Always and Only You

Chapter Forty-Two

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Five years ago

Hey, you … she types. Free to chat?

It’s early evening in the Caribbean, so it must be around lunchtime where he is.

An answer pings back within a couple of seconds.

Hey yourself. And always.

She thinks she’s falling in love with him, but she also knows it’s too soon. Every time he answers her, always caring, always supportive – even if he’s always direct, sometime to the point of uncomfortable bluntness – she slips a little further down that slippery slope.

It’s stupid, really. Their friendship grew after the accident, and it was only in the couple of weeks before she left it became something more. Both of them knew it wasn’t ever going to get serious.

Except it has. For her, at least.

She’s still not sure where she stands. It’s strange, sometimes he’s so vulnerable, so raw, that she can almost feel him there in the room with her as they type back and forth, and at other times he seems oddly opaque, as if there are layers and layers of frosted glass between them and she can only see a fuzzy outline.

She sends another message:

I think I’m ready.

Sure?

She takes a moment to check in with herself before she replies.

Yes.

In their poring through the details of the night of Megan’s accident, they’ve reached the hardest part. She put the brakes on talking about it for a few days, feeling she needed to be ready, but really she was just being a coward. However, the nightmares have stepped up in both intensity and frequency. She knows she can’t run forever. She has to face the truth, no matter what it is. There are questions she’s wanted to ask for months, but the pact between the three of them never to talk about it kept the answers captive.

The more she thinks about it, the more she wonders why they agreed to it. At the time, she’d felt so guilty, so devastated, that she’d wanted to shut it all out. Is that how the guys felt, too? Simon has shown her in recent weeks that he’s happy to open up and talk, but what about Gil? Does he feel guilty about something? Has he got something to hide?

She knows something Simon doesn’t know. The best way to find out the truth is to play dumb, to ask the question as if she doesn’t already know the answer.

Do you have any idea who gave Megan the ketamine?

She waits for a couple of seconds, and then the reply comes.

No idea. I didn’t even know she’d taken it until it came up in the medical reports.

She releases the breath she’s been holding in a slow, steady stream. Oh, thank God. It wasn’t him. Should she tell him that one of the other partygoers had told her about who they thought was with Megan when she took it? No. Not just yet. She’ll tell him later.

Are you sure she didn’t bring it with her? he asks.

Definitely not. She’d have told me.

Megan had been very open about those things with her, and it hadn’t been the first time she’d had the drug.

Someone at that party gave it to her, which means someone else also knew how much she’d taken she types.

The inquest had shown it hadn’t been enough to cause significant harm on its own. However, when you factored in the amount of alcohol Meg had drunk …

She closes her eyes in an effort to squeeze out the memory of Megan downing that huge red King Cup. If she’d known, she’d have knocked it out of Megan’s hand, hurled it across the room. So stupid … It had been completely avoidable.

There were so many what-ifs, each a tiny blade stabbing her conscience. What if she’d known about the ket? What if she’d done what she said and hadn’t drunk so much herself? She might have realized Megan had taken something. What if she’d got up and looked for Megan instead of having a nap amid the pile of coats? So many little slips, so many falls from grace she’s not sure she can ever climb back out of that pit again.

Did you see Meg at all around midnight? She must have come downstairs. No other way to get to the garden.

No. And then the next thing I knew, everybody was looking for her.

That must have been around the time she’d woken up. Someone had barged into the main bedroom, looked around, asked her if she was called Megan, and then disappeared again when she mumbled she wasn’t.

And then what they’d said had sunk in. People were looking for Megan. Why? She’d scrambled up off the bed and run downstairs, where she’d found Simon looking white as a sheet.

You looked really panicked when I found you in the conservatory she taps into her phone. Did you have a sense then that something was really wrong?

It’s a minute or two before his reply arrives, and she’s expecting something long and detailed, but it’s only one line:

I don’t remember that.

Talking to me or being worried?

Both.

Odd. She expected that his memories, like hers, would be sharper for the parts of the evening when the adrenaline kicked in hard, chasing the effects of the drink from their systems.

I asked you if you’d seen her, and you said no.

I didn’t. I do remember … I think I remember suggesting we looked in the park.

Yes. That’s right. I think I remember that too.

Those sober enough had split into groups to look in different places. She, Gil and Simon had searched the garden, then Simon had suggested crossing the road and heading into the small park on the other side. Full of fear, she’d grabbed onto Simon’s hand as they walked. They did a circuit of the main path calling out Megan’s name, checking nearby bushes in case she’d passed out. And then they’d come across the children’s playground.

When did you first spot her? she asks.

The surrounding atmosphere seems to darken as she waits for his answer, even though it’s a bright day in the Caribbean and there isn’t a cloud in the sky.

When we opened the gate to go into the fenced-off area. I saw something pale slumped on the merry-go-round. I didn’t know what it was, but I got weird vibes, like a sense of foreboding.

He had better eyes than she did then. She hadn’t realized there was a person lying there, let alone anything else, until they’d been much closer. For some reason, she’d been looking at the swings, hoping she’d find Megan sitting on one, legs dangling, or swinging high, a smile of pure childish joy on her face, but she’d been lying half on, half off the tiny merry-go-round, face down with her hair splayed all around her.

Just thinking about it makes her feel sick. She presses one hand to her stomach and taps at her phone screen with the other.

Was it you who rushed to her? Who turned her over?

The three dots appear and she thinks another message is coming, but then they disappear, then reappear again. Did he just type something and then delete it?

No.

It must have been Gil, then. Funny, she could have sworn it was Simon. But the facts must have been swept away by what she saw next.

I’ll never forget her face.

White. Eyes staring up at the hollow moon. Yellow vomit trailing from her mouth. A puddle of it on the flaking painted surface of the merry-go-round. She’d choked on it, apparently. That’s what the coroner had said, anyway. She had a bad reaction to the combination of ket and alcohol, and it slowed her heart rate to the point of no return. Another person taking a similar dose might have pulled through, but she hadn’t.

Did you know she was dead? she asks.

Not for sure. But I suspected it, even though she was still warm when I touched her.

Simon and Gil had rolled her into the recovery position while she’d dialled 999 and then run to the entrance of the park to direct the ambulance crew when they arrived.

The last time I touched her she types with a tear rolling down her cheeks, is when we were laughing on the pile of coats. How can she have been so alive in that moment and then not long after …

She doesn’t write the rest of the sentence. Can’t. But she doesn’t need to, because he replies:

I know.

He understands.

Thank you she types.

What for?

For trusting me enough to break that stupid pact we made. I think it’s really helped.

And it has, in more ways than he realizes. Somebody she chatted to at Megan’s funeral told her that one of the two guys she and Meg came to the party with gave her the ket. If it wasn’t Simon, it must have been Gil. And then he let her drink the King Cup, and he must have known that wasn’t a good idea, but he said nothing, saving his own sorry backside.

Yes, Megan’s actions had started the chain reaction of events that had led to her death, and they could all have had a part in stopping it, more so if they’d known what they were dealing with. But Gil had known. And that meant he was more responsible than any of them, yet he’d never confessed, never showed any remorse. He was a coward. While she knew she couldn’t lump the blame on him entirely, she also knew she was never, ever going to forgive him.