Page 63 of High Season

FIFTY

Blake is silent now, as Hannah forces herself to hold his gaze. As if he, too, is remembering. As if he, too, is seeing that night, as if hours have passed instead of years.

“You told me that you would stay quiet for me, because you loved me,” Hannah says again. “But really, I was staying quiet for you.”

“Hannah,” Blake says. “You hurt Tamara. She fell. She tripped, because of an injury you inflicted. I stayed quiet to protect you .”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” says Hannah. “It never did. Why would you protect me? If you really thought it was my fault that Tamara was dead, why would you protect me?”

Blake is standing, slowly now.

“For years, I thought you protected me because you loved me,” Hannah says quietly.

“It’s what I wanted to believe—you counted on me wanting to believe it.

But you didn’t care about me. You only invited me to the party so that you could drug me, and…

and… take those pictures. In fact, I think you planned to do it the night you came to my parents’ place, only I didn’t want anything to drink.

Which is when you realized it would have to happen at your mother’s birthday. ”

She can see that his fists are clenched. His jaw is set, hard. Behind his feigned nonchalance, Blake is afraid.

“You didn’t protect me, because there was nothing to protect,” Han nah continues. “The only person you were protecting was yourself. Because Tamara didn’t trip, did she? She was pushed.”

Blake doesn’t speak. A muscle twitches in his jaw.

“I never understood why I woke up in Tamara’s room,” Hannah continues.

“Why you wouldn’t have put me to bed in your room, or even Evelyn’s.

It only makes sense if Tamara put me to bed.

If Tamara knew that my drink had been spiked.

If she knew about the photographs. And you couldn’t risk anyone knowing what you’d done to me.

You couldn’t risk your reputation being ruined. ”

She knows from his silence that she is right. His quiet bolsters her, and her voice grows stronger.

“You wanted to make sure I didn’t tell anyone what I saw,” Hannah continues.

“So you let me believe it was my fault. You tried to scare me into lying about being at the party. You thought that the police might believe it was an accident. There were no witnesses. And Tamara was drunk, and high. You counted on the police thinking she’d fallen into the pool, and that you would get away with it. ”

“Hannah, I’m warning you…”

“But the police started looking at you anyway, didn’t they? They knew, right from the start, that it wasn’t an accident. They took your phone. They started poking around the house, on the terrace. And you panicked.”

She takes a deep breath. She can’t believe how, after all these years of feeling off, of feeling wrong, the events of that night have only now begun to make sense.

“And, conveniently, that’s when Nina mentions that she saw Josie and Tamara in the pool together.

You knew right away that she wasn’t talking about the night that Tamara died.

But you needed something to distract the police.

Another scapegoat, because you couldn’t actually use me, could you?

You couldn’t tell the police that I’d been at the party, and that I’d fought with Tamara, because then they’d question me, and I’d tell them about seeing you on the terrace. ”

He is still now. Completely focused on her. No longer smiling. This is how she knows that finally, finally, twenty years too late, she has hit on the truth.

“Was it you who coached Nina to tell everyone what she’d seen?

” she asks. “At the very least, you must have confused her? Made her change her story just slightly? Or was it your mother, when Harrison got taken into questioning? Were you pissed off that your mother was willing to protect Harrison but not you? Was it her idea to throw Josie under the bus, or yours?”

“I wouldn’t sound so smug if I were you,” Blake says, his voice sudden and sharp. “You were happy to drop your best friend in it, after all. I didn’t hear you speak out when Josie got arrested.”

“I was scared,” Hannah says, though it’s the truth she has been evading for years. “I thought that I was responsible for Tamara’s death. I thought I’d go to prison for it. And you were making sure I said what you wanted me to. You were completely in control of me by then.”

Her voice trembles as she says this.

She is thinking of those days, after Josie was arrested.

How she and Blake had met, late at night, when nobody would be watching.

How he had told her how much he loved her.

That he had already lost his sister, and he couldn’t stand the thought of losing Hannah, too.

Hannah had taken his twin away from him, but now you’re the only good thing left, he had said.

Tamara wouldn’t want me to lose you, too.

Then, there were the times when he was less kind to her, less gentle.

When they would have sex in a way that left bruises on her skin, a pain between her legs.

The memory of his hands on her throat. Afterward, he would remind her that she had better not go to the police, because if she did, he would destroy her.

When she was at home in bed alone, trying to stop the tears from coming, Hannah told herself that she deserved this. Blake’s anger was justified: she had caused Tamara’s death, and this was her punishment.

After she and Blake had parted in that dark corridor, Hannah had been unable to leave the pink house via the gate that led directly past the stone steps at the side of the property.

Already, people had been filtering outside—toward Nina’s sobs, and the pool where Tamara was floating, oxygen-starved now, clinging on to the very last scraps of her life.

The only other exit that remained connected to the servants’ tunnels was the garage.

She was panicking by then, not thinking straight, her hands shaking as she unhooked Harrison’s car keys and clambered into the vehicle.

She couldn’t think far enough ahead to wonder what she would do with the car once outside the house.

All that seemed important was getting away.

Leaving the pink house behind her as fast as possible.

As soon as she pulled out of the driveway, she knew it was a mistake.

She had no plan for what she would do with the car, no idea where she would take it.

And besides, she was too drunk to drive.

She could feel the way the steering wheel slipped, the car swaying even as she maneuvered it out of sight of the house.

She had abandoned the car halfway down the hill, tossed the key in the undergrowth.

When she was called to her first police interview, she was sure that they had found her fingerprints in the car, or that someone had seen her driving.

In hindsight, it was a foolishly attention-attracting way to leave the scene of a crime.

