SHE BOOKED MY GIRLS’ TRIP. THEN TOOK MY HUSBAND. (What About Your Friends #2)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

CLAIRE

The car dropped us at the little regional airport a little after six, and Vivienne wasn't there.

I knew it before the text came. Something about the empty curb, maybe, the sun not up and no Vivienne fussing over whether we'd all worn the right shoes for the flight. Then my phone buzzed, and it only told me what I'd already stopped letting myself feel.

Claire, I am DYING. Aunt Rosalind fell in the bath and they're saying maybe her hip. I'm at the hospital, I can't leave her, I'm so so sorry. Everything's booked and paid. Go without me. Don't you dare cancel. I love you. Send me pictures of the villas or I'll cry harder.

I read it twice, then out loud, because Mara was standing right there with a coffee in each hand and a face that could curdle milk.

"Her aunt," she said. Not a question.

"Rosalind. The one in Sarasota. She's eighty-something, it happens. My mother went down last spring reaching for a Christmas tin she'd left on a shelf since July."

Mara handed me one of the coffees without asking how I take it. She never asks. She just knows, which is about the four hundredth small reason she's easy to travel with and Vivienne isn't.

Tessa came through the glass doors already apologizing for something she hadn't done. "Is Viv okay? I saw the message. Should some of us stay? It feels awful, going without her."

"She told us to go. She'd be more upset if we canceled." I slid the phone into my back pocket. "You know how she is about the trip."

We all knew how she was about the trip. It had been hers for six years, the way a holiday belongs to whoever refuses to give it up.

She picked the place and the flights and the restaurants and the group photo, then acted faintly amazed when we thanked her.

I'd quit fighting her for it around year three.

Letting her have it cost me nothing, and explaining why I didn't need it back would have cost us both something I couldn't name.

Grant had driven me to meet the car that morning.

Up early, which he never was, coffee made, which he never did, and he carried my bag down and kissed me at the door with both hands on my shoulders.

"Have the best time. You've earned it. Don't think about anything here, I've got it all handled.

" And I stood there in the dark at six in the morning thinking, this is the man I married.

He's just tired lately. Look how sweet he's being.

He waited by the curb until the car pulled off.

In the side mirror I watched him lift a hand, and I lifted mine, and then the road took him.

So we went. Three of us and a flight, a change, a smaller plane, then a van whose shocks had died sometime in the last decade, on a road that gave up being a road about halfway and became more of a suggestion.

Through the trees the water kept flashing that hard mineral blue you only get near the equator.

Whatever this turns into, I thought, at least it'll be beautiful.

Cala Sombra sat at the end of the road behind a wooden gate carved with a heron.

The website had said sanctuary eleven times.

I'd counted, not because I was suspicious but because Vivienne had pasted a paragraph of her own over the link.

Fully off-grid by design. A real reset, the kind we all pretend we want and then check our phones through.

She'd made it sound like a dare. Even for her it was a little pointed, and I'd let it go, the way I let most of her small edges go.

The gate opened onto a courtyard of raked sand and one enormous flowering tree, and for about ninety seconds it was everything she'd promised. Then a young man in a linen shirt came out with a clipboard and a smile that was working too hard.

"Whitmore, Ellison, Lang," Mara said. "Four booked, one canceled. We'll take the three."

"Of course. Welcome to your reset." He said reset the way a flight attendant says unlikely event. "You're in the Frangipani villa, the three of you together, that's all right? The generator schedule makes the single villas tricky. We like to keep guests grouped in the evenings."

"The generator schedule," Mara said.

"Power's on six to ten in the morning and five to ten at night.

It's part of the philosophy. Guests tell us they sleep better than they have in years.

" He was already walking. We followed, because he was moving and we were tired and we'd come too far to stand at a gate arguing with a man about a philosophy.

The Frangipani villa smelled like a basement that had once been near the sea.

Damp in the walls, in the woven mats, in the mosquito netting that hung over three narrow beds like something from a war film.

No air conditioning — just a ceiling fan that wasn't turning and a window that opened onto more still air.

Tessa set her bag down like the floor might be listening. "It's rustic. Rustic's fine, we wanted to disconnect."

"There's no signal." Mara was holding her phone up by the window, then the ceiling, then out over the porch rail toward the trees. "Not weak. None. Claire, check yours."

One bar came and went like a held breath, then nothing. "There's Wi-Fi at the lodge," I said, because the boy with the clipboard had told us so on the walk. "For emergencies."

"For emergencies." Mara laughed, short and joyless. "Do you know what this place costs a night? I looked it up on the plane. You want to know?"

"No." And I meant it. I've never wanted to know what things cost. It always seemed easier not to, and kinder somehow, a way of not putting the number in front of anyone.

I sat on the edge of the middle bed. The netting swayed. Somewhere outside, a generator I couldn't see coughed once and died and didn't come back.

Tessa unpacked. She's a woman who unpacks the second she lands anywhere, drawers and hangers, a nest against the world, and she did it now in the dim heat with the sweat already at her hairline, hanging sundresses that would never dry if they got wet.

