Finally, she said, “I was known as Florence growing up. I started going by Helen in college. It’s my middle name.”
Nick didn’t say anything. It was too dark to see his face.
Then he said, “Oh. Okay. I like the name Florence, though.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. One of Nick’s greatest assets—for her purposes at least—was his total lack of mistrust. He tended to see the best in people, and to believe whatever he was told.
“No, it’s so stodgy.”
“It’s not. It’s pretty.”
“Well, thank you, but I prefer Helen now. Okay?”
“If that’s what you want, sure. I don’t care what your name is. I just like you.” He pulled her closer, and Florence smiled bright-eyed into the darkness.
36.
The next morning, she woke before Nick. Her chest felt tight with anxiety. And then its bedfellow, regret. Why had she let Nick be alone with Amy? She should have drugged Amy too, of course. That was obvious now. She had shrunk from leaving them both incapacitated, trying to find their way home like two injured lambs. But that was silly. They were adults. It was one drunken night. She was sure they had both had plenty of them in the past.
Her plan had been too limited; she saw that now. She needed to loosen the restraints. Boldness, audacity—that was what was required of her. No more half measures. How many times did she have to remind herself?
She wanted to roll over, to curl up onto Nick’s chest again, return to where she’d spent last night—a place of comfort and warmth. But that, she knew, was a trap. She forced herself to sit up. She pulled on her clothes and went into the kitchen, where she scooped handful after handful of cold water into her mouth. Then she patted her cheeks with her wet hands. Onward. The plan was still in effect. She wasn’t tossing away this opportunity just because of an ill-timed encounter with an old friend.
She paused for a moment. She’d made the same mistake with Greta, she now realized. She’d been too cautious. That story about food poisoning had been too small, too tame, too short-sighted. Not Helen’s style at all.
She went back to Nick’s room and woke him up.
“Hey,” she whispered, “can I borrow your laptop?”
He sat up and rubbed his eyes blearily. “Yeah, it’s over there.” He gestured at a pile of dirty clothes. She dug underneath it and found an old, cracked Dell.
She signed into the Maud Dixon Gmail account. Then she opened a new message and started typing. When she was finished, she read it over.
Dear Greta,
I haven’t been honest with you. I’m not sick, and it isn’t fair of me to ask Florence to keep lying for me. The truth is, I wanted a few days off the grid to consider some things. I’ve done that now, and I’ve reached an important decision.
I’m going to change representation. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me over the last few years, but I need an agent who supports my literary ambitions wholeheartedly. I understand why you keep pushing me to write a sequel to Mississippi Foxtrot, but I want to write a different type of book, and it will take the time it takes. Since you can’t give me the space to do that, I’ll find someone who can.
Maud
Florence thought it hit the right note: direct, considered. She hovered the mouse over the Send button, then forced herself to click it. She logged out of the account, then abruptly shut the laptop and tossed it back onto the pile of clothes.
Done.
Nick had gone back to sleep. There was a stack of tattered secondhand paperbacks in the corner of his room. She started picking through it, and saw another book by Paul Bowles. She pulled it from the pile. It was called Let It Come Down. According to the back cover, it was his second novel. It was about a bank teller who moves to Tangier and falls into moral dissolution. She flipped through it. A page heading caught her eye: “The Age of Monsters.” She frowned. Where had she heard that phrase recently? She read a few pages:
When she heard the word “forceful” being used in connection with herself, even though she knew it was perfectly true and not intended as derogation, she immediately felt like some rather ungraceful predatory animal, and the sensation did not please her.
It hit her when she saw the word predatory. It was the same passage that she had transcribed for Helen back in Cairo. Helen had handwritten it, word for word, on a notepad and presented it as a draft of her own second novel. Why? Was it some sort of statement on the male-dominated literary canon? No. That was ridiculous. It was flat-out plagiarism.
This must have been why Helen was withholding the manuscript from Greta. But what was her endgame? It didn’t make any sense. She would have known she’d never get away with it. Someone was bound to catch her before the book was even printed. Was she deliberately trying to torch the Maud Dixon name?
“Whitney just texted,” Nick said behind her.
Florence looked at him in confusion. She’d forgotten where she was for a moment. “What?”
He was sitting up cross-legged on the mattress, naked. He repeated himself and held out his phone to her. She looked at the screen: “Hi Nick, please tell Florence I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what got into me. Can I make it up to you guys tonight?”
Florence felt a wave of relief that she was okay.
She wrote back: “Hey, it’s Florence. No worries at all, but I think we’re just going to lay low tonight.” After she sent it, she deleted the entire message chain and blocked Whitney’s number. She handed the phone back to Nick, who tossed it onto the mattress without looking at it and reached out his arms toward her.
“Breakfast?” he asked. She nodded. She felt better. She was finally getting things under control.
They went to a nearby café run by a couple from New Zealand. Over coffee and avocado toast, they watched the sky change from light blue to purple.
“Whoa,” said Florence, pointing. Dark clouds were gathering forces on the horizon. Discarded napkins and cigarette butts started to swirl at their feet.
“Look at that wind,” said Nick. The leaves on the trees began struggling violently for release from their branches. It was as if the wind had been storing up its strength throughout the long, limpid day before for this. “I’ve gotta get my board.”
“You’re not going to go out on the water in this weather, are you?”
“Fuck yeah, that’s why I’m here.”
“Is it safe?”
Nick smiled at her. “You’re so sweet. It’s totally fine. I promise.”
Florence watched a man across the street struggle to attach a makeshift awning above a table laid with small, carved animals. The wind kept ripping the fabric out of his grasp.
“Have you gone out when it’s this stormy before?”
“Yeah, tons of times. Actually, the first week we were here, it was insane. Thirty knots, side-on shore wind, epic waves. A fucking shark washed up. A legit shark.”
Florence froze.
Nick laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get eaten by a shark.”
Florence said nothing.
“Babe? You okay?”
All of a sudden, Florence recognized the gaping hole in her plan: Helen’s body was going to wash up. Bodies always washed up. It was simple luck that it hadn’t already. She looked out at the gathering storm with a new sense of dread. How could she have been so careless?