Page 38 of High Season

TWENTY-EIGHT

There is something uniquely depressing about a budget airport hotel.

Josie’s room is on the ground floor. The space is anonymous and plain.

A sheen of misted plastic tacked to the lower portion of the window in a faint nod to privacy.

A beige carpet. A bathroom with a plastic shower stall.

A desk placed against the window, as if anyone would want to gaze onto the blurred concrete concourse beyond.

Josie washes beneath a slow stream of water, using up all the tiny bottles supplied to clean off the scent of her journey. Calvin’s car to the station. A crammed train carriage that left a stale, sweating smell on her skin.

Calvin had held her tight on the platform, as if he didn’t want to let her go.

“You sure about this?” he asked.

“As I’ll ever be,” Josie said, and in the reflection of his sunglasses she could see how unsure she looked. How different, and yet the same, as the version of herself who had arrived here a little over a week ago. The optimism of her new beginning already broken.

After her shower, she switches on the television. She sits on the bed, and flicks through channels she would never normally watch.

She imagines the people who have occupied this space before her, none of them staying longer than a night, nobody sleeping easily.

Couples sneaking in bottles of prosecco to toast their first holiday.

Harassed businessmen hanging up their suits above the chipped mirror.

The slightly dazed people who stay here after a flight away from a place, a person, a world that they can never go back to.

Who stretch out on this bed and know that tomorrow everything will feel new, and strange, and different.

Josie has been in so many cheap hotels, caught so many early-morning flights.

She has sat watching television on beds exactly like this.

She barely feels it anymore, the sense that she is leaving one life behind and moving on to another.

It is easier to long for the next stage than to mourn the part that has just ended.

Her fingers stray to her phone. She slides her thumb against the screen and pulls up a picture she took on what would be her first and last date with Nic.

They had been waiting for their food to arrive, already with that gloss of tipsiness, a starriness on their faces, white-toothed grins.

She flicks her thumb again, and there she is with Gabby, a selfie on the dance floor.

A picture of Gabby perched in Calvin’s lap.

A group shot of the four of them that Calvin had cajoled a stranger into taking.

She exits her gallery and scrolls into her conversation with her aunt instead.

Her mother’s sister, Beverly, a woman that Josie has only met a handful of times since she first left the UK as a child.

It’s clear that Beverly regrets telling Josie that she could ask for help anytime in a stream of uncharacteristic emotion at Patricia’s funeral.

Her messages are filled with tense questions about how long Josie plans to stay for, warnings about how Beverly’s partner won’t put up with any press at their front door.

Josie promises not to be any trouble, says Beverly will hardly know she’s there.

Like always, Josie feels that she is apologizing for something that she cannot control, for being someone she is not.

Josie hopes she’ll only need to rely on her aunt for a few weeks. She wouldn’t have thought of her at all, if she wasn’t so desperate. But she needs to leave France if she has any shot of throwing the media off her scent.

She finds herself tapping back into the gallery.

Zooming in on the picture of her and Nic.

Something in his eyes sends an ache through her chest. She barely knows him, of course.

But god, she can imagine it. She wants so badly to let herself reach out toward him.

To lean into something that feels like it could be good for the first time in years.

Her phone buzzes in her hand. A message from Calvin.

We miss you already x

She won’t let herself cry. She can’t. It would be too much of a cliché, to spend the night sobbing in a shitty airport motel. It would be too depressing to bear.

Just out of curiosity, she tells herself, she opens up a browser, checks to see if there are any trains still running. There are two, if she goes quickly. Two choices. Two chances to change everything Josie thinks that she knows about herself.

Her thumb hovers over the screen.

If there is one thing that Josie thinks she is good at, it’s goodbyes.

Or, to be more precise, not saying goodbye.

Leaving people behind without a backward glance.

Letting each person, each place leave only the tiniest mark on her, an almost imperceptible dent in the fabric of her being rather than a great gouge.

But a slow chipping away of herself is still a hollowing, a lack of history. A numbness that Josie has let grow inside her for years.

Perhaps it’s time to start filling that hole.

She taps on the button to buy a ticket.

Perhaps, Josie thinks, perhaps she isn’t quite so good at goodbyes after all.

Josie takes a taxi from the train station, the road skimming the coast, the sea falling in and out of view, long shadows as the moon rises in the sky.

She does not have a plan, exactly. She understands, still, that she will have to leave eventually, back to England, or Paris, or some as-yet-undecided place. But she also has an impossible-to-resist feeling of something unresolved, an itch that she must scratch.

Josie is so used to leaving things broken behind her.

For once, she wants to put them back together.

She wants to see Nic, even if only one last time.

She wants to say goodbye. She wants to say sorry.

She wants to say that she wishes things could have been different, but knows that they can’t.

She wants to tell him that she’ll be back, but doesn’t know if she’d be telling the truth.

She wants to do the right thing.

The dive shop is closed by the time Josie arrives, the shutters pulled down, the lights turned out. Upstairs, one solitary window glows. Josie pulls out her phone. Types out a message.

Look outside x

When he comes to the window he’s smiling.

“I had a feeling you might come back,” he says.

“You want to go for a walk?”

“Yeah. Let’s go for a walk.”

They don’t talk until they reach the beach.

They take their shoes off once they get there and sit close to the water, their toes dug in the sand. The reflection of the moon is a shifting slice of silver, shimmering with the dark rise and fall of the waves, as though the sea is a living, breathing thing.

