Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Now I’d been through my own bout with the abyss that blotted out all light and all hope—and wasn’t sure I’d quite come out of it. I’d smiled for clients throughout, maintained my social media, complete with upbeat captions, and kept up the expected Luna Wylie facade with my closest friends. All the while the abyss yawned beneath my feet and my emotions flatlined.
Masks.
People were skilled at putting on masks. But Beatrice . . . She’d been herself for the entirety of our relationship. Surely no one could wear a mask for that long? Or had I simply been blind to my friend’s inner pain?
Unless . . . Had she come off her medications at some point? But Darcie had said that she was militant about taking them, so what reason would she have to stop? It wasn’t as if she’d had a major change in her life that might’ve precipitated it. She’d been with the same friend group, passed all her papers, and been on the way to an engagement with Ash.
Could that be it? A life change that wasn’t negative but that shook her up all the same?
“Oh, by the way.” Darcie’s voice breaking into my thoughts. “Have you seen my phone? I couldn’t find it last night.” Though she attempted to sound casual, tension was a taut metal wire in every word.
I got it; I was surgically attached to my device. “No, sorry. When did you last see it? I can keep an eye out for it.”
“I was sure I left it in our bedroom, on the bedside table. I definitely had it when we got here, because I asked Kaea to grab a quick photo of me in front of the house before we went in.” She chewed on her lower lip. “But last night, after—” Shaking her head hard, as if to wipe out the memories, she said, “I couldn’t find it. Ash even tried to call it, but we couldn’t hear anything.”
It didn’t strike me as strange that she’d looked for her phone after her emotional breakdown. She’d probably wanted to numb her brain by playing a game or scrolling through her photos. An off-the-grid substitute for mindless online scrolling—of which I’d done plenty after my diagnosis.
“Clear case with pressed flowers inside, right?” Even her phone case matched her style aesthetic; that was why I’d noticed it. “It’ll probably show up in a random spot like a shelf where you put it down while busy with something else. And if you had it when we arrived, it can’t be too far from the main areas—we didn’t wander much. You’ll find it.”
“Yes, you’re right.” She gave me an unsteady smile. “It’s probably good for me to disconnect anyway.”
“I thought you two got lost out there!” Ash called out from only meters away, his handsome face aglow in the morning light. “I was coming to hunt you down.”
“Oh, you know Luna.” Laughter in Darcie’s eyes, no hint of the pain she’d revealed in the hidden orchard. “Snap, snap, snap.”
Masks.
Bea wasn’t the only member of the Shepherd family who was an expert at wearing one. Nausea swirled in my gut. Because what proof did I have of Darcie’s claims?
Bea, after all, wasn’t here to defend herself.
And Darcie was married to the love of Bea’s life.
15
Ash took the basket of oranges with an “oof” of sound, but carried the load without trouble when he began to move. “Everything’s ready. We can juice these later.”
I trailed behind them as we made our way back to the kitchen, then through to the lounge. Bea’s face, all the photographs I’d taken over the years, ran in a staccato slideshow inside my brain.
Not old memories these, not when I looked at snapshots of her almost every day.
Today, I focused on the ones where she hadn’t been smiling—including a pensive image of her seated on Piha’s glittering black sands, her hair flyaway under the knitted dark gray of her woolen hat, and her eyes reflecting a hint of the sunset fire on the water.
I’d taken that photograph about two months before her disappearance.
Bea, Darcie, Vansi, and I had gone to the beach that day. A long way to go for a sunset followed by fish and chips for dinner, but it hadn’t actually been about either of those things.
It had been about us. The friendship, the togetherness.
But there’d been something . . . not quite right that day. After all that had happened in the months to come, I’d thought I was making it up, seeing ghosts where none existed, but as I remembered that photograph, I remembered why Bea had been sitting alone on the sand rather than walking with us.
She and Darcie’d had a vicious fight. They’d been sniping at each other in the car the entire time, but that could be explained away as sisterly aggravation. Not that the two had often snapped at each other, quite the opposite, but they were sisters, after all. The odd tiff was inevitable. I’d seen the same with Vansi and her younger sister.