“No.”
I feel like I’m looking into the face of the younger boy I knew, in an adult body. I am shattering him on this shoreline.
Drew puts his head in his hands. I feel guilty for lobbing this at him, but I have to keep going—I’m scared if I don’t say it as fast as it’s coming back, I’ll forget again.
“I figured it out myself,” I explain. “I told him I knew he wrote your mum’s note. An extra layer of protection in case it all fell through, and they did investigate further. I’m lucky he didn’t kill me.”
This makes him drop his hands and look at me again, weariness and concern evident across his dark features. “Why didn’t he?”
“He was already on borrowed time. He’d got away with assault. With murder. I was thoroughly beaten down by Oliver at this point—and malleable. Anderson is a very astute man. He understood me, because he and Oliver and Gwendolyn had created this pliable version of me. They’d shaped me. He knew I’d bend to his will …”
“What did he make you do?” The anger is simmering in his tone. “Evie? Did he threaten you?”
I shake my head and look him square in the face.Oh, God.The truth is awful. I can barely utter it. “He made me promisenever to say anything about this, and to disappear from all of your lives,” I say, crying.
“Or what?”
I simply have to speak it. So I take a deep breath, and look beyond how mixed up it all is, and how confused I am, and how unwelcome this admission might be. “His exact words were that I had to cut all ties with all of you completely. Or something was going to happen to the man I love. His son.”
He stares at me, surprised. “He threatened to hurt Oliver? Evie, that doesn’t make any sense …”
I breathe deeply before making it perfectly clear: “No. Not Oliver.”
Thispart I hadn’t thought sufficiently through. The sacrifice I made, losing my relationship with my own parents, sentencing myself to a life of desperate loneliness—it was all for Drew.
Waves of memories break over me. Drew ambling into that classroom studio, looking so rough, because he was a teenage caretaker at the time, with a mum who was painfully unwell. Me, launching straight at him, demanding things of him. Him, rising to every demand, every time.
Right from the start, he stepped in behind me and pushed me forward into the life I wanted. He was never in front of me. Never in my way. He believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. And he’sstillhere. Thirteen years later, even after I banished him from my life. Twice.
“‘Pretend you don’t know me …’” he says quietly.
“When I sent that text, it was because Oliver was threatening to jump off the cliff at The Gap if I didn’t. He forced me topush you away, by threatening his own life. He said his death would be on me. Drew, I had to make the call. Not showing up to your mum’s funeral is the worst thing I’ve ever done.”
He is quiet, which unnerves me, but then a trace of compassion washes over his face. “I cut myself off from the very people who’d held me through everything,” I say.
“You were prepared to stay isolated and alone and miserable in a terrible relationship for the rest of your life. You gave up your career. Everyone you needed …”
That’s how much I love you.
“You’ve been here, all along,” I tell him. “From the second you looked at me, with your feet up on that desk and your shoelaces undone, polishing that lens and asking me for my thoughts about the photo exhibit.”
Within seconds, years seem to melt off him. Lines erase. The weight lifts.
Everything I feel for this man floods in, and Ilosemyself in the depths of it. Even with amnesia, I couldn’t deny my intense attraction to him, and that he was a man I could love—maybehadloved. But this … this knowing that it was him all along, this is the truth I’d always kept from myself. Because acknowledging it while I was so deeply trapped would have razed me to the ground.
Just as quickly as my memory crashed back, fresh thoughts smash through all that hurt, past every wrong turn in the landscape I’d once been lost in, and storm to the surface. Visions of me and Drew and Harriet, older than she is now. Christmases in New York. Drew behind the camera, me in academic robes, speaking onstage …
It’s every secret hope I’d never dared to picture until it was safe.Until I was safe.
Strangely, the only thing my mind is struggling to picture now is Oliver. When I try to, it’s as though the amnesia left one last protective layer. All I imagine now is a blurred school uniform, leadership badges clinking—tiny emblems of empty promise for the “boy most likely to succeed.”
I look at Drew.
“I need to get my life back. And my doctorate. And my podcast. I needall the counseling… and to rebuild everything with Mum and Dad. I want to meet Ivy and make it up to Bree. And I want us to go to the police and take down Anderson … I’ve got so much catching up to do.” Even as the dreams are tumbling out of my mouth and I’m at risk of hyperventilating, I realize I don’t have to do any of this alone anymore.
“It’s Day One, Evie. We’re not in any rush.”
Drew tilts his head and tucks my hair behind my ear, his eyes taking a million years to travel slowly back to mine. Suddenly my heart thuds and my breath quickens, as if this is the start of a very inconvenient panic attack. But as he holds me in his steady gaze, I know this is something else entirely. It’s excitement. It’s delirious hope. It’s me not wanting to wait, trusting him to stand with me now. And as I acclimatize to the sudden loss of gravity, I seem to breathe in every second of our history, from the moment he listened to my idea in that classroom and helped me makePictures of Yousomething special to his bringing me to the magic of this beach. All of it galvanizing me until our future catches alight.
