Page 94 of High Season
2024
When Nina crawls out of bed late on Wednesday morning, she finds the house empty.
She has slept for the first time in days, and she feels like she is crawling out of a months-long hibernation. Her body feels heavy, her brain fogged. She still feels exhausted, in a way that is bone-deep. She wants to close her eyes again. She wants to sleep until everything fades away.
She checks her phone to see a message from Claire.
Hey, everything OK with you? Ryan called me. He says he’s worried about you. And have you seriously missed the first week of your new job?!
Nina responds lying flat on her back, phone held above her face.
I have so much to fill you in on. But I’m OK. Just need to stay here a bit longer to figure some stuff out x
She doesn’t tell her that her new boss has asked her to come to a meeting on Monday morning todiscuss the terms of her contract,or that she and Ryan have barely spoken over the last few days. She doesn’t tell her that she suspects that—at last—Ryan has seen her for what she is, someone who is flawed, and imperfect. Not the disciplined person that she has tried so hard to be—someone who has her life together, her career planned, her sister’s death pushed to the back of her mind. That she is broken. Unfixable. She doesn’t tell her that, since the interview, she has spent hours on social media and in backwater internet blogs, reading everything that people have thought and said about Tamara’s death. Getting pulled into a world that is entirely different from the one she remembers. The one that she has imagined, for all these years.
She has been unable to stop thinking about what Katherine said to her back in the documentary breakroom. She has asked herself the same question that Katherine posed to her over and over again. After all, who—or what—does Nina trust? The gut instinct that tells her that she was wrong? Or the little girl who said she was telling the truth? Two versions of Nina, both buried somewhere inside her, both impossible to fully access. A summer’s day. A story told by a five-year-old child. A story that, for two decades, has defined all their lives.
Evelyn has gone into Montpellier to visit friends, so Nina fires off a text to Blake, asking him where he is. She finds Ryan’s contact, and taps the green call button. His phone goes straight to voicemail. He’ll be at work, of course, but the silence still bothers her. It makes her consider, briefly, how Ryan will react, when he sees the video footage she filmed two days ago. How he’s often said how stupid he finds people who put their life up for public consumption, how they deserve all the ridicule they get.
She presses down the thought before it can fully form. Like her job, her life in London feels far away now, another world entirely. She has something much more important to do here.
She dresses in leggings and a creased T-shirt and walks to the back of the house, through the garden with its sweeping sea view. She paces across grass scorched brown by sun, deadened by years of Evelyn being unable to afford to pay a gardener. She finds herself drifting all the way to the spine of steps that Josie said she had walked down all those years ago, looking for her during the exact window of time in which Tamara drowned.
Nina descends the stone staircase slowly. The path is overgrown, vines splintering the steps. She hasn’t been down here in years. Perhapsnone of her family has. Not for the first time, the ridiculous excess of everything they own hits Nina with a scald of shame. An entire private beach they never use. A house that could fit the Jackson family home into one of its rooms.
When Nina reaches the beach, she finds a large, flat rock and sits, watching as the waves pull in and then out again, crashing close and pulling away.
It’s peaceful down here. Quiet. She closes her eyes and imagines that this is the last moment of her life, before everything changes.
As she heads back up to the house, Nina sets a timer on her phone. She walks quickly, imagining that she is searching for someone. That she has left a child alone, one she is meant to be looking after. It takes her eight and a half minutes. Long enough to be missed. Long enough for something terrible to happen to someone.
It feels like proof, somehow, but not proof enough. No one has ever said that Josie couldn’t have made it down to the beach and back in the missing window of time, only that she might not have done. As an alibi, it was weak: there were no witnesses to back it up. The only person who could corroborate that Josie Jackson might have been looking for a small child who had wandered off was the same person who said that Josie Jackson was a murderer.
Nina is out of breath by the time she gets to the terrace. She jumps when she hears a clatter coming from above, a crash against a tiled floor. She makes her way quickly through the house, across the kitchen and the hall, up the stairs and down the corridor to her mother’s room.
The door is ajar. Through it, Nina sees a handful of clothes fly through the air and bounce down on the bed, followed by the unmistakable sound of her brother swearing loudly. She pushes against the door.
“Blake?”
Her brother is arm-deep in her mother’s chest of drawers, red faced, the skin above the open neck of his polo shirt shiny with sweat. He doesn’t look up at her.
“Where have you been?” Nina says. “I messaged you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sis,” he says, still not meeting her eye. “I wentinto town to talk to a solicitor. You’ve heard Mum wants to sell the house? It’s completely absurd. This is meant to be our house one day. She can’t just sell our legacy like that—”
He pauses, mid-rant, to hold up a leather-bound folder that he’s unearthed, a pair of tights still hanging from it like an elaborate talisman.
“Aha!” he says.
He flips it open and lets out a small huff of dismay.
“Weddingphotos?” he says. “And for Harry, too. Surprised she had time to get the film developed before she ditched him.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Granddad’s will, Nina. Of course, Mum hasn’t kept it in the bloody study, where you’d expect, and the solicitor says that we need a copy of it if—”
He breaks off, looking up at his sister, still standing in the doorway, for the first time.
