CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 11
THE MORNING SUN WAS CHEERY, AND BIRDS CHIRPED HAPPILY FROM their perches in the trees outside the house. Ness determined that, so far, she wasn’t suffering from blood poisoning, gangrene, or anything worse than a nasty scrape. When she’d woken up, Ian had been on his mattress, drooling on the balled-up pants he used as a pillow. All in all, things were looking up.
“Today’s the day. I can feel it,” Tyler said as he passed around water and subdivided portions of prepackaged peanut butter crackers.
Hayes surreptitiously cracked his knuckles, smiling politely while almost certainly edging toward a mental-health cliff. He was great at playing it like a laid-back, go-with-the-flow kind of guy, but the signs were still there if you knew what to look for.
Ness looked down at her sweat-and-dirt-encrusted clothes and felt her nose crinkle with disgust. She’d taken a page from Ian’s book and hacked her jeans into shorts using a dull kitchen knife and brute strength. The resulting aesthetic was certainly more temperature-appropriate, but also looked very much like she’d chewed through the denim with her recently whitened teeth. Though she was loath to admit it, the idea of being rescued and inevitably photographed looking (and smelling) like this was off-putting.
She popped her second and final cracker into her mouth, chasing it with half a mason jar of water, still steamy from being boiled during a half hour of generator use at the crack of dawn. That the electric stove functioned at all was a blessing given the state of the place. She glared at the jar, wishing for coffee. Her stomach rumbled in protest, and she eyed the tidy but dwindling stack of food on the kitchen island, sighing.
“I’m going swimming,” she announced, sliding off her stool as Hayes surreptitiously performed some square breathing. In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Maybe a dunk in the ocean would take his mind someplace less dire. She knew it would make her feel more human.
“Ohmigod, take me with you?” Daisy pranced to her side and was practically vibrating with excitement. She was very charming, Ness had to admit. If she was going to have a TV daughter, Daisy was a good one.
“Yeah, sign me up too.” Coco stretched her arms over her head and yawned, coming in from the living room. It seemed that their circumstances weren’t hampering her ability to enjoy a lie-in. She swiped her cracker and water allotment from the counter and downed it all like medicine. Her hair was sticking up on one side in an epic display of bedhead, and the bright morning light made her look every one of her forty-four years.
As Ness turned to see if Libby was going to grace them with her presence, she caught sight of Daisy, eyelids low, a flush creeping up her pale neck as she watched Coco move across the room.
“What’s happening?” Ian asked as they made their way to the door.
“Swimming,” Coco explained breezily.
“I’m in!” He yelled back into the house, “Come on, guys! Swim time!”
* * *
It was agreed that the women would swim on the beach where they’d originally come ashore, while the menfolk made their way along the white sand and rounded the tip of the island to their own patch of privacy behind a row of palm trees and other, more wild-looking foliage.
Ness, Daisy, and Coco stripped to their underthings and waded in. Ness hissed as the salt water stung the cut on her ankle.
“I’d go full skin,” Coco said, “but this stuff needs a rinse anyway.” Libby had trailed after them, twisting her hair into a tidy high bun as she walked. She’d produced a silky, botanical-patterned robe from somewhere and, much to Ness’s chagrin, still looked great. At first, she sat in the sand at the water’s edge, toes being tickled by the waves as they washed up.
Then Daisy clambered up onto Coco’s shoulders so she could cannonball into the clear blue water.
“Hey! I can see Hayes’s butt from here!” she called, shading her eyes with a pruny hand.
Ness hastily blinked water out of her eyes.
Daisy smirked at her. “Must have been a trick of the light.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Ness muttered, ignoring the heat flooding her cheeks.
Daisy shot her a look that made it clear she wasn’t fooling anyone, then jumped from her perch. She knocked Coco over in the process and soaked Ness, leaving everyone sputtering with laughter. Even Libby couldn’t hide the hint of a smile that cracked her crusty veneer.
Coco saw it too and waded toward her.
“Get in here, Kim.”
“Absolutely not.” Libby scooched backward. Ness couldn’t believe it. Libby had practically lived at the beach when they were younger. She’d even learned to surf with middling success. Ness hadn’t made it past their first lesson.
She’d read things online about Libby doubling down on her image—always cool and collected, rarely photographed smiling. It had started in her twenties, this chilly exterior, but with her friends she’d still been her. Warm and deadly funny. Ness wondered when that had changed.
