“Good,” she says, then pulls me in for a quick hug. “So it’s official, I’m Team Lux on this, and they can both fuck off.”
I laugh even as my throat tightens. “Okay, well, you just met me a couple weeks ago, and you’ve known Amma for a lot longer, so maybe don’t throw her over completely. Even though I appreciate it.”
When she pulls back, Brittany shakes her head. “Too late. I already told her once we get back to Hawaii, we’re done.”
“Because she slept with my boyfriend?”
Her gaze drifts past my shoulder, and I turn to see Amma on the deck of the Susannah, watching us.
“Because of a lot of things,” Brittany says, and I wonder what that means.
Before I can ask, Jake walks over to us, his hands in his pockets, sand clinging to his calves. He looks so casual, so relaxed, and I suddenly remember with a jolt that Nico and Amma are not the only shock I’ve had today.
The money, the drugs. None of it really jibes with the man I see standing before me now in salmon swim trunks, his mirrored aviators reflecting the blue-green water and white sand.
“Everything alright?” he asks, and I nod, throwing Brittany a look. I’m sure Eliza will tell him what’s going on, but I can’t have this conversation with anyone else today.
How is it that you can be this far from anything resembling civilization, and still feel this watched, this scrutinized?
“Well, here’s a bit of both good and bad news,” Jake goes on, ducking his head so that he can look at us over the tops of his sunglasses. “Managed to get someone on the satellite phone this morning. There’s a yacht headed this way out of Honolulu next week that can bring us a set of extra radios.”
“Next week?”
We were supposed to leave Meroe in just a few days, had everything gone to plan. But now Jake was saying it was going to take even longer.
“Should add about ten days to the stay, yup,” Jake agrees, looking back out at the water. “But not exactly any skin off our noses, is it? Maybe want to tighten up some of the rations a bit, go down to three bottles of wine a night instead of five.”
His teeth flash white. “And it’s not like Eliza and I had any set schedule for leaving, really. Look at it as God’s way of saying he wants us to have a good time a little longer.”
Ten more days.
Ten more days on this island with the man I loved and the woman he’s cheated on me with.
Ten more days with Eliza and Jake and their secrets.
“Works for me,” Brittany says, and I nod, too, even as I look around at the sand and the sea and the jungle behind us, wondering how a place that’s so open, so free, could feel like such a trap.
BEFORE
Eliza has never believed in fate. Some mystical force, pulling you where you’re supposed to be, so that everything clicks together with perfect symmetry? No way. Besides, that kind of thinking takes power out of your hands, in her opinion, so fuck that.
But still, when she looks across a crowded pub and sees Jake Kelly standing there, a pint in one hand, surrounded as always by a pack of acolytes, she has to wonder if the universe isn’t finally—for fucking once—doing her a favor.
Lord knows it owes her something.
After her mum, after Jake and all that, Eliza spent years drifting. A year of uni, then a new guy, one who had Jake’s blue eyes and easy charm, but not his cash, not that gold-plated sense of self that Jake had somehow possessed even at seventeen.
That guy—Tom—lasted nearly two years, and then she was moving on again, settling in London with some girls she met through an online ad, and working at a bank.
When that had gotten too dull to be borne, she’d found a job bartending on a cruise ship. She usually worked the Spanish route, Southampton to Mallorca and all that, sunburned tourists paying too much for tequila sunrises that she’d always made with her brightest and fakest smile.
It wasn’t a bad life. Eliza liked the travel, and the tips were good. It just wasn’t what she’d envisioned for herself when she was younger.
Sure, she was going to gorgeous places, but she was doing it as staff when what she wanted was to be the person being waited on, the girl who ordered the drinks, not the girl who made them.
But eventually, she made enough money from that job to travel on her own for a bit, getting off the boat in the Canary Islands and never getting back on.
She covered most of southern Europe, ended up in Istanbul for a period, all while drifting into different groups of people, different friends. And with people like that—people you meet on the road—there’s no real past and no real future. It can all just be a glorious present where Eliza can be anyone she wants. She doesn’t have to tell people that her mum is in prison, doesn’t have to confess to the wasted years on wasted men and wasted opportunities.