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It wasn’t just fear of Conor—though that was part of it. It had been fear of what Angel might do, and how Conor might retaliate. We couldn’t lose another person. We couldn’t. I found I was holding Angel’s wrist, as if I could somehow hold her back from going after Conor, and I let go and gave a shaky laugh.
“Wow. Okay. Zana, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was wobbling as if she was trying to hold back tears. “He—he isn’t normally like that.”
“Nor was my last boyfriend,” Angel said bitterly. “Until the first time he was. And then the second time. And then every time he drank or his team lost or he had a bad day at work.”
“You were in an abusive relationship?” I asked, taken aback. I don’t know why I was surprised—except that Angel was so extraordinarily beautiful, it seemed as though she would be untouchable, would have the pick of only the best and kindest men. I knew that was ridiculous, that abusers often went for the trophy girlfriend, and then ground them down. Perhaps half the triumph was in slashing down the tallest poppy. But Angel—she was so beautiful. So very take-no-shit and zero tolerance. Maybe I was just starting to understand why.
“For two years,” Angel said matter-of-factly. “It is part of the reason why I left France. He was very convincing, even some of my friends picked him when we split up. He was very good at leaving no marks.”
It took me a moment to understand what she was saying, and then I did a full-body shudder in spite of the heat of the day. I remembered the way she had stared down at the mark on Zana’s wrist, as if she was seeing a ghost from her own past—and now I understood why.
“He won’t stop, you know,” she said to Zana in a conversational tone. “It will only get worse.”
Zana shook her head.
“It’s not like that. He’s not like that.”
Angel said nothing. She only smiled, but not mockingly, or patronizingly. She looked sad, as if she knew exactly where Zana was at—and where she would end up.
“Well…” Santana said after a long, awkward pause. “Those coconuts aren’t going to get themselves. And I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody thirsty. Shall we make a start? Or should we look for Joel first?”
Angel and I exchanged a look over Zana’s head, and I knew what we were both thinking: either Joel was hiding of his own accord, in which case, frankly, fuck him for leaving the four of us to deal with Conor alone. Or something had happened to him. Probably at Conor’s hands. In which case no search was going to change anything.
“I feel…” Angel said, delicately, “that perhaps the coconuts are our priority, non? We are all very thirsty. If Joel is hiding, well, he will return when he is ready. And if he’s not…”
There was a long pause.
“If he’s not, then we can keep an eye out for him while we look for coconuts,” I said, trying for brisk optimism, but I wasn’t sure I hit the mark.
Zana nodded, and then slowly, Santana did too, but there was a sorrow in her face that made me think that she knew what Angel and I had been trying not to say. Then the four of us stood up and began walking up the beach towards the forest.
CHAPTER 26
WE ALREADY KNEW from our exploration of the island that the majority of the palm trees were close to the villas. Although there were trees and even palms in the wilder, scrubbier part of the island, they were mostly a kind that none of us recognized, without much in the way of fruit. Certainly nothing filled with the water we desperately needed.
The coconut palms were clearly imports—planted when the southern tip of the island was landscaped for the villas, and there weren’t that many of them. We had already eaten the windfalls and stripped off the low-hanging fruit. A few days ago, Angel had even picked the unripe nuts from the tree that had crashed into Romi and Joel’s villa, though it had felt like a kind of violation, watching her pick her way through the rubble, just yards from where Romi’s body had lain.
“What?” she had said when she saw me hanging back. “It is not like we can bring her back.” And I had shrugged but seen her point. We hadn’t told Joel where his portion had come from.
With all the easy fruit gone, we were left with only two options: throwing or climbing.
Initially, we tried to knock them down. Santana went first, with a startlingly hard, accurate rock that pinged off the coconut she hit and ricocheted into the forest. The coconut wobbled tantalizingly but didn’t fall. For the next half hour we all tried different trees and techniques—large rocks, small ones, sticks and pebbles, even shaking the trunk, though that felt risky given you’d be standing right underneath when the coconut fell—and the end result was three green coconuts that sloshed when we shook them, and one slightly riper one that didn’t seem to have any water in it. Better than nothing—but not the eight Conor had demanded, to release our water.
We were all beginning to droop with the heat, and as we stood in a clearing, panting and considering our next move, I found my eyes straying to the sliver of beach visible through the forest. There, knee-deep in the azure sea, was Conor, peering intently down at something in the water. Presumably he was fishing, but at the same time I couldn’t help noticing that in spite of being the tallest and strongest of any of us, he’d awarded himself the job that involved strolling around in the cool sea, while the four women were standing in the burning sun, staring at coconuts that might as well be on the moon for all we could get to them.
I was still watching him, feeling the dryness of the sand between my toes and thinking longingly of tonight’s water ration, when Zana spoke.
“I’m going to climb that one.” She pointed at a sloping palm leaning back from the villa, as if stretching towards the sea.
“Are you mad?” Angel said it matter-of-factly. “It is far too high. If you fall, you will be killed.”
“They’re all far too high,” Zana pointed out, reasonably. “That’s the point; that’s why they still have their fruit. And I don’t think I’d be killed. Look, there’s a lot of bushes and greenery underneath to break my fall.”
“Okay, but if you fall, you will break your leg,” Angel said with a shrug. “Which is the same thing, as we have no medical assistance and you will be dead from gangrene in ten days.”
“We’ll all be dead in ten days if we don’t get more water,” Zana retorted.
