“Mmm, you might be right,” he says, slowly and deliberately, as if it’s taking all his concentration to look and talk at the same time.
“What are you doing?” she asks, finding it hard to hide her irritation at how blasé he’s being about this.
“I just found these on the desk in there,” he says, tilting his head in the direction of the living room. Rachel had noticed them yesterday and had been meaning to watch the surfers, assuming that was what they were there for.
“Here,” he says, without moving from the spot he’s standing on.
“What is it?” she asks, going to him.
He moves himself around her so that she’s standing in front of him, the pair of them facing back toward the beach. He carefully takes the binoculars away from his face and without losing the line of vision passes them over Rachel’s head into her waiting hands.
She’s almost too frightened to look.
“There,” he says, pointing. “Just to the right of the surf shack.”
Rachel squints through the lenses, holding her breath as if she’s watching a horror film, not knowing what’s going to jump out from where. “What am I looking for?”
Noah gently moves her head a fraction and then she sees it. A turquoise-blue top, just like the one Paige was wearing when she left for her run. Except she’s not running. She’s standing stock-still, with her hands on her hips, talking to …
“Is that Ali?” Rachel asks hoarsely, feeling as if the air is being squeezed out of her.
“It looks like it,” says Noah solemnly.
Rachel can’t think straight. “But … I don’t understand … what are they doing?”
Noah sighs heavily. “Exactly what we don’t want them to do,” he says.
Rachel’s legs turn to jelly, rendering them useless under her weight. She falls onto a nearby chair, but she can’t stop them from shaking. The fear of Ali telling Paige about last night hits her like a ten-ton truck.
“This is all your fault,” she shouts at Noah.
“My fault?” exclaims Noah, jabbing himself in the chest with his own finger. “I haven’t been the one keeping this a secret for twenty years.”
“And it would have stayed that way, if you hadn’t have said and done what you did last night.”
Noah sits down heavily in the chair opposite Rachel and puts his head in his hands. “We don’t know that’s what they’re talking about,” he says. “We’re jumping to conclusions.”
Rachel forces herself to ask what else they might be doing, both of them purporting to have gone for a run, even though Ali left her trainers behind. And what is Jack’s part in all of this? Where is he, if he’s not with Ali? The irony that he’s probably the only one doing what he said he was going to bears down on Rachel’s shoulders.
She brings the binoculars up to her eyes again, as if questioning whether it really is Paige and Ali. For a moment, she thinks they must have both been seeing things, as she can’t see any sign of them, but then she trains the lenses to the right of the surf shack, and there they are, deep in conversation. Rachel tries to interpret their body language; Paige is by far the most assertive, with her hands on her hips and her head cocked to the side. While Ali seems to be doing most of the talking, gesticulating wildly with her hands.
For a moment, Rachel allows herself to believe that they’ve either, quite literally, just run into each other, or, worst-case scenario, Paige is taking Ali to task over how she’s been behaving around Jack. Could Ali be offering her an explanation? Might Paige be telling her that she’ll be keeping a close eye on her from now on?
It’s the best Rachel can hope for as her brain scrambles to comprehend what is happening.
“So, let’s assume Ali saw and heard everything last night,” she says, breathlessly. “And she’s telling Paige right now.…”
“Then we’re fucked.” Noah grimaces as he finishes her sentence.
Rachel’s chest hurts at the thought of her best friend finding out she’s been deceived all this time.
“We should have told them,” she says. “Right at the beginning.”
Noah looks at her. “About that night, or about Josh?”
“For God’s sake, this has got nothing to do with Josh. You’ve got nothing to do with Josh.”
She’ll not allow the look on his face to put her off saying what needs to be said. “If we’d just been honest, right from the word go, we wouldn’t be in this position. You hadn’t even met Paige when we—”