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“Twisted,” I finished. “Yeah.”
And it was. Twisted into a narrative where Conor was the hero, not the villain. A hero who had sacrificed his life for the rest of us.
We were all sitting around, contemplating what Zana had written, when suddenly we heard her voice through the trees. It sounded a long way off, but it was coming closer, her words jerky, as if she was running.
“What did she say?” Angel said plaintively, and I shut my eyes, the better to listen.
“… here!” I heard. And then, much louder. “It’s here! The boat is here!”
I opened my eyes. In front of me, Angel was grinning like she’d just won the lottery, and Santana let out a whoop and punched the sky.
“It’s here.” Zana burst through the trees, into the clearing. She stood there, her hands on her hips, and for a moment I saw her, really saw her, as the sailors would have; her salt-matted hair, the sheen of dust and dirt, the scars on her arms and legs, the bruises and the black eye, and the way her skin cleaved to her sinews, every vein standing out of her water-starved muscles. She looked… wild. Emaciated. Like a survivor. But then she smiled, and her grin was as wide as Angel’s. “The boat. It’s here. We’re saved. We’re going home.”
CHAPTER 37
HOW TO DESCRIBE the long, slow boat ride back to reality? How to describe the first shower, better yet the first bath, the sheer, unimaginable luxury of being able not just to drink as much as we wanted, but to immerse ourselves in water, wallow in it, drench ourselves in it. To feel it running over our skin—pure, clean water. I never wanted to get out.
How to describe the first meal that wasn’t forest-scavenged fruit, or moldy pastries. How to describe crisp mouth-melting fries, and ice cream, and Coca-Cola, with the ice cubes chinking and the perspiration dripping gently from the glass.
There were other things too, that none of us knew how to describe. The news that the Over Easy was gone, lost at sea in the storm. They didn’t tell us at once, perhaps they didn’t know, I’m not certain. But after a few days a man from the British Embassy in Jakarta came to our hotel and told us gently that there was very little hope, that the Over Easy had likely foundered in the storm. The marine transponder, the ship’s equivalent of a black box, had cut out in the middle of the deep ocean, and there was no wreckage to be seen. We might never know for sure what had happened.
And then there was the first sobbed phone call with my parents, over a crackling long-distance line. And the first Zoom call with Nico’s mother, dry-eyed and racked with a pain she hadn’t fully begun to process.
What could I say? What could I do to make her loss bearable? There was nothing.
They had offered us a room each, when we were released from hospital and our paperwork and passports were sorted out—but it was Santana who had said she didn’t want to be alone, and when I heard the words, I realized they were true for me too. After so long spent sleeping, eating, fighting to survive together, I didn’t want to be shut in a room by myself—but I wasn’t yet ready to face the outside world. Not until some of the scars had healed.
So we had ended up with a family apartment, two bedrooms, linked by a little sitting room. Santana and Angel in one, Zana and I in the other. In the air-conditioned cool of the evenings we came together in the little communal area in the middle to eat the miraculous room service food, and drink all the water we wanted, and we talked. We talked and we talked, as we somehow hadn’t been able to on the island.
I told them about Nico, about the growing rift between us, and the fact that I wasn’t sure we would have survived the experience of Ever After Island, even without the storm. I told them how I lay awake at night, wondering if Nico knew that, wondering if his last thought before he died was of me, and whether I loved him.
Angel told us about her childhood, her father who had died when she was just seventeen, and how much she missed him. About her Parisian mother, who told her every time she saw her that she had gained weight, and that no man would want her if she let herself go. And about her abusive ex, and how long it had taken for her to find the strength to leave him, to come to London—where she had met Bayer, and where, for a while, everything had seemed good. “Perhaps I will go back to Paris,” she said with a shrug that verged on hopelessness. “I do not know.”
Santana talked about Dan, mostly. About their time together at school, funny anecdotes about how he cheeked the teachers, and the time he dressed up in women’s clothes and asked for a tour of the school for his supposed son, Anthony. It was the art teacher who had taken him around, a man in his seventies who had taught at the school since the 1980s, back when it was all boys, and who kept peering at Dan shortsightedly through his bifocals, murmuring, “I’m sure I know you, my dear. Did I teach your father?”
And Zana… Zana talked about Conor. About how he had reached out to her on Instagram when she was just seventeen, and they had messaged back and forth, flirting, joking, and finally met up in a bar in London on her nineteenth birthday. She’d taken friends—she wasn’t an idiot—but she didn’t talk to any of them all night, just sat there, enraptured by Conor, dazzled by him like there was no one else there. She told us how wonderful it had been at first, and how bad it had become later. She told us how scared she had been, towards the end, of what Conor had done—might still do.
“It’s my fault,” she choked out, her hand over her face. “All of this. If I hadn’t agreed to come, if I hadn’t let him do everything he did—”
“It is not,” Angel said, and there was nothing but compassion in her voice. “It is not your fault, chérie. I promise you. And how could you have known, how far he would go? We have all known a man like him. Sometimes it is all you can do to survive.”
But as Santana nodded sadly I realized… it wasn’t true. Not really. Not for me, at any rate. The only man I had known like Conor was Conor himself. Nico and I might not have been the perfect couple, but he had been sweet and funny and gentle, and had loved me with nothing but respect and kindness.
But Angel, and Zana, and Santana—they had all known a man like Conor. Some of them had known several.
And as I thought about that, something else floated up from the back of my mind, something that had been scratching there for a long time, perhaps ever since that first day on the boat, when I had met Joel, and he had told me about his job.
“I’ve been thinking….” I said now, a little tentatively. Santana looked up from where she was rubbing Zana’s back. Zana wiped her eyes, and I swallowed, and began again. “Ever since we got back from the island, I’ve been thinking about this whole thing. The whole One Perfect Couple setup. There was something Joel said… it puzzled me at the time. About seeing the handout and trying to get his job correct. And then Dan mentioned it too. Do you remember?” I looked at Santana. “He said something about looking Conor’s videos up, back when you got the information pack. Did you know what he was referring to?”
Santana nodded.
“Yes, that kind of dossier thing. We got it about three or four weeks before we left.”
“Yes, but we didn’t,” I said. “Nico and me. We didn’t get one. We only signed up a couple of weeks before we set sail.”
For a moment all three of the others looked puzzled, and then Angel’s face cleared.
“Of course! I had completely forgotten. You were not in it. It was another couple… what was it… he had a stupid name. Hunting, or something.”