“You don’t want the paps to see you like this, do you?” Coco pulled a face. “Consider it an exfoliating treatment. Or an ultra-mod, niche meditation circle where the meditating looks like having fun.” She kept edging closer, until she bent suddenly and grabbed Libby’s ankle with both hands, dragging her across the sand and into the sea, clothes and all.
Libby screamed like she was being abducted, threatening them all with a thousand years of pain and destruction. Then, wonder of wonders, she started to laugh, scooping up water and flinging it at Coco’s face.
Coco was so shocked by the sound that she froze for a second, giving Libby the time she needed to mount a full, no-holds-barred counterattack. With the agility of a snarky bottlenose dolphin, she launched herself from the sea, wrapping her arms and legs around Coco. She rocked her weight abruptly to the left, chucking the other woman into the surf.
Ness and Daisy stood, mouths agape, gentle waves lapping against their hips.
“Savage,” Daisy said quietly.
Libby directed a laser-vision stare at a sputtering, snot-nosed Coco. “I. Don’t. Swim,” she said, voice cutting like a sword.
She was halfway out of the water when Bradley, Ian, Tyler, and Hayes came sprinting around the top corner of the island. All of them, except Bradley, were completely naked. Well, Tyler was more staggering than sprinting, pasty skin blinding in the sunlight, but the others were basically an ad for a very, very adult Baywatch.
They clutched clothes over their, um, more sensitive bits as they ran.
“Are you okay?!” Hayes yelled when they were in shouting distance. “Who was screaming?” Their heads swiveled from woman to woman, their pace slowing as they approached and it became clear that no one was in immediate distress.
“What. The. Actual. Hell,” panted Ian. “We thought someone was being eaten by a shark or abducted by pirates or drowning, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that would happen this week.” He bent over, hands on his knees, his lump of penis-shielding clothes dropped carelessly to the ground.
Libby glared at Coco. “I was assaulted.”
“You were fucking not.” Coco swiped a hand through her short hair, pushing it back off her face.
The men looked at Daisy and Ness for clarification.
“Misunderstanding,” Ness offered, keeping her gaze on some fluffy clouds off to her left.
“Yup,” Daisy seconded. “For a second Libby thought she might be having fun. She panicked.”
Ness snuck a look at Daisy, impressed by her sass in the face of a livid Libby. She noticed that Daisy was not averting her gaze. Then she noticed . . .
“Hey, Ian? Could you maybe, um, put some pants on?”
“Oh, like you’re any better.” He gestured to their soaked underwear. Admittedly, it wasn’t leaving much to the imagination.
Ness sighed for what felt like the ten thousandth time in the last seventy-two hours.
“Everyone, cover thyselves!” Coco hollered.
With a great deal of strategic positioning, Ness managed to get herself to the beach, grab her clothes, and tug them onto her wet body.
“I was going to air-dry,” she grumbled.
“I wasn’t going to charge to the rescue, junk flopping, but here we are,” Hayes said from his designated changing area a few feet away. They’d spread out a bit and turned their backs to each other for some semblance of privacy.
“Old habits, eh?” Ness said it hopefully, a tentative, easy lob of a reconciliation ball.
Hayes smiled at her as he buttoned his shorts. He looked relaxed, at least for the moment. Ness tried not to stare. Failed.
Nearby, Ian let out a frustrated growl and hurled his shirt to the sand.
“You okay, man?” Bradley asked. He slid his sunglasses onto his nose and stretched his arms over his head, grabbing a low-hanging branch and pulling himself up until his chin was above the rough bark.
“No. I’m not okay,” Ian snapped, mood turning on a dime. “I’m everything that is the opposite of okay. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I smell like a wet dog. There’s sand in my boxers. I’m hungry.”
Ness quickly finished getting dressed, resigning herself to sporting the distinct outline of a wet bra on her shirt. She took at peek at Ian and realized he looked . . . bad. No one looked great, but he was pale and sweating more than the nudist jaunt along the sand really warranted.
She stepped closer. “Do you feel sick?” She moved her hand to his forehead, wondering if he had a fever, but he batted it away.
“Don’t. Don’t touch me.”
“Oookay.”
Ian stomped off, heading away from the house. Libby watched him go for the length of one slow breath, then went wordlessly up the hill in the opposite direction.They all stood there, heads awkwardly swiveling, watching the two of them go.
