Page 43 of High Season

THIRTY-TWO

When Nina crawls out of bed late on Wednesday morning, she finds the house empty.

She has slept for the first time in days, and she feels like she is crawling out of a months-long hibernation. Her body feels heavy, her brain fogged. She still feels exhausted, in a way that is bone-deep. She wants to close her eyes again. She wants to sleep until everything fades away.

She checks her phone to see a message from Claire.

Hey, everything OK with you? Ryan called me. He says he’s worried about you. And have you seriously missed the first week of your new job?!

Nina responds lying flat on her back, phone held above her face.

I have so much to fill you in on. But I’m OK. Just need to stay here a bit longer to figure some stuff out x

She doesn’t tell her that her new boss has asked her to come to a meeting on Monday morning to discuss the terms of her contract, or that she and Ryan have barely spoken over the last few days.

She doesn’t tell her that she suspects that—at last—Ryan has seen her for what she is, someone who is flawed, and imperfect.

Not the disciplined person that she has tried so hard to be—someone who has her life to gether, her career planned, her sister’s death pushed to the back of her mind.

That she is broken. Unfixable. She doesn’t tell her that, since the interview, she has spent hours on social media and in backwater internet blogs, reading everything that people have thought and said about Tamara’s death.

Getting pulled into a world that is entirely different from the one she remembers.

The one that she has imagined, for all these years.

She has been unable to stop thinking about what Katherine said to her back in the documentary breakroom.

She has asked herself the same question that Katherine posed to her over and over again.

After all, who—or what—does Nina trust? The gut instinct that tells her that she was wrong?

Or the little girl who said she was telling the truth?

Two versions of Nina, both buried somewhere inside her, both impossible to fully access.

A summer’s day. A story told by a five-year-old child.

A story that, for two decades, has defined all their lives.

Evelyn has gone into Montpellier to visit friends, so Nina fires off a text to Blake, asking him where he is.

She finds Ryan’s contact, and taps the green call button.

His phone goes straight to voicemail. He’ll be at work, of course, but the silence still bothers her.

It makes her consider, briefly, how Ryan will react, when he sees the video footage she filmed two days ago.

How he’s often said how stupid he finds people who put their life up for public consumption, how they deserve all the ridicule they get.

She presses down the thought before it can fully form. Like her job, her life in London feels far away now, another world entirely. She has something much more important to do here.

She dresses in leggings and a creased T-shirt and walks to the back of the house, through the garden with its sweeping sea view.

She paces across grass scorched brown by sun, deadened by years of Evelyn being unable to afford to pay a gardener.

She finds herself drifting all the way to the spine of steps that Josie said she had walked down all those years ago, looking for her during the exact window of time in which Tamara drowned.

Nina descends the stone staircase slowly.

The path is overgrown, vines splintering the steps.

She hasn’t been down here in years. Perhaps none of her family has.

Not for the first time, the ridiculous excess of everything they own hits Nina with a scald of shame.

An entire private beach they never use. A house that could fit the Jackson family home into one of its rooms.

When Nina reaches the beach, she finds a large, flat rock and sits, watching as the waves pull in and then out again, crashing close and pulling away.

It’s peaceful down here. Quiet. She closes her eyes and imagines that this is the last moment of her life, before everything changes.

As she heads back up to the house, Nina sets a timer on her phone.

She walks quickly, imagining that she is searching for someone.

That she has left a child alone, one she is meant to be looking after.

It takes her eight and a half minutes. Long enough to be missed.

Long enough for something terrible to happen to someone.

It feels like proof, somehow, but not proof enough.

No one has ever said that Josie couldn’t have made it down to the beach and back in the missing window of time, only that she might not have done.

As an alibi, it was weak: there were no witnesses to back it up.

The only person who could corroborate that Josie Jackson might have been looking for a small child who had wandered off was the same person who said that Josie Jackson was a murderer.

Nina is out of breath by the time she gets to the terrace. She jumps when she hears a clatter coming from above, a crash against a tiled floor. She makes her way quickly through the house, across the kitchen and the hall, up the stairs and down the corridor to her mother’s room.

The door is ajar. Through it, Nina sees a handful of clothes fly through the air and bounce down on the bed, followed by the unmistakable sound of her brother swearing loudly. She pushes against the door.

“Blake?”

Her brother is arm-deep in her mother’s chest of drawers, red faced, the skin above the open neck of his polo shirt shiny with sweat. He doesn’t look up at her.

“Where have you been?” Nina says. “I messaged you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sis,” he says, still not meeting her eye. “I went into town to talk to a solicitor. You’ve heard Mum wants to sell the house? It’s completely absurd. This is meant to be our house one day. She can’t just sell our legacy like that—”

He pauses, mid-rant, to hold up a leather-bound folder that he’s unearthed, a pair of tights still hanging from it like an elaborate talisman.

“Aha!” he says.

He flips it open and lets out a small huff of dismay.

“ Wedding photos?” he says. “And for Harry, too. Surprised she had time to get the film developed before she ditched him.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Granddad’s will, Nina. Of course, Mum hasn’t kept it in the bloody study, where you’d expect, and the solicitor says that we need a copy of it if—”

He breaks off, looking up at his sister, still standing in the doorway, for the first time.

“I heard that Ryan skedaddled?” he says.

“He didn’t skeddadle ,” Nina says. “We were planning to go back on Sunday. He has work.”

“We’ll see,” Blake says. He straightens, returning the wedding album to the drawer. “Sorts the men out from the boys, our family. Some people can’t hack it.”

“Can’t hack what?”

“Being a Drayton,” he says, as if it’s obvious. “People are interested in us, until they get on the inside. Then most people realize they aren’t cut out for it. The attention. The gossip. Looks to me like Ryan got out at the first sign of trouble.”

