Page 72 of The Resort

We stand there on her doorway, where I find myself unable to move. I fall to the floor, my knees skinning on the cement of her doorstep, and she stays with me, rubbing my back in the motherly way she does. Between the sobs, I try to tell her everything. The story falls out in jagged, incoherent chunks, jumbled by the mess of my mind and the sound of the rain pelting furiously around us.

“I’ve ruined everything. I think I may have killed Lucy. And Logan’s gone…”

My explanation devolves into incomprehensible sobs, but Greta doesn’t seem to mind. Nor does she appear turned off by my confession as I feared.

“Shh, shh,” she mumbles, her hand never straying from my back. “Come on, love. Let’s get you inside. Then we’ll figure out what exactly to do about this mess.”

Greta helps me into her apartment, a small one-bedroom located a few blocks over from Frangipani. I lean against her, my breath coming in ragged peals, and allow her weight to support me.

When we’re inside, she grabs me a towel, ushering me into a chair. She’s already lit candles to combat the power outage and has placed them around the living room, casting the apartment in a soft glow.

“Wait here one second.”

Greta disappears briefly into the adjacent kitchen, returning with a cold glass of water, which she places tentatively in my trembling hands.

“You sip on that,” she orders. “I’m going to grab some dry clothes so we can get you out of these soaking wet things.”

She’s gone again, this time disappearing down the hallway back to her bedroom.

I sit and look around at the familiar living room. Every time I’ve been here, the apartment has always been tidy and organized, but it seems like in the last few weeks—at least since Alice left—it has deteriorated. Their once-pristine coffee table is now littered with food wrappers, magazines, and scratch paper.

As I shift the mess aside to set down my glass, careful not to spill a drop with my shaking hands, my eye is drawn to an object beneath a stack of Styrofoam takeout containers. I move them to the floor, revealing a heavy hardcover book, spread open at the spine. As I lean closer to look, the pages come into view, showing rows of glossy headshots.

The minimal text on the open page is in a different language, but it’s still clear what this is. Greta’s yearbook. She must have been feeling sentimental after Alice’s departure and probably lugged this out from wherever she stored it, looking for a return to better days.

I spot Greta’s photo at the top center of the page. She looks younger but mostly the same. Her ice-blond hair curls around her chin in a chic bob, and she smiles, closed lipped at the camera. Underneath the photo, in small, italicized font, is a word:Engelskalärare. Maybe she won some type of award to claim pride of place at the top of the page. Not surprising, given how smart she is.

I scan the rest of the layout as I hear Greta riffling around in her bedroom. Most of the other students beneath Greta’s picture are also blond and smiling, but they all look a bit younger. Greta has always seemed mature for her age. My eyes eventually come to rest on a girl who looks different from the rest of her class. Dark brown hair and familiar coal eyes. Alice. I forgot she and Greta had met and fallen in love in high school.

But the photos stir something at the back of my brain, a memory that’s just out of reach.

Hearing Greta coming down the hallway, I close the book and lean back from the table, not wanting her to think I’ve been looking through her things. Her arms are filled with clothes, which she places on the couch next to me.

“Here you go, honey,” she says before kneeling in front of me, her hands resting on my legs, the sides of her dark eyes crinkled with a sad smile. “I’m so sorry this happened to you, Cass. We all are. I want you to know Brooke’s post doesn’t change how we think of you. We all have things we’re hiding from. We’ll be here for you, no matter what.”

I want to thank her, to show her how much I appreciate her kindness even when I’ve potentially ruined this island for everyone. But there’s only one thing I can think of.

I feel the emotion I’ve finally begun to control rise again in my throat. “Unfortunately, Logan doesn’t seem to feel the same way.”

She grabs hold of my left hand. “He’ll come around. I know he will. He just needs time. It will all be okay.”

And in the soft glow, with the rain pattering down outside, I try to believe Greta might be right. Maybe this doesn’t mean the end. Maybe there’s a way back for me and Logan, for all of us.

I feel her palm roam over mine, her fingers tracing my left ring finger.

“Oh no, tell me you didn’t lose your ring too,” Greta says. I’m so lost in my thoughts that I don’t understand her words. “Logan was devastated yesterday when he told me how he’d lost his so soon after the engagement,” she continues.

“What?” I ask as a pulse of anxiety thrums through my body. “He told you this yesterday?”

“Yes, yesterday afternoon. We met for coffee after he and Doug went to the gym.” She catches the look of shock that crosses my face. “Oh no. Did he not tell you? God, me and my big mouth. I didn’t mean to get him in trouble!” Greta covers her face with her hands.

I try to process what this means.

Sengphet didn’t give Logan’s ring back yesterday morning as Logan claimed. It was still missing last night when I confronted him about it.

And then he convinced me that it was mine. He told me I had lost my ring, when really he must have taken it from the ring box where I kept it in my bedside table and pretended it was his. And he convinced me thatmyring—not his—was next to Lucy’s dead body.

But why?

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