Poppy
“That’s Avi Galev,” Lillith says with a nod toward the Tan Man. “He’s my close security detail.”
“Your—your bodyguard?”
Get rid of Arra.
The sense of overwhelm and confusion starts breaking her open. She feels like a trapped rat in a lab maze. Lured into some plot she doesn’t understand. No idea who to believe. No clue who is aligned with whom. Or who to trust.
A tear plops onto the tablecloth.
“Poppy, it’s okay.”
Tears flow.
“Oh, my dear.” Lillith struggles to her feet and leans toward Poppy. “Come here.” Lillith wraps her arms around her, and just holds her. No one has held Poppy for years. Sobs begin to heave her body, and she is unable to stop her snotty blubbering until her emotion is spent.
When she finally sits back, drained, Lillith releases her and eases into her chair again.
“Is that what was worrying you, Poppy? Avi following us? Is he why you seemed unwell?”
Poppy inhales shakily and wipes her nose with her napkin, unsure what to say, or what move to make next. Avi is watching them brazenly now. Blocking any path of exit.
Avi Galev—he’s A.G.?
Lillith would have paid for his passage—that would explain Maxine’s comment. But why would a bodyguard leave a gift? Nothing in this puzzle is making sense.
“I didn’t know he was yours,” she manages. “I—I saw he was stalking us. I—” She doesn’t want to admit that she feared he was after revenge for her poisoning Paz. “I thought he was working with Arrabella. I saw them together—meeting.”
Lillith nods, reaches for her glass, sips water. “Yes. Arrabella was interfering.” She gives a mirthless laugh as she sets her glass down. “She’s no good for my Patrick. I needed him to see that on his own. So I asked Avi to help with her.”
“What do you mean ‘help with her’?”
“Listen, I’m running out of time, Poppy. I think you know that, on some level.”
“I—I saw the meds.”
“I have a very rapidly progressing form of ALS. I have perhaps six months at best before I’ll need advanced care—or worse. I’m preparing for my death. You also saw the book on my nightstand?”
Poppy swallows and nods.
“I have made a clear plan to wrap up the loose ends of my life. Having someone assist me with my memoir is a part of that. But”—she pauses, choosing her words carefully—“some rather unexpected events on the ship have forced me to bring my schedule rather sharply forward.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“The clock’s ticking—that’s the gist of it. And there are some things I want to tell you, Poppy. But first I must ask you a few questions. It’s important that you answer truthfully. Can you do that for me? Can you be honest?”
Or what?
The Tan Man will be summoned with a whistle?
Is this some kind of test? Give one wrong answer and I vanish from the cruise, just another missing-tourist statistic?
Or is this still a reckoning? For murdering Paz.
“Can you, Poppy?” Lillith’s features sharpen.
Poppy glances again at Avi. She nods, buying time.
“Tell me more about Africa.”
Her jaw drops. “What?”
“I want to know the truth about Africa.”
Walls slam up. Her heart begins to race.
She should never have opened up about that.
It was a stupid knee-jerk response to Arrabella’s snide dig about high-end cruises.
The Africa stuff had just spilled out because it’s something Poppy knew.
Of course she’s never been on any of those cruises.
She made it all up. But she has lived on a big rusty ship that was moored off the coasts of Liberia, Congo, Zaire.
The SS Mercy Grace—a floating hospital run by a global charity where her mum—a nurse—and her dad—a doctor—volunteered for years.
She was homeschooled on the Mercy Grace. Poppy helped in the clinics aboard the vessel. She ran barefoot through remote dusty villages, playing with children whose languages she didn’t understand but whose laughter she shared.
“I’m not sure what more I can tell,” she says blandly.
“You said the Africa cruise was your favorite?”
She avoids eye contact. “Yes.”
“Are you being honest?”
Her eyes sting. Her throat tightens.
The old combat journalist in Lillith has surfaced. She was once renowned for her probing questions, her sharp eye, for getting things out of people no one else could.
Poppy draws in a breath as a powerful sensation punches through her. Lillith—this whole trip—is splitting her wide open. Her carefully buried past is oozing out through the cracks, and it’s spilling all over the place, and she can’t seem to stop it. And it frightens her.
“Why am I here?” she blurts.
“I need you to answer my questions first.”
“I never went on a cruise. Okay? Happy? This is my first. I lived as a kid on a mercy vessel for a good chunk of my early life. Formative years. That’s the only ship I knew.
It was my home for months at a time over the years.
My community was a disparate group of volunteer medics—nurses, surgeons, doctors—from around the world.
Mostly religious people trying to do good.
Kids from rural villages were my friends.
I helped my mum. My dad traveled with vaccines to distant villages by dirt bike with a guide. ”
Lillith listens with a strange, hungry expression growing in her eye.
