are trying to forget, rather than because they want to create a night worth remembering.

With Gabby and Calvin and Nic, it’s easy.

They play stupid drinking games, the kind that Josie never learned because she missed out on going to university and those late teenage years of bar hopping and trying to break the ice with strangers.

They talk about work—easy, inconsequential problems about rude customers and late deliveries of stock.

Gabby tells Josie about how she first visited the town as a teenager with her high school boyfriend, how they had fantasized about moving out here and opening up a café.

How the dream outlasted Gabby’s relationship, and she had come back alone thinking that she would stay for a summer, heal from heartbreak.

Instead, she never left, a dream becoming her reality.

It reminds Josie all over again how special, how magical this place can be.

How it can take hold of your heart and refuse to let go.

When a song that Gabby loves comes on, she squeals and grabs Josie’s hand, tugging her to the dance floor.

Gabby dances with short, happy bounces, and briefly the two women catch hold of each other and spin round and round.

Josie is tipsy enough not to feel self-conscious.

The music is inside her, as deep as her bones, and she throws back her head and sings the lyrics at the top of her voice.

“Hey.” Gabby pulls Josie close so that she can speak in her ear. Her eyes are shiny. “Calvin and I were talking before we came out. The girl who does the afternoon shift at the café is leaving next month. I was going to advertise, but—well. You need a job, right?”

Josie leans back. They are still swaying to the music, Gabby grinning and glowing, Josie temporarily dazed.

This could be her life, Josie thinks, with a flash of clarity.

Spending the day at the café, in a job that she likes, where the work is hard and simple and thoughtless and honest. Coming down to the beach with a group of friends, people who know her.

Care about her. Maybe even a boyfriend, someone who loves her in a straightforward, undemanding way.

Evenings spent drinking and laughing. The past becoming a distant thing.

The thought has not quite fully formed before Josie trips, Gabby’s borrowed dress tangled up around her legs. The two women collapse onto the sand, squealing and clutching at each other, a giggling heap of limbs.

“Alright, you guys.” Calvin is there before they can stagger back to their feet, one arm looped beneath Gabby’s to pull her up. “Think that you might have had enough to drink.”

“But we’re having so much fun ,” protests Gabby.

Then Nic is there, too, his hand gripping Josie’s, pulling her up. His touch sends a flicker across the surface of her skin, and when she meets his eye, they both hold the gaze for just longer than is necessary.

“Actually,” says Josie. “I am kind of tired. Maybe we should head home.”

“How about it, Nic?” Calvin says, slapping him on the back. “Nightcap back at ours?”

There’s a beat before Nic answers. A promise of what could come passing between him and Josie.

The start of something. The startling optimism of their desire.

Josie has learned not to expect anything from anyone.

She has learned not to dream, but just now, she does.

Just now, she lets herself lean into the hope.

“Yeah,” Nic says. “I think that maybe I will.”

They walk slowly, as if they have nowhere in the world to be.

Gabby and Calvin go on ahead, and Nic and Josie lag behind talking, the ambling, easy chatter of two people who’ve been drinking for the past two hours. Whose mouths are freed up, the intimacy of alcohol between them.

Josie tells Nic about how once, when she was in Paris, she shoplifted a handbag from a designer shop where the assistants were snooty and rude to her, and all of a sudden, the story feels funny rather than shameful, Nic laughing and letting out an impressed whistle and saying that she’s basically an anti-capitalism activist. He tells her about a time when he slipped a bag of sweets into his pocket in a supermarket as a kid, and his dad marched him back to apologize later that day, and Josie feels genuinely sorry for the little boy that she imagines, embarrassed and repentant, and has an overwhelming urge to pull Nic in for a hug.

“I’m glad you came back,” Nic says, when they’re close to the house. “You feel like you belong here, you know?”

To Josie, who has not felt as if she belongs anywhere for a very long time, this feels like the kindest thing he could have possibly said.

Their fingers brush against each other as they turn onto the road leading up to the house, and Josie could swear that she feels an actual crackle of static pass between them.

The promise of what comes next is palpable, electric.

She is thinking of Nic touching her. Kissing her.

She is, with this tiny, almost imperceptible moment of contact, mapping out an entire future for them.

She turns her face up toward his, wondering if this is it. If Nic might kiss her, right here in the street.

But Nic is not looking at her.

Instead his forehead is creased, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance. His steps slow.

“Wait a second,” he says. “Is that…?”

His expression reconfigures, the shock sketched across his face.

“Oh shit,” he says. “I think that’s Nina Drayton.”