We sit there for a moment, occasionally raising our respective mugs of coffee to our lips.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” I say eventually. I try to keep it light, but the accusation slips through in my tone.
“I know. I should have texted you. But to be honest, you were part of the reason I decided to come back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I know how much you went through the last time. How close you were to Phoebe. I figured if you were strong enough to relive all that, the least I could do was to be here too.”
The back of my eyes burn, and I force the tears away.
“Listen,” I say. “The others, they can’t know. They wouldn’t understand.”
He nods, but he won’t meet my eyes.
“I won’t tell them,” he says eventually, resigned. “Don’t worry.”
I think of how similar the conversation is to the whispers I overheard yesterday morning, and I cringe. So many secrets, so many things we don’t know about each other. Was it always like this?
“Hey.” He turns to me, pulling a hand away from his mug and placing it on my arm. There’s concern in his cornflower blue eyes. “This can’t be easy for you, being back here. Are you okay?”
A lump instantly forms in my throat. Despite all the questions I’ve been forced to answer the last few days, no one has asked about me. How I’m holding up, if I’m alright.
The short answer is: I’m not. It’s not just the guilt, the paranoia of what the police will find. It’s the memories of all of it, of Phoebe, of what happened after. The stories that live in this place, that have come alive as I keep thinking about the last time we were all here.
My body crumples, and suddenly Josh is there to support me, kneeling beside me, his arms wrapped around me. And it’s exactly what I need. A friend.
“Hey, hey, hey,” he murmurs as he rubs my back, my tears dripping onto his T-shirt, leaving crescent-sized stains in the fabric. “You’re okay. I’m here.”
I don’t know how long we stay there, but eventually we’re interrupted by the unlatching of the door lock behind us.
“Oh.” Declan’s surprise drifts across the balcony, and I snatch my head up, away from Josh’s shoulder.
When Declan next speaks, it’s with barely concealed bitterness. “I didn’t realize I was interrupting.”
I want to stop him, to explain. To tell him how I’ve thought about him every day over the last ten years. The times we spent hand in hand walking on the beach in the Whitsundays, his arms around me as the others looked on, jealousy hard in Phoebe’s eyes at our tangled limbs. I want to tell him that I almost reached out, that I wrote out a novel-length email at least five times, one I was never able to send.
But then I think of how I tried to talk to him in Sydney after everything happened, how I sent him messages when I returned home. How those efforts went rebuffed, the messages unanswered. How he let me down when I needed him most.
I let him go back inside without stopping him.
***
The plane we take to Everly Airport seats sixteen and is easily susceptible to turbulence. While the flight itself is only about ninety minutes, the last half is dominated by views from our small windows of a barren red landscape, dotted occasionally with shrubbery and gum trees. Every second of it brings my mind back to my time in Jagged Rock. To what happened there, to what I did.
The wheels hit the tarmac, and minutes later, we grab our bagsfrom the sole carousel in baggage claim and secure the two rental cars ordered for us in advance by Kyan, who was quick as always to flash his cash. We pile in, Adrien, Kyan, and Josh in one car, Declan, Ellery, and I in the other, and head towards the address for Nick’s ranch, which Adrien found online.
The airport feels as if it was dropped in the middle of nowhere. It’s surrounded only by dirt and a small parking lot, its asphalt glistening in the midday sun. There’s nothing else around, no shops, no businesses, no roads other than a small two-lane street that turns into dirt after about half a mile.
As we drive, my memories travel back to Nick. That very first day at orientation, he and Phoebe got off on the wrong foot, and it got progressively worse from there. Phoebe doing things—showing up late, intentionally trailing behind on our cultural tours—to piss him off, his face always growing a concerning shade of red in response.
For the thousandth time since yesterday, the thought seeps into my brain.Did Nick really kill her?
“I think this is it,” Ellery says as Kyan’s car stops in front us. I look out the window to the right and there lies a massive gate blocking a dirt road,Gould Farmswrought in steel above a logo of a sheep.
As soon as I open the car door, I notice the air is dryer, the temperature at least ten degrees hotter out here than back in Sydney. I can already taste the dust that littered my lungs the last time we were here. I think of the handwritten sign I saw in the baggage claim.Limit Water Use—We are in a Drought!!!
“I don’t see any speaker.” Kyan walks up and sticks his headthrough the gap in the gate. “And there’s a chain on here that needs a key to unlock.”
