Chapter 26
That was almost too easy.
I back away from the door silently, trying to get the image of Trey’s skinny body hunched over Viv’s voluminous chest, hand clapped over her mouth, out of my head. I don’t want to keep thinking about the way Viv’s head was thrown back in ecstasy, how her back was arching underneath Trey.
So, the dude tries to hit on me, and then ten minutes later is dick-deep in his other employee? Nice. Real nice.
But it makes me wonder… If Viv and Trey are this close, and Trey lied about Elena quitting to Carl, does that mean that Trey is responsible for her death? Does Viv know and is covering for him? I wouldn’t put it past them, necessarily, but I’m struggling to understand a motive.
Maybe I should try harder to be less antagonizing to Trey and Viv. I thought they were simple bullies, charismatic people who took advantage of others to build an empire, but maybe I read them wrong. What if one is a murderer and the other is an accomplice?
“Shit,” I whisper as I scurry back down the hall, away from Viv’s room.
Up until this point, I assumed I could walk off Empress scot-free.
A bit traumatized, yes, but safe. Now I’m realizing how naive that was.
This group, this yacht—it’s not a workplace.
It’s a weird little cult. And if they’d kill Elena, who was supposedly one of Viv’s longtime friends, what would they do to me?
Their expendable, newest member who keeps challenging their authority?
Swiftly and silently as possible, I scurry back down to my room, exhaustion and despair clinging to my limbs and threading through my rib cage. Heart leaden and full of the knowledge that I might be running out of time, I flop on to the bed, passing out without even turning off the lights.
* * *
When I wake up, I am curled around a pillow, spooning it, and I am warm. For a moment, I bury my face into the silky fabric and breathe. I forget where I am. What has happened.
And then it all comes crashing back.
Warily, I pull away from the pillow and check my phone. It’s a little past ten in the morning—the late night turned into a late morning. There’s still no service on my phone, but the wind isn’t screaming anymore, and there’s muddy light filtering in through the porthole window.
“Yes!” I crow, hopeful the storm is moving past us if I can tell it’s daytime.
Voices coming from the hallway spur me to action even though part of me wants to dive back under the covers. I lurch to my feet, racing over to the door, foreboding rising in my throat. I slip from the bedroom and follow the tune of loud conversation down the hall, toward the game room.
When I reach the billiards room, the door that leads to the bridge is open again; Trey must be in there trying to work on the sat phone.
The rest of the influencers, minus Piper, are settled on armchairs or barstools: Ashley is sitting at the bar, a wineglass in her hand even though it’s not even noon; Fiona and Rachel are sitting together at a high-top table, sharing the same sleeve of crackers Piper was munching on for dinner last night.
Poor Fiona looks like she had a lobotomy—her face is slack and her eyes are bloodshot.
She limply shoves a cracker into her mouth, mechanically chewing.
Viv is leaning against the pool table, face as stormy as the sea outside. “Thanks for finally joining us,” she says as I enter.
“What’s all the shouting? I thought the plan was to stay in our rooms,” I reply.
Viv shrugs. “That was your plan.”
“Damn it!” Trey’s voice echoes from the open door to the bridge. A metallic clanking noise punctuates the end of his sentence.
“How’s that going?” I ask, nodding to the open door.
“Not well, obviously.” Viv turns to the side, giving me the cold shoulder. “Rachel, can you start planning what we’re going to eat today? How many boxes of mac and cheese do we have left?”
“Enough,” Rachel says gloomily, not looking up from the crackers. “We should finish the leftover cheese and raw veggies from the party before I make more pasta though. Those’ll go bad first.”
Viv wrinkles her nose. “This is a nightmare. These food options are so disgusting. We’re going to have to limit our calories next week to make up for all this junk food.”
“Shut up, Viv.” Fiona’s voice is garroted by pain, but her words are clear.
Viv’s eyes bulge; none of them have spoken to her like that before. At least not in front of me.
Viv’s jaw works, fingers flexing and clenching at her sides. Finally, she says, “You’re hurting, Fee. I’ll let that slide.” A vicious expression flickers across her face, and Viv strides over to the high-top, snatching away the sleeve of crackers. “No more. The sodium will make you bloat.”
It’s clearly meant as a punishment, but Fiona doesn’t seem to notice or care. She puts her head in her hands and melts over the table, quiet sobs racking her throat.
