The breeze gusts, jerking the half-open window behind them shut with a thud. There’s a wild fear in Jo’s eyes, her mouth twisting into an odd shape.
Then the words start coming out: “Han, please, you have to know that I didn’t mean to leave him. I panicked. I knew he was dead, I did. I wouldn’t have left him if I wasn’t certain. I’d have called an ambulance, stayed. But he was gone, I knew he was. I keep going over it—wish I hadn’t cycled away to do the other jump or persuaded him to come with me, but he was stubborn, said he wanted to try it again. I was out of sight, but I heard it. This thud . . .” Jo briefly closes her eyes. “I went straight back, and I swear, I checked to see if he was breathing, but he was gone, and I was going to tell you, but I couldn’t. How could I?” She’s wrapped her arms around herself, is doing a strange rocking motion, backward and forward on her heels.
Hana stares at her sister and feels a funny fizzing in her head. The awful heat that was there before, morphing into something colder, darker. “You were what?” She has no idea where it’s come from—this self-control that she’s managed to muster. “You were there when Liam died? At the bike park?”
“But that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Jo’s face pales. Beads of sweat are dotting her forehead. “That you knew it all. That I was with him when the accident happened.”
A horrible, weighty silence.
“No,” Hana says eventually. “I found out about the affair, the fling, whatever it was. That was it.” The words are like acid in her mouth. “Not this. That you were with him when he died and then you left him.”
She can’t absorb it. She’s played out Liam’s final moments so many times in her head, forensically picked over the reports, it’s as if she were there as it happened. This new narrative doesn’t work, the pictures she’s clung to now grinding to a juddering halt in her head.
“I panicked, Han, that’s all it was, and I promise I’ve tried to tell you so many times, but there’s no way I could have done it right after he died, and every moment since, it wouldn’t happen. I’d open my mouth or start writing a letter and the words wouldn’t come.” Jo drags her gaze up to meet hers. “I never wanted to tell you like this, you have to know that. It’s the last thing I wanted. I planned to do it properly, but Bea’s accident, and then Seth . . .” Tears are forming in her eyes. “There was never the right moment.”
“Bea knew, didn’t she?” Hana watches a tiny insect crawl up the underside of the yoga mat toward Jo’s hand.
Jo nods, a jerky, puppetlike movement. “Yes. She saw a photo on my phone of the two of us together. A few weeks ago she confronted me and it all came out. She said I had to tell you. I promised I would, said I’d do it here, on the holiday. That night, when Bea got to the island, she called me, asked if I’d done it.”
“And that’s when you went to meet her, wasn’t it? It was you who left the villa that night.”
“You knew it was me?” Jo’s grip on the yoga mat tightens.
“Caleb overheard you talking to Seth.”
As the insect on the mat reaches her thumb, Jo looks down, flicks it away. “She asked me to meet her there. I’ve no idea why she wanted to talk there and then. She was in an odd mood, kept going on about needing to make things right, telling the truth.” She frowns. “But we cleared it up, I promise. I told Bea I’d tell you the next day and she seemed happy with that.”
“And you definitely left her on the beach?”
“Yes. She said she was going to get her stuff and then come to the villa. She still wanted it to be a surprise for the rest of you.”
“But what about this?” Hana pulls Bea’s broken phone from her pocket. “I found it in your room.” Her voice cracks. “You took her phone, Jo. Something we might have been able to give to the police. You destroyed it, took the memory card. Why would you do that?”
Jo looks at her, stricken. “I didn’t destroy it. It was like that when I found it, the morning Bea was discovered. I saw it under one of the planters near the yoga pavilion. The memory card was gone when I picked it up.”
Hana mulls over her words, a thought edging out from the corner of her mind. “So that’s what you were looking for when I saw you by the pavilion after I spoke to the detective. You knew what people would think if they realized you’d met Bea that night, the messages between you. How it would seem, out of context.”