Page 75 of High Season

“And after last night,” she continues. “Well, you said it yourself. Time to move on. To stop living in the past.”

She smiles a wavering, hopeful smile.

“It’s time, Nina,” she says. “I’m moving on. And you should, too. This is going to be our last summer at the pink house. So let’s not let all of these silly rumors ruin it.”

Their last summer at the pink house.

There will be no more nights beneath the bougainvillea. No more birthday parties.

No more avoiding the place where Tamara was pulled out of the water.

But all Nina hears, all she understands, is that there will be no more opportunities to put things right.

That this is, perhaps, her last chance to find out the truth.

TWENTY-FOUR

2024

Josie has left an entire afternoon free to pack.

She opens up the suitcase that she arrived here with, not even put away yet, and begins to fold T-shirts and ball up socks. Quickly the stretch of time starts to feel ridiculous. An entire afternoon to pack up the few scraps of her life she brought with her. She has only been here for a week. She has almost nothing to show for it.

Gabby knocks on her door just as Josie is searching for a bracelet that she kept, back from that brief period of living in Devon. Her boyfriend back then, the first man she had loved, had given it to her for her birthday just six days before he had found out the truth. It surprises Josie now, how little she remembers about that period, one of the few lengths of time that she recalls being truly happy. Only a few small, snatched memories. Cups of tea on the sofa on rainy days. The small, unexpected joy of eating dinner together in front of the television every night.

“Need any help?” Gabby asks.

Josie shakes her head.

“There’s not much left for me to do.”

Gabby hovers in the doorframe.

“Need some company?”

Josie’s hand catches against the bracelet, its thin gold threads entangled around a pair of tights. How long until this week becomes a vague and faded memory? How quickly will it melt into the patchwork of Josie’s life, a tangle of places and people that she can’t quite remember? Cheap costume jewelry that she can’t bring herself to get rid of, even when the gold fades to a gray tarnish. Phone numbers that she never has any need to call anymore. The specific smell of someone whose face she can no longer remember.

“Yeah,” she says. “I could use some company.”

Gabby shuts the door behind her and slides over to the suitcase. She ignores Josie’s refusal of her help and picks up a T-shirt, beginning to fold it into a neat, compact square.

“Where are you going to go?” she asks.

Josie frees the bracelet and drops it on top of the pile of clothes.

“Kent, at first,” she says. “I can stay with my mum’s sister for a couple of weeks. Just while I’m figuring things out.”

“And then where?” asks Gabby.

“I don’t know.”

The words fall heavily between them, a rock sinking toward an ocean floor. Josie can’t bear to think about what she’ll do after her aunt’s hospitality runs out. She only knows that she can’t stay here. Not with reporters showing up at Calvin’s door. Not with the worry that they’ll be at Nic’s flat next, or at Gabby’s café.

“You could just stay, you know,” Gabby says. “Calvin’s devastated that you’re leaving. We both are.”

Josie is already shaking her head.

“Everyone knows where I am now,” she says. “Nobody wants me here.”