The rest of us shift uncomfortably, and Rachel slings an arm around Fiona’s shoulders, tears of her own silently inching down her cheeks.
“This is so fucked up,” Ashley mutters from her spot at the bar, downing the remaining yellow liquid in her wineglass with a loud gulp.
Viv doesn’t respond, huffing and turning away—her version of a resigned nod.
My chest aches for Fiona and Rachel. Even Ashley.
She was having an affair with Carl, but there was a complicated history there.
The events of the past few days have taken their toll.
The group is fractured and unstable—but I can’t trust any of them.
Elena is dead. The bridge is destroyed. Carl is under a sheet upstairs.
I wonder if Trey ended up telling the others about my secondary drowning theory. I wasn’t sure if he believed me, in the end. It probably doesn’t matter. The influencers are grieving a sudden loss, and I am an intruder. I barely knew Carl. Why should they take my word for it?
Either way, I can’t ignore the theme following me around.
It’s almost like I manifested it—all this drowning.
I didn’t think about drowning once before The Last Time We Drowned came into my head.
Then I did so much research. Imagined what it would be like so I could write the crux of the book when Paia nearly dies.
Mermaids, water, and drowning all go together perfectly.
It was a solid plot. Then Sage stole it, renamed it, published it.
And now everywhere I go, everywhere I look, someone is drowning, starting with Sage herself.
Maybe I’m cursed. Or maybe that’s the reason why I’m seeing glimpses of a drowned girl on the yacht.
As Rachel continues to console Fiona, I realize that we’re missing someone. Again. “Where’s Piper?”
“In her room,” Viv replies, rolling her eyes. “She needs to sleep it off.”
I stand there next to the pool table for a minute, wondering why all the girls treat Piper’s drinking like a slightly embarrassing but normal quirk.
They tried to hide it from me at first, but now they’ve dropped the pretense and seem to view it as something we have to live with.
It doesn’t help that they drink a lot too, although none to the extent Piper does.
The fridges are stocked with beer and wine, not food.
There’s no pizza or veggies in the freezer, but there are vodka bottles.
I’ve only been here a couple days, but it’s already not surprising to see someone with a drink in their hand, regardless of time of day.
It’s like drinking has become a part of their glamorous life.
Like alcohol is expected and normalized in a setting like this.
Sage would have done well here. We both drank, but Sage liked to imbibe a little more than usual, even for Wisconsin.
I was never a big drinker despite living in Milwaukee my whole life—my mother was very dismissive of the drunk writer stereotype—and in an effort to please her, Emily and I both steered clear from binge drinking.
But Sage loved her beer, and though I didn’t try to keep up with her, I did find myself drinking more when we lived together.
When Sage drank, she would get loud and sometimes would pick fights for no reason, but it was hard to stop her once she decided to start.
It was like she used any excuse to drink—bad day, good day, in-between day.
If she was bored, it was time for a shot.
If she was angry, a beer would calm her down.
I tried to talk to her about it, once, after a night where she insisted we stay up until the sunrise, drinking and plotting our books. She brushed me off. Said she wasn’t drinking any differently than any of the other writers she knew. But Sage wasn’t close to many other writers. Just me.
“You’re the weird one,” she told me. “I had to practically beg you to have a whiskey. That’s the unofficial drink of an author, Char!
Maybe if you had a few more, you’d be able to finally start your draft!
” She smirked, like it was a joke, but there were threads of honesty in her voice. She truly believed her own words.
I didn’t bring up her drinking again after that. Maybe I should have. Maybe it would have saved her. As it was, I wasn’t shocked when the autopsy found that Sage’s BAC was quite a bit above the legal limit when she died.
When we drank on the boat together, I could usually monitor how much she was drinking and keep an eye out when she got in the water. But I wasn’t with her on the boat that day.
Your fault, a voice in the back of my head utters, and I flinch. I can’t think like that. I can’t analyze that thought. I put it away, violently.
Clearly, Sage had a drinking problem, and it contributed to her death. And that’s what it was: a problem. But if someone was young and pretty and wealthy, a dangerous relationship with alcohol was suddenly excusable. And I lived with Sage long enough to be able to spot the similarities in Piper.
I can’t ignore the situation anymore. I didn’t do enough to help Sage. But I should at least try with Piper.