I felt the guilt move through me with a familiar weight that was a part of me for the last one year. Noah had been uncomplicated and warm and seemed genuinely fond of her, and he left because of the consequences of my actions, because of a decision I had made seven years ago.
She seemed happy with him.
And now he was gone, down a midnight lane in a rusty convertible, because of me.
Maybe after all this is sorted, I could find a way to speak to him, to explain without revealing anything that couldn’t be explained — maybe there was still something there to be salvaged. She deserved that. She deserved every ordinary, uncomplicated thing that I had made more complicated simply by existing in her life.
I checked the mirror again. Still empty.
We drove for another twenty minutes, the road narrowing as we moved away from the town center, the trees thickening on either side.
Camila turned her face towards me.
“Thank you, Jason.” Her voice was quiet, directed at the window rather than at me. “For saving my life tonight.”
“Thank you for letting me,” I said.
She didn’t respond. But she didn’t look away from the window either, and for a moment the silence between us was not the silence of hostility but the silence of two people existing in the same space without defending against each other.
I held onto that for the rest of the drive.
Briggs had given me directions to the safe house,the cottage,as he called it. He said it was small, and old, and sat in a clearing in a sandy forested area twenty miles from the heart of Paradise Island.
I stopped the car about eight hundred feet back, where the dirt track met a dense stand of palms.
Camila turned on her phone’s flashlight. I took both bags from the trunk.
“Let’s go.” I said.
The sand was soft and deep, the kind that pulled at your shoes and made each step deliberate. I could hear the waves now, a consistent rhythmic sound coming from somewhere beyond the treeline to the left. The beach was nearby.
I was watching the tree line.
Then Camila moved closer.
The path narrowed between two large palms, and she stepped in beside me, and then her hand found mine in the dark, and she held my hand.
I gently wrapped my fingers around her hand and kept walking.
We didn’t say anything. The sand shifted under our feet. The flashlight moved ahead of us. The waves kept their steady sound behind the trees.
The cottage appeared at the edge of the clearing — small, single-storey, its windows dark, a covered porch running along the front. A rusted garden chair sat beside the door. A wooden sign, barely legible, said something about the forestry department in faded letters.
I let go of her hand to check the door.
I punched in the numbers Briggs had shared into the padlock.
I held the door open.
Camila went inside first, and I stood on the porch for a moment, listening to the dark and the waves and the silence of the trees, making sure we had arrived alone.
We had.
I went inside and locked the door.
CHAPTER 26
CAMILA