“We should start a fire,” Ness announced as Ian disappeared around a corner and the tall grass swallowed Libby.
“Ugh. Yeah, I guess we may as well,” Coco agreed reluctantly. “It doesn’t seem like rescue is swooping in any time soon.” She froze, then stomped the sand. “Fuck. I’m supposed to have a video meeting with a director tomorrow.”
“I’m supposed to be on set in two days.” Hayes rubbed his eyes. “I already threw the original schedule out the window to be here. They’re going to kill me.” He looked up the hill at the crumbling castle. “If I don’t die here, of course.”
“Death is unlikely,” Bradley said idly, dropping back to the ground and twirling a stick like a baton between his fingers. “We, well, I have the skills we need. We could live, if not happily or particularly well, without imminent peril, for, ohhh . . .” He cracked the stick in half and let the pieces drop. “Months, I’d say.”
Ness ignored him, gathering wood from the beach. It was damp, but she figured with enough dedication they could get it lit.
The air smelled like salt water and grass, and if she closed her eyes and tuned out the noise of the others, she could imagine she was on Eclipse Island enjoying a quiet moment between takes. For most of her L.A. life, she’d loved those moments of anticipation before heading back in front of the camera to transform into someone else. So much about that life didn’t live up to the hype, but there were pieces of it she’d mourned for a long, long time.
Her eyes fluttered open, revealing undulating palm fronds and their beautiful but disappointing reality.
Tyler walked slowly back and forth across the sand, picking up sticks. He was being awfully quiet for someone who had been consistently providing the most annoying commentary at every opportunity. She wondered how he felt, being marooned here with them. At least most of them had some semblance of a relationship to fall back on, as fraught as those connections may be, and Daisy seemed to be fitting comfortably into their dynamic. But Tyler was the odd man out. Was it getting to him? In his place, Ness would have felt, well, at sea. She stifled a burst of mildly unhinged laughter at her terrible joke.
When they’d gathered a waist-height pyramid of driftwood and semi-dry grass, Ness pulled a book of matches from the bag she’d brought down with her. Ian had a lighter, she knew, but she really preferred not to ask any favors of him at the moment. Also, the walk up to the house and back was killer.
She burned through five without getting any hint of a stable flame going.
Hayes held out his hand. “May I?”
Ness plopped the matches into his palm. “Knock yourself out.” She paused. “Not literally, please.”
She wanted to talk about the night before and apologize for being so stubborn, but she could feel Tyler watching them intently, even while he pretended to be focused on peeling bark from a stick, and she chickened out.
Hayes lit the match and gently cupped the flame with his free hand, bringing it to some tendrils of grass that stuck out from the bottom of the brush pile. He leaned in close, blowing softly on the glowing tips until they caught. He quickly struck another match, and another, performing the same magic until there were two matches left and the small sticks they’d stacked near the grass were starting to crackle merrily. He passed the matchbook back.
“For emergencies.”
“Sure,” Ness said, sliding it into her back pocket.
They stood in a circle, watching the flames lick at the carefully arranged wood. There was a collective sigh of relief as an impressive cloud of smoke started floating upward. They’d done it. They’d made fire. Ness felt the same sense of satisfaction she got from successfully retiling a foyer or single-handedly building a new section of fence. She smiled at Hayes. He smiled back, slowly, sexier than anyone had any business being. She felt her cheeks flush and hoped he’d put it down to the sun and heat from the fire.
“I require shade and a paltry sip of warm water,” Coco said, sashaying to the path.
Bradley stared out to sea for a long moment before he, too, turned and made to leave. “I need to . . .” He trailed off as he walked.
Tyler, Ness noticed, was turning a shade of red usually associated with crustaceans.
“You need to get out of the sun,” she told him.
Tyler craned his neck to get a look at his bare shoulders. “Ugh. I have the sunblock on and everything.” He rambled off toward the house, hands held over his shoulders like ergonomically horrific protective armor.
Hayes, Ness, and Daisy looked from the fire to each other.
“Someone has to stay here to keep an eye on it and add more wood,” Ness said, resigning herself to an afternoon with the mosquitoes that were slowly getting closer and more abundant as the shade of the trees began to shift onto the edges of the beach.
“I’ll do it,” Hayes and Daisy offered at the same time.
Ness looked at them doubtfully. “You both want to sit here cooking in the sun and being slowly devoured by the native wildlife?”
