Page 65 of High Season
FIFTY-TWO
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AFTER THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
Twenty-one years after her sister died, Nina opens up the newspaper to see her own face smiling back at her.
The article is a double-page spread. N EW DOCUMENTARY EXPLORES A DECADES-OLD TRUE CRIME CASE THAT HAS KEPT PEOPLE GRIPPED FOR TWENTY-ONE YEARS. A picture of Nina, her face split in two by the page crease so that it looks slightly contorted.
Nina folds the paper without reading it.
She doesn’t need to. She already knows what it will say.
She knows that it will tell the story of her sister’s death—only now, the story of Tamara Drayton will be threaded through with another story, one of twenty years of deceit.
A story of how Blake and Evelyn lied to everyone, including Nina, about how Tamara died, and why.
Nina has spent the best part of this year coming to terms with the fact that her mother and brother kept her quiet and sedated for the years after Tamara’s death, making her believe that there was something not quite right with her.
Now she understands that her childhood tendency toward anxiety and worry was something deeper and darker—a reliance on pills that would excuse any inconsistencies in her story, and repress any compulsion that Nina might have to question their version of the truth.
The article will of course mention the reopened investigation, fueled by Hannah Bailey’s testimony against Blake and Evelyn, and the overturning of Josie’s conviction.
A new trial presenting evidence that’s now twenty years old, and an expert who, after all this time, ruled Nina’s story to be unreliable.
The cracks that this sent through Nina’s life splintered all the things that had once held her life together.
Ryan had balked at Nina’s new position in the spotlight, said that it wasn’t good for him and his business to be associated with her, a conversation that had ended their relationship with stunning swiftness and simplicity.
Gone was the beautiful, modern apartment where she had imagined their life unfolding; gone, too, was the pretense of perfection, a need for Nina to be someone that she was not.
Last to fall: the pink house, which had sold to developers a few months back.
Nina heard they were planning to tear the whole thing down, replace it with a sleek, white hotel with three pools.
This, she couldn’t help but feel, was probably a good thing.
Because the thing was: each splinter, each crack that ran through the center of her life, had opened up space for something new.
Nina had been surprised by the kindness that she had been shown.
The brilliant light that broke through the darkest days.
The job that had been patient with Nina and given her a later start date told her that she should take as much time as she needed.
Claire, who had offered a place to stay as soon as she answered the phone to a sobbing Nina on the day that Ryan broke up with her.
The dozens of people who messaged her, wrote letters, commented on her newly public social media profile.
You’ve been so brave.
I can’t believe what you’ve been through.
Your sister would have been so proud of you.
Most of all, it opened up space for Nina to understand herself—or at least, the version of herself she used to be.
The person that she had spent a lifetime trying to escape through pills, and exercise, and rituals that she couldn’t explain or justify.
The person who had spent years buried in study, trying to understand what had happened to her, when all along the truth had been there.
Not within essays, and theories, but in the stories of the people who Nina had never thought to ask.
So, instead of reading the story, Nina gets dressed and leaves her flat.
It is a beautiful summer’s day, the kind where the light is egg-yolk yellow and hopeful, even first thing in the morning.
She goes to the small florist a couple of streets away from her and buys an armful of tulips, flowers that she now knows were her sister’s favorites.
Another part of the last year, for her, has been discovering these small things about her sister, snippets gathered from the people who knew and loved her.
Learning about Tamara—the real Tamara. A person whose life was, for so long, overshadowed by the story of her death.
Nina is determined to change that. From now on, she wants to make today, the anniversary of her sister’s death, about her life.
There is just one thing she has to do first.
Josie takes a taxi to Nina’s flat, threading through the streets of South London. She leans her head against the car window and closes her eyes.
She almost said no when Nina had invited her over. She has been in London for four weeks, and the city is beginning to wear against her, the excitement fading, exhaustion seeping through to her bones.