“But of course you know that world,” Poppy adds. “You worked all over Africa. You know what it can be like.”
“And your parents?”
“I’m really not that keen to talk about it.”
“Your past? Or your parents?”
Poppy has a hot sense Lillith already knows. So she needs to be careful. She reaches for her water, sips, clears her throat again, and dabs her mouth with a napkin. “I probably said too much last night—the wine, the cocktails, you know? It went to my head.”
Lillith smiles. Not in the patronizing you idiot for drinking too much again kind of way. But gently. And it feels confusing.
“Go on,” she urges. “Tell me about your parents. Your mom was a nurse?”
She nods.
“What was she like?”
“She was kind. Always busy. A lot of time for all the sick kids.”
“And for you?”
“She tried to balance it. But I was alone a lot. My true friends were books, mostly. The ship had a small library. I read everything in it.”
“This is why you carry a huge bag of books everywhere you go?”
“Support books, I suppose. I—I always have some with me. There was a lot of change in my life. The book characters were a constant. I revisit them whenever I need to.”
The waiter brings them coffee—one for Avi, too.
“And your dad?”
“More absent than my mom. He worked on tropical diseases. Did a lot of research.”
“What were their names?”
She hesitates. Saying their names out loud will bring pain back. She has so much unresolved grief.
“The truth, Poppy,” Lillith reminds her gently.
“Catherine and James.” She doesn’t give surnames. She still needs to hold some part of them private, close. Like a security blanket. They’re hers. Not to share with some rich woman who’s turning out to be very weirdly eccentric.
“And they died in a plane crash?”
Now Poppy balks. She doesn’t want to admit she lied.
Yes, it was a crash. But nothing exotic like a plane over blue African hills with lush jungles.
Just a horrible multi-vehicle pileup on the outskirts of Manchester, where they’d gone for a conference.
Her childish and imaginative mind turned their deaths into something a real heroine might experience.
More exotic. More dramatic. Worthy. So instead of answering, she looks away.
Lillith reaches for her hand again. Emotion floods Poppy’s eyes. She keeps her face turned away.
“Did you love them?” Lillith asks softly. “Were they good to you, Poppy?”
The question slices her to the raw, beating heart at her center. She removes her glasses and swipes tears away, feeling ridiculous—a boring, middle-aged woman sniffling over parents buried in a long-gone past. Who even does that?
“I really don’t know why you want to know, Lillith, or what you want with me.”
Lillith’s one-eyed gaze probes Poppy’s features, searching. Needy.
“Did you love them?” she presses.
“Yes. With my whole damn heart. They’re all I had, and when they left . . .” Her words collapse under a surge of old loss that swells like a ravenous monster in her chest. It squeezes her lungs so tight she can’t breathe, can’t talk.
Lillith waits.
“No one else wanted me,” Poppy says. “But they did. I was—the media called me the Tardis Baby. I was left as a newborn in an old police box. Wrapped in a thin blanket in the middle of a London cold snap. Just dumped. That’s who I am, Lillith.
Dumped. Unwanted. A baby abandoned in a bloody phone box.
It was outside a hospital that offered specialist obstetric care, and they rushed me inside.
A nurse—Catherine Montague—” She lets the surname slip.
“Your mother?”
“Yes. She helped care for me in that hospital while police searched for my real mother. Media made a huge spectacle of it. Everyone was talking about it, but no one came forward. They never found who left me there. So Catherine and her doctor fiancé took me home. They got married and officially adopted me. We became a family and they named me Helen, after Catherine’s mother.
They did it because they were good people. ”
Her voice hardens as old shame resurfaces. “So that’s who I am, Lillith. But somehow I think you already know all this about me. Because your security man has been digging up my past, and to be honest, if one digs, my dirty old past is probably not that hard to find.”
Lillith pushes back her chair and once more comes to her feet. She wraps both arms around Poppy and strokes her hair. “I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry.”
The soft, feminine scent of her perfume floods through Poppy, and her last inner walls simply just cave, and she crumbles into another blathering, snotty, crying mess—big, ugly, uncontrollable, body-heaving sobs shuddering her body.
And she feels she’s a little girl of four again.
Missing her mom. She doesn’t know what in God’s name has just happened to her, or how this weird woman has disarmed and broken her with kindness and simple questions.
Who on this sweet, violent earth still misses their mom in this way when they’re a middle-aged has-been?
When Poppy finally opens her eyes again, Avi has vanished. His table is empty save for the tiny Greek coffee cup. As though he were never there. Just a figment of her verdant imagination fed by a lifetime of fiction. The words from the Death List swim into her mind.
Give Poppy her due.
End it with Poppy.
RIP.