"The book at the desk says the plumeria blooms twice a year," she said.

"We might've caught the bloom. That would be something, wouldn't it?

" Talking to fill the quiet so the quiet couldn't say anything back.

Mara had gone to try the shower. The pipes knocked, groaned in the wall, then came the flat splatter of water on tile, and then her voice, very calm, which is how I knew it was bad.

"There's no hot. I don't mean it's warming up.

The knob turns one way and the one way is cold.

" A pause. "Brown for the first ten seconds, then cold and clear. So. Options."

"It's a rinse," Tessa said. "In this heat a cold rinse is nice. People pay for cold plunges."

"People pay for cold plunges after a sauna, Tess, not instead of a life." Mara came out drying her hands on a towel with the texture of a paper bag. She looked at me on the bed and softened a degree, the way she does when she remembers I'm a person and not a problem to solve. "You okay?"

"I'm fine. Tired." I pulled my hair off my neck.

The damp had already gotten into it, that heavy tropical weight.

"It's one night. We'll figure the rest out in the morning when we can think.

Vivienne wouldn't send us somewhere with no way out.

There'll be a car, a shuttle, something. She thinks of everything."

"She does think of everything." Mara held my eyes a beat too long. "That's what's bothering me."

I didn't ask what she meant. I could feel her walking toward something, and I turned away and unpacked my own bag instead, slow, folding shirts into a drawer that smelled of mildew, buying my way out of the conversation with the small honest labor of putting things away.

"She must not have known," I said. "About the AC, the signal. She'd never send us somewhere like this on purpose. You know how she is about the pictures. She'd want the pictures."

Mara looked at me for a while. She has a way of deciding, right in front of you, between the true thing and the kind thing, and she isn't by nature a kind-thing person, so when she picks it you know it cost her.

"Sure," she said finally. "Maybe she didn't know."

Dinner was at seven, when the evening power came up, in a long open room strung with bulbs that flickered every time the generator strained.

They gave us a fish I couldn't identify over rice cooked into a single object, and a salad that tasted like the inside of the villa smelled.

Four other guests, all couples, all with the glazed patience of people who've decided to enjoy a mistake because the alternative is admitting they made one.

A German man asked where our fourth was.

Tessa said, "Family emergency," and he nodded like he'd expected exactly that, like this was a place fourth women went missing from.

His wife leaned over the guttering candle.

She had the sunburn of someone who'd trusted the shade.

"We booked seven nights," she said, and there was a warning in it, woman to woman.

"We're on night four. My advice, given with love: don't read the reviews now.

Read them when you're home. It's a better story than it is a Tuesday.

" Her husband said her name, low. She waved him off.

"What. I'm helping. Somebody should have helped us. "

Mara put down her fork. "Were the reviews bad?"

"The reviews were honest, that's different.

The photos on the site are from another resort, I'm nearly sure of it.

Here you can't swim. My husband tried the first day and came back with his shin open like a book.

" The husband said her name again. She ignored him again.

"Forty-eight hours to arrange a car. Did they tell you? Forty-eight hours. For a car."

"They told us." Mara had gone very still now, that gathering stillness. "When did you find out about the forty-eight hours?"

"When we tried to leave." She laughed without any joy in it and picked up her fork, and that was the end of the helping.

I ate what I could. Under the table Tessa's knee kept jumping, and I put a hand on it once without thinking, the way you'd steady a child.

It stilled, then started again a minute later.

The bulbs dimmed and surged. In the kitchen a radio played some bright accordion thing completely at odds with the room.

I'd have paid a genuinely stupid amount of money right then for a cold room, a working phone, and the sound of my husband's voice.

I tried to call him after dinner. Stood at the lodge under the one strong bulb and held the Wi-Fi long enough to dial, and it rang and rang and went to the voicemail he never checks. I texted instead. Made it. Not exactly what the website promised, ha. Miss you already. How was the board thing?

The reply came an hour later, when I'd nearly given up and gone back. It dropped into that doorway while I was slapping a mosquito off my ankle, and I still remember the exact grey of it on the screen.

Long day. Board dinner ran late. Glad you got there safe. Love you.

No question about the trip. No how are the girls. No send me a picture even though there's no signal. Just the neat little brick of a message a man sends to close a door softly.

He's tired, I told myself. I'm tired. The damp and the fish and the flickering bulbs had put an edge on everything, and in the morning the water would be blue and I'd laugh about all of it.

I felt my way back through the dark. The generator gave out at ten on the dot, the bulbs died together, and the island went so black I had to keep one hand on the rough bark of the flowering tree the whole way.

Inside, Mara was sitting up in bed with a battery lantern and her phone, and her face in that light was doing something I didn't have a name for yet.

"I asked the guy about leaving early," she said quietly, so as not to wake Tessa, who had finally stopped tossing. "In case we wanted out. Just in case."

"And?"

"Transport has to be arranged forty-eight hours ahead. Next scheduled shuttle to anywhere is Thursday." She turned the lantern so it lit only the space between us. "Claire. It's Monday."