“It has,” he admits quietly. “Anyway, Evie, the point is I can take a few days off and nobody’s chasing me.”
“I wish nobody was chasingme. Social media feels like death by a hundred thousand DMs.” I’d throw my phone off this cliff right now if I wasn’t clinging to the tiny hope that my parents might call me. If they even have this number.
A flash of memory jostles to the surface. Losing Breanna in a crowd at a party. I’d been far too introverted to be untethered from my best friend in a large group of our high school peers, and I remember the escalating panic as people who took up more space and sound than I did pushed past me, their laughter brash, their bodies confident. They seemed to own the air we shared in a way that sucked it from my lungs. The “big people,” I used to call them, secretly.
Wait.WasI alone?
It’s not a proper memory, just a mirage of one. More a feeling than anything specific. That sense of loneliness and abandonment when Breanna went off being swept away and replaced, in an instant, by something else. Light. Warmth. Enough to block out all the other people …
But now the light is so bright I can’t see. Like a starburst ona lens. Brilliant. Overexposed. A boy’s silhouette. And this all-consuming, extraordinary emotionalrush…
“Evie?” Drew says.
His voice snaps me back to the clifftop.
“I asked you what you thought about staying in Newcastle tonight. We can start the search tomorrow? Seems pointless driving back to Sydney.”
His words break the spell. I can’t recapture that glimpse from the party, despite how intensely I want to. I’m not even sure it was real and not some subconscious longing for absent connection. In any case, Drew is right. We should make a plan.
“I’ve got a notebook and pen in the car,” I offer. I’ve been using them to collect random assumptions about my life.
“Do you drink, Evie Roche?” he asks.
It’s a simple enough question. I assume I do—I used to. Breanna and I once wrote ourselves off with Smirnoff Double Blacks at sixteen. It’s a miracle the amnesia didn’t set in then. My stomach churns. I’d be amazed if I ever drank again in the years following that mistake. Maybe I’m one of those wellness fanatics now who drinks only the green smoothies with ginger and turmeric that keep being pushed at me online …
I check my body. No, I do not look like a wellnessfanatic, exactly, more someone who has a passing acquaintance with a gym. The type where I use the treadmill occasionally and the coffee shop more often. Mainly as a backdrop for Instagram.
“I probably do drink,” I deduce, on balance. My jaw clenches and I try to ignore the dull pain in my chest, a deep ache from the exertion of trying to figure out my life.
Meanwhile, a man is asking me to a bar. I wouldn’t even know what to order! I assume I graduated from vodka cruisers to something more sophisticated, like wine? But white or red?And what about all the different varieties? What even is sauvignon blanc? How do you pronouncesauvignon? I don’t even know my own palate …
“We’ll have a beer,” Drew says decisively. “There’s a craft brewery on King Street.”
Right.
“Come on, Versace.”
And he stands up and pulls me to my feet.
9
Drew
Why am I offering herdays?
I’m promising to help her unravel a mystery I already know the solution to. I could level with her right now. But I’ve dumped big news on someone once before. I can’t go through fallout like that again. Surely it’s safer to let the truth sneak up on her in gentle little episodes, however her mind wants to piece it together. Preferably in the company of her parents. Not me. I’m the last person she should lean on. The last one she’llwantto lean on, once she remembers …
And now a jolt of guilt slices through me. What if I’m not protecting her at all, but selfishly carving out time with “the old her” while she stays ignorant? A precious limbo, before everything crashes in and we’re back where it all exploded.
She used to be strong. The Evie I first met in boarding school, at sixteen, was the most focused person I knew. The kids around her didn’t know their plans for the weekend; Evie had hers locked in years ahead. She had every course in her undergraduate degree selected before Sydney Uni even established a timetable. Ironclad rules that would lead her straight to the goals she’d tacked on her bedroom wall in Castle Hill.
Now she’s staring at the schooner of beer on the trestle table,all wide-eyed and incredulous, like I’ve asked her to swallow poison. The whole vibe of the place—wooden floors, loud music, massive stainless-steel fermenter tanks—seems overwhelming to her and I’m gripped with guilt. Should we be somewhere this stimulating so soon after her hospital visit? A kid topples a massive wooden Jenga puzzle, pieces clattering onto the floorboards near us, and she jumps.
“We don’t have to stay,” I tell her, looking for the nearest exit.
She snaps her attention back to me. “I’m not sick. I wasn’t badly injured.” She tugs at her shirt sleeve to cover the purple bruises on her wrist, wincing. “The doctors said there wasn’t a head injury. They did a whole lot of imaging to prove it.”
Surely that’s impossible. The woman has lost her adult life. She’s adrift in a world that has stormed forward and left her without the experience she needs to wrestle reality. Even if she did have her full faculties, this situation would be a struggle—the sudden loss of the only partner you’d ever known.
