Page 37 of High Season
“No,” she says. “I was just…”
She trails off. Gestures one hand, uselessly.
“I thought it was you I saw yesterday,” he says brightly.
“Yesterday?”
“At the dive shop?” he says. “I waved at you, through the window. Didn’t you see?”
He shakes his head, incredulously.
“Josie Jackson,” he says, as if he can’t quite believe it himself. “In the flesh.”
“I’m not—” she starts.
But he’s looking at her like he knows her.
“Do I—?”
“You don’t remember me?”
She shakes her head.
“Oh, come on,” he says. “I know I was only a kid back then, but I was always running around after you and Hannah. I thought you guys were so cool.”
That’s when it clicks.
“Nicolas?”
There’s a vague memory, like an object just beneath the surface of water. Hannah’s little cousin. He lived somewhere else—somewhere inland—but he and his parents would come out here to visit. When Josie was fourteen, he had stayed for the entire summer. His parents were getting a divorce, and he had been offloaded with Hannah’s family while they sold the house and squabbled over custody, as Hannah told Josie in whispered asides when Nicolas wasn’t listening. They had spent all summer trying to cheer him up, taking him down to the beach and showing him their favorite places to cliff-jump. They had taught him how to dive, just below the surface of the water wheresmall shoals of fish would dart away from them, the world still and quiet.
“Everyone calls me Nic now,” he says. “But that’s me.”
“God,” says Josie. “You’re still here. Does anyone ever leave?”
He shrugs.
“You did,” he said. “And Hannah. Hannah left.”
The name hangs between them.
“Where did she go?” Josie asks.
Nic rubs the back of his neck, as though trying to knead out a knot.
“England,” he says. “You know she always wanted to go there. She moved the year after… everything. Went to university.”
“London?”
The possibility that Josie and Hannah might have been in the same city, might have passed each other in the street, their lives tantalizingly close and yet a million miles away, feels impossible. Nic shakes his head.
“Manchester,” he says. “She met a guy there. Got married. She’s got three kids now. They come back a couple of times a year to see her parents. They’re cute. I think I have a picture…”
He digs his phone out of his pocket and thumbs the screen.
“Ah, yeah. Here. Look.”
He holds the phone out toward Josie. She takes it with both hands, scanning the picture. The sea, the beach that she knows so well. A woman, crouching between two young boys, as if they could hide her from sight.
