Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
CLAIRE
We took a corner of the Costa Blanca lobby like an occupying force, and for the next four hours nobody spoke to me the way you speak to a woman who's been left. They spoke to me the way you speak to a commander.
That was Mara. She'd watched me go grey by the fountain and made a fast private decision that what would save me wasn't comfort but a job, and she was right, she's almost always right about people, which is why she's hard to be married to, her husband says, and also why he's never once regretted it.
She got a day rate on a room to use as a base, put it on her own card without a flicker, and set up on the desk with her laptop and both our phones and a legal pad she'd produced from somewhere, because Mara travels with a legal pad the way other women travel with sunscreen.
"We stop guessing," she said. "Guessing is what he's counting on.
Guessing is what she's counting on. We deal only in what we can screenshot.
" She uncapped a pen. "Tessa, you're on the timeline.
Every text Vivienne sent Claire the last two weeks — screenshot it, timestamp it, put it in order.
Claire, get the bank back on the phone, and this time ask for the full itemized list, dates and locations, and write down every merchant. I'm building the day."
Tessa hadn't moved. She was on the end of the bed with the scarf still around her neck, the one from the plane, her hands folded in her lap like a child in church.
"There has to be an explanation." Her voice was very small.
"Maybe Grant ran into her. Maybe it's a coincidence, business people take the same cruises, maybe the company booked something and she was already?—"
"Tessa."
"She wouldn't do this. Not this. She's difficult, I know she's difficult, but she wouldn't strand us at that place on purpose so she could — no. No. People aren't like that."
I looked at Tessa and saw myself. Two days younger, on a damp bed under a mosquito net, saying Vivienne must not have known, holding a story shut with my whole body because what was behind it was too big to let into the room.
I loved her for it. And I couldn't afford it, not from her, not from myself, not anymore.
"Tessa," I said. "Look at the reflection."
"I looked at it."
"Look at it again and tell me whose watch that is."
She looked. She'd chipped in on that watch too, all four of us at the jeweler's, and I watched her find it, the little silver fact of it, and watched the explanation she'd been building come down inside her all at once — not dramatically, just a soft collapse into the thing it was always going to become.
"Oh," Tessa said. Then her hand went over her mouth, and she said it again through her fingers, "oh," and then she cried, quietly, the way she does everything, and Mara gave her exactly one minute before she said, not unkindly, "Okay. You've got the timeline. Go."
It took the four hours. The bank read me the itemized list and I read it out and Mara built the day on her legal pad like an accountant reconstructing a fraud, which is what she was doing.
A suite upgrade at eleven Monday morning, the same hour we'd been standing at the heron gate.
A spa charge at four, the same hour Delfina was explaining the philosophy of the currents.
Champagne, a boutique, a private cabana at a place called Solara Beach Club, and two excursion passes, and the passes had dates on them, and the dates were the thing.
Because a cruise ship isn't a hiding place.
A cruise ship is a schedule. Mara had the Aurora Celeste's itinerary in ninety seconds, published, public, a PDF any travel agent could pull.
She laid it beside the charges. The ship was in this port, our port, tonight and tomorrow.
And the two excursion passes on my frozen card were booked to Solara Beach Club, the white-umbrella place on the good coast, for tomorrow, eleven to three.
Somewhere in the middle of it I called him.
I'm not proud of it. It was the opposite of strong, a woman reaching for the thing that had always steadied her before she remembered the thing was the danger.
I shut myself in the bathroom of the day-rate room and called Grant, and this time, with real signal, it rang twice and he picked up, and my whole body went stupid with relief at the sound of him, a Pavlovian thing, sixteen years deep.
"Hey." Casual, a little rushed. Wind behind him, something. "Everything okay? You never call during the day."
"Where are you?" I said.
"Where am I? Work. Stepped out for air between meetings." The wind again. Sea wind. I can tell office air from sea wind now; I learned it in that bathroom. "Why, what's up? Is the trip a bust? You sound weird."
