Page 20 of High Season
Josie groaned, and the moment was broken.
“Do you ever think about anything else?”
Hannah reached down into the water, flipping her hand across the surface to splash her friend.
“Hey!”
“Come to the party with me. Please.”
“You’re not going to let this go, are you?”
“Absolutely not.”
Josie reached down to splash Hannah back.
“Fine. But only for an hour. Two hours, tops.”
“Deal.”
“And Hannah?”
“Yeah?”
“Just… I don’t want you getting your hopes up too much with Blake, OK?”
She had seen it. The way that her friend looked at Blake Drayton. The way that she talked about him. She’d gently teased Hannah about it for months, but now, with the Draytons back for the season, the issue felt urgent. Josie couldn’t stand to see her friend getting hurt.
“People like him,” Josie said. “They don’t go for people like us.”
Hannah shrugged.
“I’m not getting my hopes up,” she said. “It’s only a party. But I think it’ll be fun.”
EIGHT
2024
That night, Nina can’t sleep.
She tries all of her usual tricks. White noise in her headphones. Lavender-scented oil smeared on her pressure points. The three-hundred-pound eye mask Ryan had bought her last Christmas that promised to engulf her in darkness like nothing she’s ever experienced before.
None of it works. Nothing slows her heartbeat. Takes her into the relief of dreams.
She gives up sometime around four in the morning. She goes downstairs and pours herself an ice-cold glass of water, picks a waxy orange out of her mother’s fruit bowl. Back home, Nina buys so much fruit that she keeps it in an oversized salad dish. Plump strawberries and green-skinned mangoes. She is compulsive about arranging them, the art of having something wholesome and fresh and beautiful on display promising an order and an aesthetic to her life that usually feels just out of reach. She rarely actually eats any of the fruit herself, buying more than she can conceivably get through. In summer, it often rots before she can throw it away, apples furring with mold, sugar-drunk fruit flies cavorting in her kitchen. Now, she peels the orange, and slides one plump segment into her mouth. Chews it until her jaw aches.
She sits at the kitchen counter and pulls out her phone. She types her own name into the search bar.
Googling herself is not new to Nina. She’s always resisted having an online profile, maintaining only a private Instagram account with a small circle of friends as her followers. Still, her silence does not stop her name cropping up in dozens of search results. Most of the plentiful information about her online refers to her asprivateorelusive.Remarks that:Now an adult, Nina Drayton has never spoken out about the case.She is referenced in long reads aboutformer it-girl and famous heiress Evelyn Draytonandthe many scandals of the Drayton family.True crime blogs and Reddit threads about Tamara’s death name-drop her. Archived articles from that summer and the months following relay the timeline of the investigation, and eventually, the trial.
Nina knows these results by heart. She’s stayed up late, clicking on links that have already turned purple to show that she’s visited them before, so many times that the web pages begin to resemble bruises. Violet sprawls of text, each an old wound to be pressed upon.
Now, when the results load, Nina is greeted by fresh links. They send a jolt of surprise through her, like new trees breaking through the earth overnight in a landscape that she has known for years.
Why are people suddenly talking about the Josie Jackson case again?
Newly commissioned documentary promises to “pull back the cover” on the noughties’ most notorious murder trial
The true-crime TikTokker bringing attention back to long-ago crimes