She had no idea that Josie had already been arrested that morning, and the interview confused her.

So much of it had been about Josie—what her role would have been at the party, her relationship with the Draytons.

When the police had asked her, right at the end of their questioning, if Hannah herself had been at the party, she just shook her head.

She said that she had been at home, working on her Oxford application, and had gone to bed early.

As Evelyn Drayton could confirm, there was no reason for her to have been invited to the party.

By the time the second interview came around, it was too late for Hannah to go back on her story.

She was a side character by then, someone to support the vague motives that the police had been toying with, to back up all the things people were saying about Josie.

Josie had been obsessed with Tamara Drayton, everyone said so.

Olivia and Chrissie told the police what Tamara had said to them the night of the bonfire.

They described Josie as intense, strange; they claimed that just a few days before Tamara’s death, Josie had tried to kiss her.

They hadn’t known the details, but it hadn’t mattered.

It was a motive: romantic rejection. And it fit with Nina’s story.

The police wanted to know about Hannah’s relationship with Josie.

Was it true that they were unnaturally close?

There was a rumor they had practiced love bites on each other, turning up to class with the skin of their forearms puckered with pale violet bruises.

On the side of Josie’s Converse, the shoes that she was wearing when she was arrested, there was a small inked heart with the letter H in the center of it.

Had Josie once had a crush on Hannah? And, more important, could she have moved on to someone else? Was Josie in love with Tamara Drayton?

And Hannah had found herself shrugging. Saying yes. Maybe. She didn’t know.

By omitting the truth, she was embroiled in an unimaginable lie.

Hannah’s mum had sent her to stay with Nic and his mother after that.

There were swarms of reporters all over the place, people peering through the window of the dive shop and forcing them to close before the end of summer.

It was better for Hannah to be away from it all, they said.

Somewhere the specter of Tamara Drayton wouldn’t hang over everything.

But when the end of summer arrived, the blaze of August fading into the soft heat of September and then a damp, cool October, Hannah had not returned. She had stayed with her aunt, spending most of her days indoors, playing video games with Nic and avoiding the news.

Over time, the text messages from Blake had thinned.

Hannah would call him, surreptitiously, buried beneath her bedsheets late at night, only for the phone to ring out to nothingness.

She heard that they had left the pink house, gone back to England.

She imagined him in London, barely thinking about her at all.

Hannah had missed three months of school by the time she returned home. The Oxford application deadline had come and gone. Her teachers had tried to be understanding, promising she could catch up. There were other universities, after all. Oxford wasn’t everything.

Hannah hadn’t listened. She didn’t care where she went anymore, as long as it was somewhere else.

As long as she was far away from home. When she was accepted by Manchester, she had been inordinately, impossibly grateful, even though she had never been to the city before, could barely imagine living there.

All that mattered was the promise of a fresh start.

A place where people wouldn’t know who she was.

Where she could try to forget all about Blake and Tamara Drayton.

Her parents had been unsure, still talking in concerned tones about the cost of university.

That was until a letter had arrived. A check from Evelyn Drayton.

Hannah showed it to her parents, who had been astounded, unable to fathom that Evelyn Drayton would want to do something to help them.

Hannah had spun a lie about how she had been giving Tamara some tutoring when she had been at the pink house.

That the money was probably a thank-you for all that Hannah had done.

What she did not show her parents was the note that came with the check. Handwritten. Blake tells me you’ve always wanted to study. Maybe it would be good for you to be away from here.

What she did not tell them was how clearly she understood this message.

How a desperate feeling of unease had overtaken her when she read it.

This, she understood, was hush money. It was a payment for Hannah’s silence.

And if Evelyn Drayton wanted Hannah to stay silent, there was something more to Tamara’s death, something that she had not—at least at first—understood.

Since then, Hannah had tried to press down the ache of worry. She had tried not to think about Blake. Tried not to think about what it would mean if she had lied for him, unwittingly protected him.

But when Imogen showed her those pictures, she could not ignore it anymore.

Now, she stands in front of the man who changed the course of Hannah’s life completely.

“I can’t do this anymore, Blake,” Hannah says. “I can’t keep lying.”

Blake lets out a sharp, hard laugh.

“You’ve been happy enough to lie for the last twenty years, haven’t you?” he says. “What’s changed now?”

“Everything,” she says.

She thinks of Josie. The years her best friend lost. The guilt that has festered inside Hannah for decades, growing too big, too consuming to ignore.

When her son was born, Hannah had been scared of what he might become.

But when she watched her daughter, she was scared of something else. The things that she might say yes to, even when she didn’t want to. The lies she might believe. The lies she might be forced to tell.

She stands up slightly straighter.

“We let an innocent person go to prison,” she says. “ I let an innocent person go to prison, because I was young, and I was stupid, and I was scared. But I’m not scared anymore. I’m not scared of you.”

Blake takes a step closer.

“Don’t you get it, Hannah?” he says. “ You’ll go to prison. We both will. And for what? Josie Jackson’s already done the time. Why should we put ourselves through that? What for?”

“Because,” she says.

Because she’s imagined a life where she lives this lie for the next twenty years, and the next. As it gets bigger and bigger, until there’s no space left inside her.

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” she says. “And because Josie never left prison. Not really. She won’t be free of it until we tell everyone what really happened.”

“It’s over for us,” Blake says. “For both of us, if you go to the police.”

Hannah has considered this. She has considered the consequences. And yet, her decision is made.

“It’s already over.”

That’s when Blake takes another step toward her. That’s when Hannah sees the flash of desperation in his eyes.

That’s when he pushes her against the wall of the pink house.

That’s when Blake grabs hold of her throat.