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Elin

Parque Nacional, Portugal, October 2021

‘I fucked up, Elin. I wasn’t there for her because I was absorbed in a bloody wedding. I had to hear everything she was going through from a friend. You know, just before the wedding, Kier tried to tell me something was wrong, and I brushed her away.’ Steed’s eyes are glassy as they roam her face, seeking a reaction. ‘I’d had enough. All I wanted was to get married. For all of us, Kier too, to enjoy it—’

He keeps talking, as if he can explain his way out of it, thinking they can have some kind of rational conversation, completely unaware of the devastation he’s wreaked.

Elin listens, unmoved. How can he tell her that his guilt was a reason to put her through what he had?

‘Enough,’ she interrupts, unable to listen to any more. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘I’m trying to explain. I made a mistake. A stupid fucking mistake, and I want to say sorry.’ Steed reaches out a hand as if to try to touch her. ‘These past few months, I’ve been seeing a therapist, and she’s made me understand that the messages I sent to you were a way of me projecting. Projecting my guilt onto you instead of processing it, even when I knew you weren’t what I thought you were.’

Turning her face away, she motions for him to stop coming closer. ‘Don’t.’

‘Elin, please. I’m still me. We’re still friends.’

‘No, we’re not.’ She looks back at him, balling her hand into a fist to stop it from shaking. ‘ Friends don’t do what you’ve done to me this past year. All these apologies, this realisation you’ve come to about why you did what you did, doesn’t make any difference. Did you honestly think bringing me here, telling me this, that I’d want to help you? I don’t want you anywhere near me.’

‘I get it.’ Steed looks at her helplessly, his eyes now red-rimmed and swollen. ‘Part of me knew that in telling you, that you’d probably walk away, but it was my last throw of the dice. Kier—’ his voice breaks at the word, ‘she’s all I’ve got. I had nowhere else to turn. You’re the only person I can trust.’

His emotions are too much against the clamouring of thoughts inside her own head. Not only processing what he’s telling her, but the motivation behind it.

Is he telling her the truth or is he trying to manipulate her? What if deep down he does still blame her for Kier’s disappearance? How will that play out?

He’s clearly unstable, not in his right mind. She’s got no idea what he’s capable of.

‘You need to go,’ she says. ‘Please. Just go.’

Elin watches him gather up his bag in silence, frozen in position. Although everything about him is familiar: every gesture, every microexpression, it feels like she’s looking at someone completely alien. A stranger.

The door clicks as he closes it behind him, but she doesn’t move until she hears the sound of his footsteps on the decking growing fainter before fading away entirely.

Elin gives it another minute and then peers through the window .

He’s gone, but the fog is back, blowing a filmy gauze over the familiar vista.

Pressing a hand to the door to make sure it’s fully closed, she locks it and turns around. She slides to the ground, her back against the door, and sits hard against it, pulling her legs up to her chest. Adrenaline fading away, her body doesn’t quite feel like her own. She’s cold, shaky.

Elin sits for a while, trying to absorb everything that’s happened, let her mind settle, but it doesn’t happen.

Part of her had believed it would be better with Steed gone, but it’s worse.

Without his sheer physical presence, the shock of him being there in her space, the thoughts that had simply been flitting through her head now come fully formed, crashing in all at once.

How could she not have realised?

How could she have got it so wrong?

Elin pushes her fingers to her temples.

The narrow space is only emphasising the claustrophobic feeling inside her head, the weight of her own thoughts coming in on her.

Out , she thinks.

She needs to get out of the van.