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When I let go of her shoulders, she slumped back down and curled herself into a ball, clearly intent on going back to sleep.
“What the fuck?” I turned to Santana. “What on earth is going on?”
“I have no idea,” Santana said. Then she put her hand to her mouth. “Oh bloody hell, Lyla… you don’t think… you don’t think she took the wrong coconut? The one meant for him?”
There was a long silence as I processed this suggestion. Angel had been carrying Conor’s coconut—she had insisted on it. There was no way she could have drunk that one, it was the one coconut we had all been fixated on, and Angel of all of us was the person in the best position to notice where it ended up. But it was just possible that she could have drunk Zana’s.
“I don’t think she could have taken his,” I said at last. “But you were carrying Zana’s—and we were all so focused on forcing him to pick up the drugged one, I think maybe… maybe she wasn’t paying attention when you and I set ours down. Fuck, we should have made sure we each had one of the safe ones, so we could be sure of where they were.”
“So does that mean Conor might be wide awake when I go out to the villa?”
“It’s possible,” I said. I shut my eyes, trying desperately to visualize the moment when Conor had picked up the two coconuts, slipping one under his arm. My fear had been that he’d drunk the less drugged one. But what if it hadn’t been drugged at all? “I honestly don’t know. I think he drank the one he was supposed to, but it was so quick, and the light was so bad—did you see?”
“Not enough to be sure. And we clearly fucked up one, didn’t we? So it’s fifty-fifty we screwed the pooch entirely.”
“Shit.” My voice sounded tremulous. “So what do we do?”
“We have to go ahead with the plan, surely?” Santana said. “I mean—we don’t have any more sleeping pills, so it’s now or never. And if even one of them is asleep, it’s better than the alternative.”
I nodded slowly. I knew she was right. But I also knew that she could no longer do this alone.
“You’re right. We should go tonight.”
“We? I thought the plan was for me to go alone.”
“Not anymore. I’m coming with you.”
“Lyla, darling, I know you didn’t want to do this. And what about Angel?”
“I’m coming,” I said, with more firmness than I really felt. “Angel will be fine. But if Conor’s not drugged, there’s a good chance he’ll wake up, and I’m not sending you out there alone to deal with that possibility. No, we both go, or neither of us.”
There was a long silence. Then Santana nodded.
“Okay. So how do we handle this? What do we do with her?” She jerked her head at Angel, still snoring on the floor. “Is it safe to leave her? Should we try to make her throw up?”
I considered the question and then shook my head.
“I think it’s too risky. The pills are already in her system, so chances are they’ve already been mostly absorbed. And in the state she’s in, there’s a good chance she’d choke on her own vomit if we tried to stick something down her throat.”
“But can we just leave her?” Santana said doubtfully. “Is it safe?”
“We pull our sheets into the bathroom,” I said. “We tuck her up to try to make sure she’s lying in the recovery position, doesn’t choke on her own vomit or anything. And then we climb out through there.” I nodded at the bathroom window. “In a way, this is a good alibi. If anyone checks the cameras, all they’ll see is us heading into the bathroom to check on Angel, and then spending the night in there to keep an eye on her. We can say she was sick or something. It fits with the dodgy fish story.”
“But won’t the cameras see us climbing out of the bathroom window?” Santana asked. “That’ll look worse than just walking out the door, won’t it?”
I shook my head.
“There’s no cameras in the bathroom, Camille told me. And if we skirt around the back of the villa, the bedroom camera won’t catch us going past the window. If we stick to our story—that we both spent the night nursing Angel in the bathroom—I can’t see how anyone can disprove that.”
“If Conor’s asleep,” Santana said. “And if he disabled the camera in the water villa. That’s a lot of ifs.”
I nodded soberly. It was a lot of ifs. But there was nothing we could do about most of them except hope.
Working quickly now, we stripped the beds and dragged the sheets into the bathroom, where we tucked them around Angel, trying to wedge her on her side so that if she threw up while we were out, she wouldn’t suffocate. As we worked, I kept trying to talk myself down from my fear that we’d come back and find her dead. A double dose for someone young and healthy—it surely couldn’t be that big of a deal. Medicines with such a narrow gap between the toxic and therapeutic dose were rare for obvious reasons. But Zana, on the other hand… the speed at which Angel had passed out had rattled my confidence in our calculations, and if Zana had drunk the coconut meant for Conor, then a quadruple dose, for someone of her body weight…
I swallowed, my throat dry. Our actions suddenly felt grossly irresponsible, and I tried not to imagine what would happen if we went out to the villa and found her lying dead beside Conor.
When Angel was as safe as we could make her, I bent down and shook her shoulder.