Hayes’s forehead crinkled as he thought it through. “Well, no. But it doesn’t seem fair that you should do it by default.”
“Really, guys,” Daisy said, shooing them toward the path. “I’ve got this. Someone can come swap with me in a couple of hours.”
“Are you sure?” Ness was having a hard time not feeling guilty about leaving her there alone. She knew it was probably safe, but despite people splitting off on their own more and more, she couldn’t shake a default desire to travel in pairs outside the confines of the house.
Daisy wasn’t concerned. “Sure, I’m sure! This is nothing, really. I’ll see if I can find some more of the stuff that fell out of the cooler, maybe go for a swim. It could be nice to have some time on my own. No big whoop.”
A mosquito landed on Ness’s cheek. After hitting herself in the face and delicately wiping bug remnants from her hands, she looked at Daisy, who was now propping fallen palm fronds up in the sand to create some shade.
“Okay, but I’ll be back in a bit.” She figured by then she’d want to escape the constant bickering in the house.
Daisy gave her a thumbs-up. Her hair was loose, falling in perfect beachy waves around her shoulders. She looked like an ad for a high-end vacation.
Hayes steered Ness to the path.
“Let’s go before she changes her mind,” he murmured, his breath a minty whisper across her cheek.
Ness cast an uncertain look over her shoulder. Daisy waved jauntily.
“Don’t worry!” she called. “I’ve got you covered!”
Working her way up the hill behind Hayes, her feet sliding over the loose sand, Ness figured she may as well get an apology out of the way.
“Sorry about last night,” she panted. “I was feeling . . . many things, and I didn’t react well to your kind offer of help.” Grabbing a handful of sharp-edged grass, she heaved herself along, eyes on the ground, while she waited for him to reply. This resulted in a rather forceful collision with his back when he stopped moving.
“Oof,” Ness grunted, staggering. Hayes turned and grabbed her arm, steadying her before she could topple off the path.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, his hand still resting lightly above her left elbow.
She squinted up at him. “About what?”
“I tend to push when I should let things go.”
“Oh.” How was she supposed to interpret that?
His hand dropped back to his side. “We should get out of the sun. Tyler’s going to have a fit if we burn.”
* * *
After parting ways with Hayes at the front door, Ness was ready for a snooze. Maybe a nice snack of, erm, room temperature water. Instead, she found herself on a scouting mission with Tyler.
“Thanks for coming along,” he said, panting slightly. They had looped around the lagoon—murky and likely filled with alligators or piranhas—and followed an overgrown trail to the beach at the top end of the island. In normal conditions it would have been an easy, if buggy, hike. In their exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated state it felt more like they were running a marathon.
“I would have been happy—more than happy!—to do this alone,” he continued. “But there’s something about having company that makes it much more pleasant, don’t you think?”
Ness wasn’t sure she’d call it pleasant, but given how often Tyler’s shoddy eyesight had come up, she didn’t think traipsing around by himself was the safest or most productive option. With their luck, he’d fall off a cliff or disappear into the dense inner-island foliage, unable to navigate out.
They were ostensibly there to search for a means of escape, but Ness got the sense that Tyler was filling the hours until bedtime. He’d been about to head out the door solo, but Ness had volunteered to tag along. She needed time out of the house to reflect on Hayes’s comment—let what (or who) go?—and the idea of exploring the island a bit more appealed to her. What if there was a secret food stockpile somewhere? Or, better yet, a long-forgotten but still entirely functional small yacht?
“No problem,” Ness assured him, though there was, in fact, a problem. She needed to pee. Badly.
“Um, hey, Tyler?”
“Mmhmm?” His head swiveled side to side, looking for signs of hidden watercraft or a tree large enough to carve an ocean canoe for eight from.
“I need to duck into the shrubbery here for a second.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s a great idea. We don’t know what could be lurking in there . . .” He trailed off when he saw her crossed legs and desperate shifting.
“Ohhhhhhh. Into the shrubbery.” He all but winked at her.
“Yeah.”
“Okay! Yes. You should do that. I’ll, um, I’ll be right here, but looking, uh, this way? Is this way fine?”
“That way is great. Be right back.”
She finished her business and was heading back to Tyler when she saw the shed. It was set back into the trees, painted dark green with a dark metal roof. It blended so easily into the shadows and dappled light that she might not have seen it at all if it hadn’t been for the birds.
