It’s early evening in the Caribbean, so it must be around lunchtime where he is.
An answer pings back within a couple of seconds.
Hey yourself. And always.
She thinks she’s falling in love with him, but she also knows it’s too soon. Every time he answers her, always caring, always supportive – even if he’s always direct, sometime to the point of uncomfortable bluntness – she slips a little further down that slippery slope.
It’s stupid, really. Their friendship grew after the accident, and it was only in the couple of weeks before she left it became something more. Both of them knew it wasn’t ever going to get serious.
Except it has. For her, at least.
She’s still not sure where she stands. It’s strange, sometimes he’s so vulnerable,so raw, that she can almost feel him there in the room with her as they type back and forth, and at other times he seems oddly opaque, as if there are layers and layers of frosted glass between them and she can only see a fuzzy outline.
She sends another message:
I think I’m ready.
Sure?
She takes a moment to check in with herself before she replies.
Yes.
In their poring through the details of the night of Megan’s accident, they’ve reached the hardest part. She put the brakes on talking about it for a few days, feeling she needed to be ready, but really she was just being a coward. However, the nightmares have stepped up in both intensity and frequency. She knows she can’t run forever. She has to face the truth, no matter what it is. There are questions she’s wanted to ask for months, but the pact between the three of them never to talk about it kept the answers captive.
The more she thinks about it, the more she wonders why they agreed to it. At the time, she’d felt so guilty, so devastated, that she’d wanted to shut it all out. Is that how the guys felt, too? Simon has shown her in recent weeks that he’s happy to open up and talk, but what about Gil? Does he feel guilty about something? Has he got something to hide?
She knows something Simon doesn’t know. The best way to find out the truth is to play dumb, to ask the question as if she doesn’t already know the answer.
Do you have any idea who gave Megan the ketamine?
She waits for a couple of seconds, and then the reply comes.
No idea. I didn’t even know she’d taken it until it came up in the medical reports.
She releases the breath she’s been holding in a slow, steady stream. Oh, thank God. It wasn’t him. Should she tell him that one of the other partygoers had told her about who they thought was with Megan when she took it? No. Not just yet. She’ll tell him later.
Are you sure she didn’t bring it with her?he asks.
Definitely not. She’d have told me.
Megan had been very open about those things with her, and it hadn’t been the first time she’d had the drug.
Someone at that party gave it to her, which means someone else also knew how much she’d takenshe types.
The inquest had shown it hadn’t been enough to cause significant harm on its own. However, when you factored in the amount of alcohol Meg had drunk …
She closes her eyes in an effort to squeeze out the memory of Megan downing that huge red King Cup. If she’d known, she’d have knocked it out of Megan’s hand, hurled it across the room. So stupid … It had been completely avoidable.
There were so many what-ifs, each a tiny blade stabbing her conscience.What if she’d known about the ket? What if she’d done what she said and hadn’t drunk so much herself? She might have realized Megan had taken something. What if she’d got up and looked for Megan instead of having a nap amid the pile of coats? So many little slips, so many falls from grace she’s not sure she can ever climb back out of that pit again.
Did you see Meg at all around midnight? She must have come downstairs. No other way to get to the garden.
No. And then the next thing I knew, everybody was looking for her.
That must have been around the time she’d woken up. Someone had barged into the main bedroom, looked around, asked her if she was called Megan, and then disappeared again when she mumbled she wasn’t.
And then what they’d said had sunk in. People were looking for Megan. Why? She’d scrambled up off the bed and run downstairs, where she’d found Simon looking white as a sheet.