I wanted to mark the day somehow , Nina had written in a text. Please say yes x
Twenty-one years since Tamara’s death, and one year since Josie’s life changed all over again. One year since they were all able to move on at last.
“Do you mind?” she had asked Nic, showing him the text message from Nina.
“Of course not,” he said. “It feels right, in a way. Marking the anniversary. Why not do it with Nina?”
Josie replied: Just tell us where and when. We’ll be there x
Now, Josie walks the two flights of steps up to Nina’s attic flat. As it always does, the impossibility of the situation strikes her: she and Nina Drayton, friends.
“You made it!”
Claire opens the door to Nina’s flat, beaming.
“Calvin and Gabby are on their way,” Josie says. “Their flight was late landing.”
“No problem at all.” Nina is a few feet behind Claire brandishing a serving spoon, pink with the heat from the kitchen. “Help yourself to drinks. Whatever you like. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”
She dashes back into the small galley kitchen at the back of the flat. She looks at home here, even though she only moved in a few months ago. She told Josie that it was the first place she had chosen for herself. Not a place passed down through family, or already owned by a boyfriend. Hers.
“Of course, it’s a whole lot smaller than I’m used to, and in a neighborhood that estate agents like to call up-and-coming, ” she had said over congratulatory gin and tonics at a nearby pub. “But I like it. And I can afford it myself. And that stuff matters, doesn’t it?”
And Josie had agreed that it did.
Josie and Nic make their way to an ancient-looking drinks trolley stacked with liqueurs and spirits that haven’t been fashionable since the eighties and help themselves to two glasses and the remains of an already-open bottle of wine.
In a vase on the side, Josie sees a clutch of tulips and smiles.
Unthinkingly, her hand strays to her throat.
The necklace that she has worn every day since her release from prison.
J T engraved on a silver heart. A small, perfect tulip.
She and Nic clink their glasses.
“To you,” Nic says.
Josie smiles.
“To both of us,” she says. “Thanks for coming over here, when it’s peak season.”
Nic shrugs.
“There’s always another summer,” he says.
Josie squeezes his hand. She loves him. She loves the simplicity of that belief: always another summer. It’s something she has never quite allowed herself to believe before. She thinks she would like to now.
They said that they were going to take things slowly at first, she and Nic.
Their relationship, if that was what they were going to call it, had been so fast at the beginning, and they wanted to give dating a try.
A normal relationship, another thing that Josie had never really managed before.
But after a few months of spending a couple of nights a week with Nic and living out of a backpack, Calvin had asked Josie how she’d feel about selling their childhood home.
“Me and Gabby want to move in together,” he had said over mugs of tea at the kitchen table. “And… well. I don’t want us to move in together here. It feels like a bad omen, this place. Too many…”
He trailed off, and Josie nodded. She understood exactly what he meant. Too many memories. Too many ghosts. Too many heartbreaks, and wrong turns, and losses.
They contacted an estate agent that afternoon.
Calvin used the money from the sale to buy a flat close to the beach.
“Do you think you might buy somewhere?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Josie said. “I actually had something else I was thinking of doing with the money.”
It was an idea she had back when the truth about Blake Drayton came out.
For Josie, the news elicited an outpouring of sympathy.
Letters from people who claimed to have always known she was innocent.
Emails from around the world. But it also sparked messages from dozens of people, too many to count, who would tell Josie over and over again that their loved one had also been wrongfully convicted of a crime that they did not commit.
Sketchy evidence, the wrong place at the wrong time.
Victims of decades of domestic violence who had finally snapped.
People who had been judged on their sexuality, or their race, or their past wrongdoings, rather than the facts of the case.
Women who were released after a wrongful conviction was overturned only to come back to nothing—long-forgotten by their now grown-up children, abandoned by past partners.
Having to start over, after the justice system spat them out.
That was when Josie knew what she wanted to do with her life. She would start a charity providing legal aid for wrongful conviction appeals, and support for people once they were released. She would help the kind of person that she had once been.
She registered the charity the day the money from the house sale landed in her account.