There were about fifty of them scattered over the roof and surrounding fallen logs. Their white bodies were topped with charcoal wings and a slightly darker cap, with a long white feather trailing from the backs of their heads like the iconic rat-tail hairstyle of the early nineties. They chirruped and . . . quacked? Ness couldn’t quite describe it, but they were loud, strutting around on spindly orange-yellow legs like curmudgeonly old men.
“Hey!” she called to Tyler.
“Yes?”
“Come here! There’s a shed. And a whole whack of birds.”
He edged through the low-hanging branches, managing to get hit in the face by no fewer than three of them, and came to stand beside her. He smelled like a teenage boy, sweat comingled with the stale remnants of a deodorant that probably had an extreme alpha-male name. She would have taken him for more of a fresh linen kind of guy.
“Oh wow,” he said, hands on his knees, puffing slightly. “That’s definitely a whack of birds. Are they . . . guarding this place?”
“Maybe they live here?” Ness said uncertainly. The shed was big. Big enough to hold a dinghy or tin boat, for sure. The door hung off its hinges, giving them a tantalizing glimpse of the inside.
“Should we get closer?” Tyler asked, eyeing the birds nervously.
“Yeah. They’ll probably fly away, right?”
“They look . . . strong-willed.”
Ness refused to admit it, but they were surprisingly intimidating. Each one was larger than a crow but smaller than the Canada geese she’d grown up dodging in parks. In a flock this size, that added up to a lot of bird mass.
She walked forward slowly. The birds raised their heads to track her movements.
“Maybe try running at them,” Tyler suggested. “But carefully. And remember, the network isn’t liable for any injuries sustained here.”
Ness turned to see that he’d actually moved farther away, tucking himself partially behind a tree. She rolled her eyes and continued her cautious approach. Her avian observers puffed up their feathers but didn’t relinquish ground. She was fifteen feet away from them now, close enough that any reasonable animal would have fled. Maybe they didn’t know people were dangerous? Ness had read about animals like that, who hadn’t had exposure to villainous humans and thus went about their business unconcerned when they were around.
Suddenly, the birds gave a collective squawk of alarm and took to the skies. Ness felt oddly vindicated. She was, in fact, a noticeably dangerous human after all. She watched them go, then strode toward the shed. After eyeing the saggy roof, she peered through the door. There was a broken lounge chair visible, along with an umbrella, its stand snapped in two. A giant gray tarp was draped over a mountain of hidden items, but she could spy a myriad of table legs and the potential for an absolute clutter of spiders. Ness shuddered as a cobweb brushed the back of her neck and draped across her cheek.
Backing up quickly, sputtering and wiping at her face, she barely heard Tyler the first time he called out.
“Ness!” Tyler hissed. “Ms. Larkin!” he said, much more loudly when she ignored him. “Stop!”
Finally registering his words, she froze.
“Look.” He pointed one shaky finger at a flimsy, pale cylinder on the ground to the right of the shed. The green-tinged sunlight danced across the translucent snake skin. Ness’s eyes tracked along its length, stopping when, after about ten feet, it curved around the back of the decrepit building and presumably continued on.
She spun on her toes and crashed through the trees back to the beach, dancing in place on the hot sand as she tried to shake off the heebie-jeebies making her entire body tingle.
“Uuuughhhhghhghgh,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the shed.
Tyler nodded, unspeaking. His already pale face was the color of rice milk.
“Take the beach back?” Ness asked, already jogging toward the house.
Tyler followed, running to catch up.
“So,” he huffed, “did you see anything useful in there before the, um, sighting? Should we go back later?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Definitely not.” She slowed her pace, linking her fingers behind her head and gulping air.
“Yeah. Okay. Good. That’s good.” Some of Tyler’s color had returned. He kept darting looks back over his shoulder as though they were being pursued.
“How are we going to break this to the others?” Ness wondered aloud.
Tyler pursed his lips as he considered the various implications.
“I think stress levels are high enough, don’t you?”
Feeling her heart still trying to bust out of her chest, she nodded.
“Yeah,” she said, resuming forward motion, albeit at a less strenuous pace. “You’re right. It’s probably one of those ‘it’s more scared of us than we are of it’ things, right?”
“For sure.”
* * *
Ness was psyching herself up to do some gentle yoga that would hopefully center her thoughts and distract her from the implications of the nightmare-inducing snake skin.
