Chapter 26
26
Evie
I’m grateful for the cool breeze flowing through the brick courtyard as I try to calm down. I can’t even look at Drew right now.
Rose, having realized her blunder, shifts the topic. “Your parents have moved to Adelaide.”
Adelaide?
“But we don’t know anyone in South Australia,” I argue.
She pats my arm. “I think that was the point.”
A sense of dread creeps in, slowly at first, then rushes through my body. Why would my parents want to escape? What could they possibly be running from?
They lost their daughter.
I can’t imagine what could have happened that was so bad that my parents and I have no contact, or that they had to leave the city they love and start a new life in another state. The only person who might have a clue is Drew, who has been keeping the truth of our own relationship secret too. Now I feel even more alone than I did yesterday.
I catch Rose and Drew exchanging worried looks. Are they protecting me because of my health, or is the truth really that bad? How far off track can a life possibly get in the decade or so since school?
Suddenly, I’m too scared to find out. Not here. I just need to get to Adelaide, see my parents, and ask them to set me straight.
Drew picks up his phone and starts tapping on the screen in a way that enrages me. Maybe he’s texting that Chloe he was so keen to dismiss when she phoned on the way to Newcastle. Is my rapidly deepening crisis boring him?
I study him as he scrolls. He is annoyingly attractive, in that effortless, oblivious way, absorbed in the phone, sipping his coffee while dappled light filters through the canopy overhead and dances across his deceptively innocent face. I try to cast myself in his past, remembering the sort of girl I was—a person not in the slightest bit effortless about anything. Oblivious, no doubt in many ways. Anxious. Cautious. Studious. And I struggle to see us hitting it off.
“Rose, I don’t understand anything .”
She nods kindly. She’s still talking to me, so surely whatever I did can’t be that bad? Forgivable, at least?
“There’s a four p.m. flight from Newcastle, via Melbourne,” Drew says, looking up from his phone, which he was apparently using to help me. I can’t read any situations right anymore. “Rose, would Evie’s parents welcome a visit?”
Yes. I can totally cast myself as the prodigal daughter. “I could surprise them?” I say, hopeful of a happy ending. Maybe I could film their reaction and it would go viral on SnapTok, or whatever it was everyone was talking about at the hospital, showing me videos, trying to cheer me up.
“Hmm,” Rose says, in obvious doubt.
“Yes?” Drew says, looking at me for the official go-ahead, finger poised over the booking button. How does he know my personal details? Does he need my birthdate? Oh. Of course. He knows more about me than I know about myself now, and that’s terrifying. He could influence the whole narrative if he wanted to. How would I know the difference?
Seconds later, the phone beeps with a confirmation of the purchase. He looks at me and nods, and I don’t know what he expects. Thank you , probably. Thank you for keeping me totally in the dark and making me feel more insecure than ever?
“We’ve got a few hours before we need to be at the airport,” he says, his voice calm and even.
“We?”
He looks taken aback. Like he thought I’d know that he was coming too. Aren’t we “barely in each other’s lives”?
“Like it or not, we’re in this together now,” he says. “You claim you haven’t had a knock to the head, but I’m not so sure.”
Flattering!
“You’ve lost your memory. You’re in no state to travel on your own—or at all, probably. And you don’t know what’s going to happen at the other end, in a city you’re unfamiliar with. It’s a recipe for disaster … as usual.”
The “as usual” is muttered. And it stings.
I will not cry in front of this man again.
He’s looking at me like I’m a liability. But when he sees me struggling to keep my emotions together, his expression softens. He looks like he wants to tell me it will be okay, but no words come out. Maybe because it won’t be.
“I’ll write down the address and phone number for you,” Rose says, scurrying away to get the details.
I know I should thank Drew for the tickets. And for coming. But instead, I just accuse him. “What kind of best friend are you?”
“I used to be the best kind,” he explains. There’s something deeply resonant and believable in his tone, and I can almost see the younger, less confident version of him that I must have known. I’m cut up that he didn’t tell me when I first got in his car, or when we pulled over and had that discussion about “where to next.” Why not last night on the clifftop, or over dinner, or when we were in the store getting supplies? Why did he keep from me the one piece of information that would have made sense of every moment he’s spent looking after me?
“And then what?” I ask. “What went wrong between us?”
What did he do?
I wish I could unsee the hurt in his eyes.