Page 86 of High Season
Look outside x
When he comes to the window he’s smiling.
“I had a feeling you might come back,” he says.
“You want to go for a walk?”
“Yeah. Let’s go for a walk.”
They don’t talk until they reach the beach.
They take their shoes off once they get there and sit close to the water, their toes dug in the sand. The reflection of the moon is a shifting slice of silver, shimmering with the dark rise and fall of the waves, as though the sea is a living, breathing thing.
“You’re not leaving, then?” says Nic.
“Not yet.”
“At some point, though?”
“At some point, yeah. I just felt like there was unfinished business for me to figure out here first.”
“Is that what I am? Unfinished business?”
He says it lightly, like he’s joking, but Josie doesn’t miss the cut of his words, the hurt that hides behind them. She looks right at him then.
“Of course not,” she says. “That’s not what I mean. I…”
She pauses. She has already made her decision. And yet saying it out loud will solidify it. Make it real.
“I’m going to talk to the documentary makers again,” she says. “Youwere right, what you said before. I’ve already given them the case file. They’re going to be telling my story anyway. People are going to be talking about me, whether I like it or not. At least this way, I get a chance to control the narrative. I get a chance to tell my side of the story. I doubt people will believe me, but…”
She breaks off. Takes a moment to gather herself again.
“When we talked about this before, I said that things would never change, unless Nina Drayton changed her story. And when I spoke to her—I think that she actually might be ready to do that. If I’m here, if I take part, I can make sure that she goes through with it. I need to talk to her again. I need to speak to Nina Drayton, properly this time.”
“And then you’re leaving?” Nic says.
“I like you, Nic,” she says. “If things were different…”
She shrugs. She can’t finish the sentence. If the case hadn’t gone viral again. If Josie hadn’t spent her late teens and a good chunk of her twenties in prison. If, all those years ago, Nina Drayton hadn’t pointed her finger at Josie and changed the entire trajectory of her life.
“The documentary is going to attract a lot of attention,” she says. “And even if Nina Drayton changes her story, there will still be a lot of people who don’t believe her. A lot of people who hate me.”
“But how can things be different, unless you change what you’re doing?” Nic asks.
“What do you mean?”
He picks up a stone and rolls it between his fingers.
“It just seems to me like this is what you always do. Didn’t you say that you’ve spent the last ten years feeling like you were running away?”
He pulls back his arm and throws the stone. It lands heavily against the water.
“How can you expect things to be different, if everything that you do is the same?”
“I didn’t mean…” she starts, and then trails off.
Because maybe this is exactly what she meant.
