Chapter 47
Maggie had never felt more exhausted. Her leg muscles spiked with the burn of lactic acid; a deep pressure was throbbing at her temples; her breath came in uneven gasps.
Helena and Joni hadn’t spoken a word to one another. The argument hung over them all, weighting the atmosphere. Helena marched at the front; Joni lagged at the rear. Sandwiched by their animosity, Liz and Maggie walked in silence, too.
Despite the strengthening wind, Maggie was hot beneath her jacket. She paused to unzip it, tying it around her waist. The freckled skin on her arms was flushed pink. She stretched one way and then the other, easing out her back.
Joni drew closer, gaze on the ground, expression bleak. Wisps of dark hair had escaped her bandanna. The verve and spark that she’d blazed with onstage at the lodge had burned out, and she looked tired and fragile now.
“You okay?” Maggie asked.
Joni shook her head. “I’m a shit person.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Everything Helena said about me—it’s true. I wasn’t there for her when her mum died. I should have been. And you, Mags,” she said, eyes misting, “she’s right. After you and Aidan ended, I didn’t check in enough. I let you down.”
Maybe there was some truth in that. At the time, Maggie had felt abandoned—but there was no point kicking someone when they were down. “You were away. I understood.”
“But you shouldn’t have to understand! I want to be the type of friend who you can rely on. Like Liz and Helena.”
She was right that Liz and Helena had been brilliant. It was Liz who’d found the house she was now renting, and who’d given up a weekend to help her move in. Helena had driven down, too, arriving with food to stock her cupboards and two bottles of champagne, “to toast your freedom!”
“I could have called you, messaged, sent something for Phoebe. But I didn’t,” Joni said. “There’s something wrong with me. I think about doing something nice—and then I never follow through!”
Maggie knew that Joni lived so fully in the moment that sometimes she didn’t pause to think outside of that reality.
If she was out drinking, she’d never be the one to think ahead about the early start, or the hangover that would come.
Maggie suspected that when Joni was apart from them, it was like they didn’t exist. It wasn’t Joni being callous or selfish—she was simply living in another moment, and they weren’t part of it.
“You three—you’re everything I have.” Joni’s eyes were teary. “And I just . . . I keep messing up.”
“We’re always going to be here. We love you.”
“But I don’t deserve you. Any of you. There are things I’ve done . . . ,” she said, looking ahead at Helena, then Liz. She shook her head, trailing off.
“Joni?”
“Sorry. I’m not good company. I think . . . I just need to be on my own for a bit.” Without waiting for a response, she picked up her pace, leaving Maggie alone on the trail.
The stony path continued to ascend steeply, weaving past boulders. The vegetation grew sparse, hard-growing grasses and tough shrubs poking between rocks. She imagined that in a few more weeks, the trail they were walking on would be buried beneath snow.
Maggie slipped a hand into her pocket and felt the bracelet she’d tucked there. She pressed the cool silver between her fingertips, turning each letter of Karin’s name like it was a rosary.
Her thoughts spun back to the moment in the woods when she’d stepped off the trail, separating from the others.
She remembered the clean slice of fear when she realized that she was lost. A cold dread of being alone out there.
Then she recalled Erik appearing from the shadows, staring right at her.
Hooded eyes dark and disturbed. Karin, he’d whispered, turning her blood cold.
Maggie rotated the letters harder, feeling the press of each of them.
Had it been Erik they’d spotted on the beach entering the cave? She thought of the sagging backpack he’d been carrying in the woods. Plenty of space to fill it with bags of cocaine.
Soon Erik—or whoever was down there—would discover that some of the cocaine was missing. He’d follow the footprints. Would know what they’d done.
She checked over her shoulder. Her chest tightened as she wondered when he’d come for them. How long it would take for him to catch up. And what would happen when he did.