“You’re not leaving, then?” says Nic.

“Not yet.”

“At some point, though?”

“At some point, yeah. I just felt like there was unfinished business for me to figure out here first.”

“Is that what I am? Unfinished business?”

He says it lightly, like he’s joking, but Josie doesn’t miss the cut of his words, the hurt that hides behind them. She looks right at him then.

“Of course not,” she says. “That’s not what I mean. I…”

She pauses. She has already made her decision. And yet saying it out loud will solidify it. Make it real.

“I’m going to talk to the documentary makers again,” she says.

“You were right, what you said before. I’ve already given them the case file.

They’re going to be telling my story anyway.

People are going to be talking about me, whether I like it or not.

At least this way, I get a chance to control the narrative.

I get a chance to tell my side of the story. I doubt people will believe me, but…”

She breaks off. Takes a moment to gather herself again.

“When we talked about this before, I said that things would never change, unless Nina Drayton changed her story. And when I spoke to her—I think that she actually might be ready to do that. If I’m here, if I take part, I can make sure that she goes through with it.

I need to talk to her again. I need to speak to Nina Drayton, properly this time. ”

“And then you’re leaving?” Nic says.

“I like you, Nic,” she says. “If things were different…”

She shrugs. She can’t finish the sentence. If the case hadn’t gone viral again. If Josie hadn’t spent her late teens and a good chunk of her twenties in prison. If, all those years ago, Nina Drayton hadn’t pointed her finger at Josie and changed the entire trajectory of her life.

“The documentary is going to attract a lot of attention,” she says. “And even if Nina Drayton changes her story, there will still be a lot of people who don’t believe her. A lot of people who hate me.”

“But how can things be different, unless you change what you’re doing?” Nic asks.

“What do you mean?”

He picks up a stone and rolls it between his fingers.

“It just seems to me like this is what you always do. Didn’t you say that you’ve spent the last ten years feeling like you were running away?”

He pulls back his arm and throws the stone. It lands heavily against the water.

“How can you expect things to be different, if everything that you do is the same?”

“I didn’t mean…” she starts, and then trails off.

Because maybe this is exactly what she meant.

“What should I do differently then?”

He picks up another stone.

“Stay,” he says, simply. “Not just for a bit, while you’re sorting out unfinished business . Stay for good.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not? Gabby and Calvin want you here.”

“Just Gabby and Calvin?”

“You’re really going to make me say it?”

She tilts her head to one side. He groans, mock-defeated.

“Look, I don’t want to put pressure on you,” he says. “I wouldn’t ask you to stay just for me.”

He tosses the stone. This time it’s a perfect skim, the flat rock bouncing against the surface.

“But since you said it first,” he says. “I like you, too. I like you a lot.”

There’s a beat of stillness. Within it, Josie sees the last ten years of her life. All the different places and people. All the times she has left. All the times she’s gone looking for safety, and found only the ground giving way beneath her again.

Nic is right. Even change becomes monotonous, after a while. The same process of leaving, of starting over. The same worries, and regrets. The same hopes that get dashed again and again. Maybe it really is time for Josie to do things differently.

Her fingers graze Nic’s leg. She doesn’t think too much. She doesn’t wonder if this is the start of something, or the end.

He turns his head toward her, and she leans into him. Her mouth meets his.

It’s one of those rare moments where Josie Jackson feels as if she is exactly where she is supposed to be.

When Josie wakes the next morning, she is alone.

She must have fallen asleep without meaning to, Nic’s T-shirt twisted around her body, the smell of him on her skin.

The scent takes her back to last night. How they had come back to his flat and drank coffee on his sofa.

Talked for a long time. How, eventually, they had kissed again, slowly this time, his hand on the side of her face.

How Josie had wanted him in a way that felt large and complicated, and clean and focused all at once. The scale and simplicity of her desire.

They had taken their time undressing each other, uncovering each new contour of skin, hands tracing new curves and corners like explorers sketching out a map of new territories.

Nic had kissed her collarbone, her hip, the sharp indent between her throat and shoulder.

When he was inside her, he had intertwined one hand with hers and pressed it down hard against the mattress.

To Josie, it felt like they were drowning, submerged, clinging to each other as they reached for the surface.

In some ways, Josie feels as if she has been underwater since the day Tamara died. Now, she takes a deep breath, and is struck by the distinct sensation that she is back above air again.

She pulls on her jeans and opens the door to the living room. Nic is already at the stove, brewing coffee in a battered moka pot.

“Morning,” he says. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah.” She feels slightly dazed at how natural this feels.

“It’s a beautiful morning,” Nic says. “If you go and sit out on the balcony I’ll bring this out?”

“Actually,” Josie says. “There’s something I wanted to ask you first.”

“Ask away.”

It feels so easy, and yet Josie knows that now she must make things hard. She must make things hard, so that she can make them better again.

“You said last night that Hannah’s back,” she says.

She sees him stiffen. She has to go on.

“Can you talk to her for me?” she says. “Can you ask if she’ll see me?”

“I don’t know—”

“Please,” she says. “It’s important. To me, and probably to her as well.”

On the stove, the moka pot starts to gurgle. Nic doesn’t move to take it off the heat. Instead, he straightens, then nods.

“OK. I’ll see if she’ll talk.”