Nina doesn’t answer him. Blake pulls open another drawer.

“Maybe it’s back in London,” he says, distracted again. “Although I’m sure he had his will done here. The solicitors closed down years ago, unfortunately—”

“Blake,” Nina says, interrupting him. “I went to see Josie Jackson the other day.”

He stops still. His face furrows, as if reaching for a thought.

“Nina,” he says, and there’s a note of warning in his voice.

“She’s back,” Nina says in a rush. “And she didn’t want to talk to me, at first. But now, she’s decided that she wants to, and I’m going to meet up with her today, and I thought maybe you might want to…”

“Jesus, Nina.” Blake shuts the drawer, hard. “What did I tell you about leaving this stuff alone? Haven’t you got into enough trouble already?”

Nina’s mouth slides shut.

“Next thing you’ll be telling me is you want to do this bloody documentary,” Blake continues.

“Actually—”

He looks up at her, his face aghast.

“I went and did a preliminary interview,” she says. “On Monday, when I told you that I was going shopping in Montpellier.”

“For god’s sake.”

He sits down heavily on the bed, lowers his head to his hands.

“What did I tell you,” he says, thickly, his words muffled, “about talking to those people?”

“You said it was my decision!”

“Your decision affects all of us, Nina.”

He straightens. His face is flushed and livid in a way that Nina doesn’t recognize.

“She was my twin sister, Nina,” he says. “She was my best friend. I knew her better than anyone. Don’t I have a right to say who gets to talk about her? Don’t I get a say in that?”

For a moment, he doesn’t look like Nina’s bold, brash brother who always drinks a bit too much wine, always makes people laugh, always has everyone wrapped around his finger, always seems at ease. He seems crumpled. Broken.

Nina thinks then of all the other things that she doesn’t remember. Not just the night that her sister died, but the aftermath. The devastation that swept through this house. The long, slow process of putting lives back together.

But then, she thinks of her own life, spooling out in front of her. All the years that she has carried the guilt of sending someone to prison. How she knows, from experience, that over time this guilt will only get larger and larger until it consumes her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I have to do this, Blake. It’s my life, too.”

There’s a silence. It stretches out for slightly too long. Makes Nina itch.

“Nina,” Blake says, at last. “I know that this documentary has resurfaced a lot of… a lot of trauma for you. For all of us. But you’re getting obsessed.”

“I’m not—”

He holds up one hand.

“Please. Let me finish.”

Nina closes her mouth.

“You’re not yourself,” he says. “You seem… well, frankly, Nina, you seem a bit unhinged.”

She almost laughs. She’s the one who’s a psychologist. She’s the one who knows about these things.

And yet, she recognizes the look of genuine concern on his face.

Her brother, who knows her better than almost anyone.

Who cares about her, more than almost anyone.

Who has always been there, always loved her unconditionally, as if all the love that he used to have for Tamara needed somewhere to go and settled on Nina.

She thinks, then, of the video posted of her at her mother’s birthday party. How even she saw how unstable she had looked. How Ryan had looked at her before she left, as if she was becoming somebody else right in front of him.

“Maybe we should think about getting you to see someone,” Blake is saying.

He tilts his head to one side, sympathy leeching out of him.

“A doctor, or something? Just someone you can talk to about things, before you make any big decisions? Have you been taking your medication?”

She shakes her head, mutely.

“I came off medication last year, you know that—”

“Well, then!” he says, as if that decides it. “I really don’t think you should be making these kinds of big decisions in your current state of mind.”

“I don’t have a current state of mind,” Nina is saying. “Not like that, anyway. I’m fine.”

But she sounds less certain this time. The creep of something in the back of her throat.

Blake takes her hand. Guides her to sit next to him.

“Neens, when everyone you know and love is worried about you, it’s probably time to listen,” he says evenly.

“Just don’t go and see Josie Jackson today, OK?

You can rearrange for another time. Maybe a bit further down the line.

When you’ve had a chance to speak to someone about everything that’s going on with you.

You’re making a huge decision here. You don’t need to rush into it. ”

“I—”

“And I’ll call your doctor. The one you used to see when you were a kid?

I’ll speak to the documentary makers, too.

Tell them you weren’t in your right frame of mind when you spoke to them.

I’ll tell them about the medication. They won’t be able to use anything you said, if there’s any doubt about your mental health.

And I can speak to your work, too, tell them what’s going on. They, of all people, will understand…”

“You’re talking to me like you think I’m crazy,” says Nina.

Her voice wavers on that last word.

Blake knows. He knows that this has always been her worst fear, ever since she was small. Ever since their mother first took her to a psychiatrist. Since the diagnoses began. The anxiety, and the obsessive behavior, and the need for control. Ever since she was first put on medication.

But she can’t deny it—she has been different lately. She knows this. And she is not sure if she is in control anymore.

“Of course you’re not crazy,” Blake says. “You just need support, Nina. You always have. That’s why you have to listen to the people who care about you. The last thing you need to be doing right now is talking to Josie Jackson.”

He squeezes her hand. His eyes look so loving, so concerned. For a moment, Nina sees the picture of Tamara that she’s seen so many times before. Their eyes, she realizes, are still identical. It is like looking into the eyes of a dead girl.

When Nina finds herself nodding, there’s a relief to it. All the stress and the anxiety of the last week taken out of her hands. Allowing someone else to make the decision for her.

“OK,” she says, and she sees his shoulders release. “I won’t see her today. But Blake? I still want to see her. I can’t just leave this.”

“Sure,” he says, soothing. “We’ll figure it all out, Nina. You don’t have to worry about a thing.”