Dammit.
I try 2-2-0-3-3-5 next. The phone waggles a finger at me again, chastising. Wrong again.
I try two more variations, but both times the phone shakes itself and refuses entry.
Fuck, I think.If I don’t get this one, the phone will be disabled.
I sit for a moment, closing my eyes, Piper’s phone hot in my hand. I remember her pressing against me on the deck, her scent, her voice in my ear, murmuring her final goodbye.
“2-0-3-3-5-5.”
Shakily, I tap the numbers in.
Her home screen appears, and I almost drop the phone in relief. I sink to my knees on the floor beside her bed and stare at the screen, wondering why on earth Piper wanted me to be able to get into her phone. It feels wrong to snoop, but that was clearly her intention.
There are surprisingly few apps on Piper’s phone. The staple social media icons are grouped together in one folder, of course. But there aren’t the typical data-tracking or face-editing apps I’d expect for an influencer as big as her. And when I tap into her messages, I’m surprised to see almost every thread has been deleted. There’s a group chat called “Empress” that I suppose I haven’t been added to yet, and a thread with Viv that has a few short messages aboutcontent, but besides that there’s nothing.
Strange.
When I tap into her photo album, it’s even more shocking—she has deleted nearly every single photo or video from her phone. There are four items in the album: Two are shots of Piper decked out in expensive fashion for future social media posts, one is a grainy image of the storm from what must be her bedroom window, and the fourth is a video from a little over a month ago. I notice the time stamp at the bottom corner—it’s almost twenty minutes long. Maybe that’s why Piper deleted everything else; maybe she didn’t have enough room for a video of that length.
I tap on the video and it expands to fill the whole screen.
The frame shakes, dark, blurry, and then it stabilizes as someone sets the phone down and walks away. Piper. She’s wearing crisp black slacks and a loose maroon crop top with a plunging v-neckline. She strides away from the phone, which must be propped up. I can tell from the angle that the phone is on one of the high-top tables on the other side of the kitchen island, next to the wall of windows on the port side of the yacht. The sun is setting in the video; the time code says 6:46 p.m., and the light bathing the kitchen is molten and tinted orange.
The video’s frame captures the whole kitchen and part of the staircase. The living room is off camera, but Piper has the ratio of the phone set to 0.5x, so everything else is visible, proportions slightly skewed like a fish-eye lens.
Piper walks over to the island, turns, and eyes the camera. She’sthe only one there. She must not be satisfied with the placement, because she picks up a small potted plant from the island and walks back over to the camera, putting it down off to the right. The plant cuts into the corner of the screen, but the majority of the kitchen is still visible.
Piper’s hiding the phone, I realize. She’s doing what Viv did to me a few days ago—secretly recording the room. Which means the other girls probably don’t know this video exists.
My heart splutters hard against my ribs like a faulty car engine. For a few minutes, nothing happens. Piper stands next to the island, ignoring the camera, but making sure she’s in the center of the frame. Finally, Viv appears.
“You ready?” she asks.
“This is overly aggressive,” Piper responds. “Can’t you talk to her like a normal person?”
“I tried that. You know I tried that. Look how that went. She ignored me. Actually, scratch that, she got even worse afterward. This will show her we’re serious.”
“It’s…intense.”
I’ve never heard Piper like this before. She doesn’t sound like the brash, confident girl I interacted with these past few days. She’s timid, nervous.
“We’re going to talk to her straight. Like an intervention,” Viv assures Piper. “Oh, here are the others.”
The twins and Fiona walk into frame, gathering around theisland. Fiona is shifting from side to side and chewing on a cuticle. The twins are very quiet. For a full minute, the girls stand around the island, waiting. Not speaking.
My blood is cold. What am I watching? Why did Piper record this?
Then a new voice chimes from off-screen. “Where are you guys? Kitchen?”
She comes up from the staircase, waltzing on-screen from the left corner. My heart leaps at the sight of her alive, smiling, breathing. Her beautiful curls are loose around her cheeks, and she’s wearing a black bodysuit with a leopard-print beach cover-up. The gold cuff bracelet gleams on her right wrist.
“Elena, come here,” Viv calls her over.
Elena grins to see the girls standing around the island. “Family meeting? Or is this because your little sneak attack last week didn’t work, Viv?”
“Come on, Elena,” Viv says wearily. “Sit. We want to chat.”
