Page 137 of High Season
Craig gets to the door just as Nina carefully sets down the food in the center of the table, her hands ensconced in oven gloves.
“Perfect timing!” he says, throwing it open.
Gabby bundles straight past him to throw her arms around Josie. She smells like airports and hastily applied deodorant, but beyond that Josie still catches the faint whiff of the sea. That place, so much a part of them all that salt still clings to their skin.
“We’ve missed you!” Gabby says.
Josie hugs her back, hard, while Calvin and Craig shake hands. She’s missed them, too. She misses her life back on the Côte d’Azur. Dinners at Gabby and Calvin’s place that last until midnight, candles stuck in empty wine bottles, leftover pastries from the café for dessert. Nights sitting out on the sand, crates of beer, the crash of the tide. Early mornings with Nic, mugs of coffee out on the balcony, the soft dawn heat. A life that is so small and simple in some ways, yet so much bigger than she ever dared imagine for herself. Laughter. People who love her. Work that gives her purpose. Peace.
“Sit down, sit down,” Nina is saying. “The documentary starts in half an hour, and I want to clear up before then.”
They cram around Nina’s small dining table, Nic having to balance on a comically small stool, Craig on a folding garden chair. Nina asks Nic about the dive shop as she plates up. Gabby asks Josie how she’s feeling about seeing the documentary, after all this time. Imogen talks about a new opportunity she has, lecturing a series at a prestigious American college about media coverage of female murder victims.
“Anyway,” says Nina. Tendrils of hair have escaped from her ponytail. She raises a wineglass. “Thanks so much for coming, all of you. It’s been quite the summer.”
They all lift their glasses with murmurs of agreement.
A buzz at the downstairs door cuts through the background hum of a Spotify playlist. Nina’s smile tightens.
“Are we expecting anyone else?” says Craig, half standing, uncertain.
“Actually, yes.” Nina is already on her feet. “There’s one more person I thought should be here.”
She presses the door release.
“Well, come on, Nina,” Craig says with an uncertain laugh. “You’re not going to tell us who it is?”
Nina doesn’t answer. From the speaker, a folk singer croons. Gabby glances at Calvin, a look of confusion on her face. Nic sets down his fork. No one speaks.
A knock on the plywood door, and Nina pulls it open.
And there, standing in the doorway, a bunch of white tulips clutched in the crook of her arm, is Hannah.
The day after the video of Blake Drayton’s confession went viral, Hannah had gone back to the pink house.
She went out to the terrace, to the place where Tamara Drayton had drowned. Standing on the place where the pool once was, Hannah cried. For Tamara, but also for the person that Hannah herself was, back then. A lost, confused girl, not much older than Mason.
That afternoon, she had gone to the police station, and told them everything. About her relationship with Blake, and what happened after Maison de la Mer. The bonfire. The night of the birthday party. The way that she had lied for Blake, over and over again.
As she spoke, she felt something inside of her uncoil and release. The truth, unraveling its wings and preparing to take flight. The knot had been there so long, she had stopped noticing it.
To Hannah’s surprise, she had not been arrested on the spot. She was being treated as a witness, rather than a suspect. Still, she spent the next few months on edge, waiting for a phone call, a knock on the door.
There was an investigation, and a decision was quickly reached. Yes, Hannah had lied to the police, but she was young and vulnerable. The statute of limitations was short for that kind of crime, and if she was willing to testify against Blake, her role in it would disappear.
Two months ago, Blake was found guilty of manslaughter—thesame crime that he had dangled in front of Hannah as a threat all those years ago. Evelyn was charged with assisting an offender, a trial that had floundered and collapsed on the basis of weak evidence, the truth eroded by time. Hannah had heard that she was living in Paris, awaiting Blake’s sentencing. Apparently she was newly engaged to what would be her fifth husband, the arrest of her son and estrangement from her daughter not dampening her belief in her right to a happy ending.
And so, Hannah’s life went on. Mealtimes, and school runs, and social media posts, and longing, and sleepless nights. Birthdays, and arguments, and bills, and grief, and love, and all the small things that make up life, that make it easy to forget. She was the same, and yet irrevocably changed.
And now, Hannah stands in the doorway and looks straight past Nina. She looks past Gabby, and Calvin and Nic. Hannah stands in the doorway, and the only person that she sees is Josie.
“Hi,” she says. “Do you think we could talk?”
They go outside, to a small shared terrace with smatterings of flowers in terra-cotta pots, a bench painted bright pink. London stretches out around them, rooftops silhouetted against a pale ochre sky, the sunset just coming into view.
When Josie was still locked away, Hannah would occasionally watch the sky turn crimson—all the beauty, and the light, and the darkness coming together—and be struck by the fact that Josie could not see it. That Tamara would never see a sunset again. This realization never failed to floor her. In some ways, every sunset since Tamara’s death has led her here.
Josie is gazing out at the sky. The sweep of color, the lilac clouds spooling like bruises against skin, the pale sphere of the rising moon.