"The trip's a bust," I said, and I listened to myself hand him the easy exit, watched myself do it from up near the ceiling. "Resort's a disaster. No AC, no signal. We left."
"That's a shame, babe. Viv must be sick about it.
" Not a beat of hesitation on Viv. "Look, I've got to get back in, your dad's got the four o'clock.
Text me where you land. Love you." And he was gone, and I stood in the bathroom holding a dead phone, and through the door Mara said, "Well?
" and I said, "He says he's at work," and Mara said, very quietly, "Claire, there is no four o'clock today.
Your father's in Palm Beach with your mother.
My husband golfed with him yesterday." And that was the last wall.
He'd reached for my father's four o'clock, the one he'd complained about to Vivienne in a room that smelled of eucalyptus, and used it to get off the phone with me, and my father wasn't even in the state.
Mara circled the eleven o'clock twice. She turned the legal pad around so I could see, the way she'd turned her phone around at the fountain, and looked at me over the top of it, and there was nothing left of the difficult friend in her face. Only the loyal one, who'd been under it the whole time.
"This is not a coincidence," she said. "A coincidence is one thing that happens. This is eleven things happening in a row on your credit card. This is an itinerary."
I looked at the pad. Eleven o'clock. Solara Beach Club. Tomorrow.
Tessa had stopped crying. She'd picked up the legal pad and was reading it over and over, and something was shifting in her too, the neutrality finally burning off, and when she set it down her voice had changed.
"She booked us the worst place on the island so we'd have no signal, no way out, no way to know.
She didn't just miss the trip. She used it. She used us."
"Yes," Mara said.
"There's a version where we just go home.
" Mara said it carefully, laying it out as an option, not a recommendation, because she's scrupulous about the difference.
"We fly out tonight. You never see the beach club.
You deal with him on your own ground, with lawyers, your family behind you, where you're strong and he's got nowhere to run.
That's the clean version. I'd almost tell you to take it.
" She tapped the pad. "But you should know what you'd be giving up.
If you don't go, you never watch his face.
You hear about it. You get the version he decides to give you, filtered through his fear, and you spend the rest of your life wondering what he'd have done if you'd been standing there.
Some women can live with the wondering. Some can't."
"What would you do," I said.
"Don't ask me that. It's not my marriage."
"What would you do, Mara."
She looked at me a long moment. "I'd go.
I'd want to see it with my own eyes so no story he ever told me could unsee it.
But I'm not you, and going costs something.
Whatever he does at that club, you carry it, live, in your body, for good.
There's no version where you watch it and it doesn't mark you. "
Tessa had been folding and unfolding the corner of the pad.
"I'll go wherever Claire goes," she said, and it came out steadier than anything she'd said in three days.
"I spent the first day of this defending her.
I owe you the second half. You want to look at him, I'll stand next to you while you do. "
I stood up. My legs held, which surprised me, I'd expected them not to.
Instead I was standing in a cold clean hotel room with the fountain coming faint through the wall, looking at an itinerary in another woman's handwriting, and what I felt wasn't what I'd braced for.
I'd braced for grief. Grief was coming, I could feel it out past the reef, a hard flat weight of it.
But standing there, what I felt was clear.
That night I finally took the hot shower I'd been dreaming about, and it was the strangest shower of my life, the water hot and endless and clean, everything I'd wanted since the heron gate, and I stood in it and felt nothing but a low steady clarity.
I didn't cry there either. I kept waiting to come apart the way I'd always assumed I would, and I kept not coming apart, and the not-coming-apart scared me worse than crying would have. I stood under it until it ran cold.
Then I put on the hotel robe and sat on the end of the bed while Mara worked and Tessa slept, and looked at the itinerary one more time.
"I want to go home," I said, and I watched Mara's face start to fall, and then I finished it.
"But not yet. First I want to see it. I want to see him.
" I picked up the room phone, the one that worked, connected to a world with power in it all night long.
"Call Mateo. Tell him eleven o'clock. Tell him to take us to the dock. "