“Why?” I ask now, folding my arms tightly around me. “Why would he have taken just mine?”
Jake shrugs. “You said you had a weird moment with him. Maybe he wanted to punish you? Would’ve made sailing back into Hawaii a real pain, let me tell you that.”
Maybe. Or maybe …
I look again at that knife, thinking of Robbie out here in the jungle with it.
The knife, and my picture.
Waiting.
Plotting?
Jake is probably right—it was probably just to fuck with me, just to make my life a little more difficult after our confrontation on the boat, but I think about all the times I felt like someone was watching from the jungle, and I shiver.
Scanning the clearing, it’s obvious Robbie had been staying here. There’s a shirt draped over a branch, the remnants of a little fire, and when I approach it, I notice tiny bones strewn across the ground.
“The fish,” I say, and Jake walks over, kicking at the ash and bones.
“Oh, that stupid fucker.” He sighs. “We told him, didn’t we? Bloody well told him.”
It seems clear now. Robbie was always trying to catch fish, and he finally had, but the wrong ones. It’s easy to imagine him, sick, poisoned, crawling over to that pool, drinking the brackish water in desperation—so weak he’d fallen facedown into the water, unable to lift his head.
An accident. A stupid, shitty accident.
But a reminder of how quickly this place turns on people.
How it eats them up.
“We have to tell someone,” I say, and Jake nods.
“Right, we’ll let the others know we found him.”
“Not just them,” I reply, frowning. “Like. We have to let … I don’t know, the coast guard or something know? People might be looking for him.”
“Lux, no one is looking for this sad bastard, I promise you that. Not our problem.”
The words are so cold that I almost take a step back. “We can’t just leave him here.” Jake sighs, reaching up to rub the back of his neck as he looks around. “Well, I’m not carrying him back to our beach, are you?”
“Don’t be a dick,” I snap, and he holds both hands out, walking toward me.
“Hey,” he says softly. “I’m sorry. But…”
He holds my shoulders, looking down into my eyes. “Lux, the guy was a creep, and possibly dangerous. You were right to worry he wasn’t really gone. But it’s not our fault he went and poisoned himself, and I’d be lying if I said we weren’t almost certainly better off for it. Surely you can see that.”
Part of me wants to recoil at Jake’s words, but the thing is … he’s right.
In a way, hadn’t this been what I wanted? That first morning after Robbie disappeared, when Jake had joked about getting a “hunting party” together, hadn’t something about that idea appealed to me, made me feel safer?
I feel myself nodding in agreement and let Jake pull me in, hugging me close.
“We’ll tell the others,” he repeats, “and when the ship gets here with the radios, we’ll let them know. There’s really nothing more we can do until then. Nothing more we should do.”
He’s right, and I know it.
“And the ship gets here when?” I ask. “Like, just a few more days now, right? A week?”
Jake still smells like salt and sea and me, and he rests his chin on the top of my head. “No more than a week. Maybe a couple of days longer, depending on how their sail goes, but soon.”
Soon.
Soon, there will be other people here. Soon, we can leave. Soon, Meroe Island will just be a memory, a weird story from my crazy twenties that I can tell at bars and around campfires.
I know I’ll never tell this part, though. Not me and Jake and this stolen afternoon, and not Robbie, lying on the jungle floor, my eyes drawn to his body over and over again as we turn to leave, watching until the jungle closes back around him.
TWENTY-FOUR
Brittany and Eliza are on the beach when we get back, and seeing Eliza makes my stomach churn with guilt. After finding Robbie’s body, I’d almost forgotten the shame I’d felt about Jake, and now, as she smiles brightly and waves, it all comes crashing back.
I’ve never been the kind of girl who went after someone else’s boyfriend. I’ve never cheated in my life. And I like Eliza. A lot.
“There you two are!” she calls out. “Brittany and I were about to go searching.”
Jesus, what if they had? What if they’d come across us when we were …