Complaining about how much his growing collection of mosquito bites itched, Tyler had gone down to the beach for another swim, confident he could make his way there alone. (“I’m teaching myself to navigate based on the textures of the various plants and sound of the waves. I like to think it feels just a little Method.”)
Relieved Daisy wouldn’t be waiting on her to take over at the fire, Ness was now wandering from room to room, trying to decide which was the least sweltering, when she heard Libby’s raised voice from upstairs.
“This is unbelievable, even for you.”
Ness edged toward the stairs and eyed the freshly splintered wood with residual annoyance. Her ankle still throbbed.
“You know I wouldn’t ask if I had any other options.”
“You did this to yourself. I can’t imagine why I would be inclined to help.”
Ness could practically hear Libby’s smirk. She strained, trying to catch Bradley’s much quieter answer.All she heard was a low muttering, followed by Libby’s earsplitting shriek of outrage. Loud footsteps stomped overhead and Ness, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, ran on her tiptoes down the hall, into the living room, and out of sight. She turned and headed back the way she’d come at a leisurely pace, rounding the corner just as Libby steamed along the same path.
Crash.
If it had been anyone else it wouldn’t have been a big deal. A quick apology and they’d have both been on their way. But, of course, it was Libby.
Ness realized this was the first time the two of them had been alone since she’d gotten to Florida. She wished someone else would walk in and save her, but no such luck.
“Sorry. I was just—”
“Why are you here?”
“Oh, I was going to see if the back room is any cooler than up here. I wanted to get some yoga in . . .” She stopped herself. “That’s not what you meant.”
Libby stared at her, chin jutting out.
Ness had really been hoping to avoid this conversation until they were off the stupid island. Or forever. Forever would also have been fine. The idea of reconciliation had seemed great on paper, but the journey to get there—if they could even make the trip—would be rough. She sighed and mentally buckled up.
“I’m here for the same reason you are. It’s a job. A good one.”
“Did you think you could just show up again and everything would be fine?”
“Honestly, I was hoping we would all be at a point in our lives where we could either discuss our issues and move on, or, if we couldn’t bring ourselves to be that civilized, we’d let the past stay where it belongs and do this like professionals.”
“Typical.”
Ness clenched her teeth, then forced them apart and resigned herself to her fate. “What is?”
“That you only thought about yourself. I bet you didn’t consider what you’re doing to Hayes. To me.”
“It’s been so long, Libby.”
Ness examined the stained grout between the floor tiles, suddenly very tired, as she tried to put the right words in place. She sat down, back against the wall, looking up at Libby.
“Why do you even care anymore? You’re beyond successful. You’ve got money and recognition and the freedom to do whatever you want.” It sounded like a dream life to Ness. “Why are you still hung up on my shitty behavior from a lifetime ago?”
It was dumb, she knew, to pretend Libby didn’t have an entirely valid reason to be angry. If she’d been smart, she’d have dived into her well-rehearsed apology speech and ended on a note of groveling hope. Instead, she stayed silent.
Libby loomed over her, arms crossed.
“You’re back, acting like nothing ever happened? What did you think? We’d all coast through the next few months like we have no history?”
Ness had had this conversation in her head a million times. It didn’t go like this. She was supposed to be calm and composed. She would acknowledge her numerous and painful wrongdoings and forge a path forward to a reasonable coexistence not doused in hurt feelings and negative vibes. Instead, she could feel her face getting hot and tears burning her eyes as words spilled from her mouth.
“Did your parents steal everything you had? Did they max out your schedule for years on end, raking in every penny you earned so they could run off into the sunset, leaving you alone, in unimaginable debt? Did the one person you trusted with everything—everything, Libby—just peace out one day and never look back?”
Libby glared at her, then knelt so they were face to face.
“Do you know who I trusted with everything, you self-centered, narcissistic idiot? You. I trusted you. So, yes, you were hurting and heartbroken and making bad choices, but I was there for you. We were friends, Ness. You were one of the only friends I had, and you left.” She let out a shaky breath. “After your dad, everything was about you. Your pain.Your problems. How unfair your life was. And I got that! I can’t imagine being betrayed by someone you trusted with literally everything. I wanted to help you, but you blocked me out. You disappeared from my life like I was nothing. You ghosted me before ghosting was even a thing. How do you think that felt?”
Libby didn’t wait for a response, which was good, because Ness didn’t have one.