Chapter 37

HOW TO DESCRIBEthe long, slow boat ride back to reality? How to describe the first shower, better yet the first bath, the sheer, unimaginable luxury of being able not just to drink as much as we wanted, but to immerse ourselves in water, wallow in it, drench ourselves in it. To feel it running over our skin—pure, clean water. I never wanted to get out.

How to describe the first meal that wasn’t forest-scavenged fruit, or moldy pastries. How to describe crisp mouth-melting fries, and ice cream, and Coca-Cola, with the ice cubes chinking and the perspiration dripping gently from the glass.

There were other things too, that none of us knew how to describe. The news that the Over Easy was gone, lost at sea in the storm. They didn’t tell us at once, perhaps they didn’t know, I’m not certain. But after a few days a man from the British Embassy in Jakarta came to our hotel and told us gently that there was very little hope, that the Over Easy had likely foundered in the storm. The marine transponder, the ship’s equivalent of a black box, had cut out in the middle of the deep ocean, and there was no wreckage to be seen. We might never know for sure what had happened.

And then there was the first sobbed phone call with my parents, over a crackling long-distance line. And the first Zoom call with Nico’s mother, dry-eyed and racked with a pain she hadn’t fully begun to process.

What could I say? What could I do to make her loss bearable? There was nothing.

They had offered us a room each, when we were released from hospital and our paperwork and passports were sorted out—but it was Santana who had said she didn’t want to be alone, and when I heard the words, I realized they were true for me too. After so long spent sleeping, eating, fighting to survive together, I didn’t want to be shut in a room by myself—but I wasn’t yet ready to face the outside world. Not until some of the scars had healed.

So we had ended up with a family apartment, two bedrooms, linked by a little sitting room. Santana and Angel in one, Zana and I in the other. In the air-conditioned cool of the evenings we came together in the little communal area in the middle to eat the miraculous room service food, and drink all the water we wanted, and we talked. We talked and we talked, as we somehow hadn’t been able to on the island.

I told them about Nico, about the growing rift between us, and the fact that I wasn’t sure we would have survived the experience of Ever After Island, even without the storm. I told them how I lay awake at night, wondering if Nico knew that, wondering if his last thought before he died was of me, and whether I loved him.

Angel told us about her childhood, her father who had died when she was just seventeen, and how much she missed him. About her Parisian mother, who told her every time she saw her that she had gained weight, and that no man would want her if she let herself go. And about her abusive ex, and how long it had taken for her to find the strength to leave him, to come to London—where she had met Bayer, and where, for a while, everything had seemed good. “Perhaps I will go back to Paris,” she said with a shrug that verged on hopelessness. “I do not know.”

Santana talked about Dan, mostly. About their time together at school, funny anecdotes about how he cheeked the teachers, and the time he dressed up in women’s clothes and asked for a tour of the school for his supposed son, Anthony. It was the art teacher who had taken him around, a man in his seventies who had taught at the school since the 1980s, back when it was all boys, and who kept peering at Dan shortsightedly through his bifocals, murmuring, “I’m sure I know you, my dear. Did I teach your father?”

And Zana… Zana talked about Conor. About how he had reached out to her on Instagram when she was just seventeen, and they had messaged back and forth, flirting, joking, and finally met up in a bar in London on her nineteenth birthday. She’d taken friends—she wasn’t an idiot—but she didn’t talk to any of them all night, just sat there, enraptured by Conor, dazzled by him like there was no one else there. She told us how wonderful it had been at first, and how bad it had become later. She told us how scared she had been, towards the end, of what Conor had done—might still do.

“It’s my fault,” she choked out, her hand over her face. “All of this. If I hadn’t agreed to come, if I hadn’t let him do everything he did—”

“It is not,” Angel said, and there was nothing but compassion in her voice. “It is not your fault, chérie. I promise you. And how could you have known, how far he would go? We have all known a man like him. Sometimes it is all you can do to survive.”

But as Santana nodded sadly I realized… it wasn’t true. Not really. Not for me, at any rate. The only man I had known like Conor was Conor himself. Nico and I might not have been the perfect couple, but he had been sweet and funny and gentle, and had loved me with nothing but respect and kindness.

But Angel, and Zana, and Santana—they had all known a man like Conor. Some of them had known several.

And as I thought about that, something else floated up from the back of my mind, something that had been scratching there for a long time, perhaps ever since that first day on the boat, when I had met Joel, and he had told me about his job.

“I’ve been thinking….” I said now, a little tentatively. Santana looked up from where she was rubbing Zana’s back. Zana wiped her eyes, and I swallowed, and began again. “Ever since we got back from the island, I’ve been thinking about this whole thing. The whole One Perfect Couple setup. There was something Joel said… it puzzled me at the time. About seeing the handout and trying to get his job correct. And then Dan mentioned it too. Do you remember?” I looked at Santana. “He said something about looking Conor’s videos up, back when you got the information pack. Did you know what he was referring to?”

Santana nodded.

“Yes, that kind of dossier thing. We got it about three or four weeks before we left.”

“Yes, but we didn’t,” I said. “Nico and me. We didn’t get one. We only signed up a couple of weeks before we set sail.”

For a moment all three of the others looked puzzled, and then Angel’s face cleared.

“Of course! I had completely forgotten. You were not in it. It was another couple… what was it… he had a stupid name. Hunting, or something.”

“Hunter,” Santana said. “Hunter and Lucy. I’d never heard of him, but I actually know her slightly. She’s a friend of my cousin, and I when I realized they weren’t on the boat, I texted her to find out what happened.”

“And what did happen?” I asked.

“Apparently her boyfriend pulled out when he got the dossier. He had a massive problem with one of the other contestants. Lucy didn’t say which one.”

“I know which one,” Zana said in a low voice. She looked at me. “It was Conor, right?”

I nodded.

“I think so. Did you know Hunter, Zana?”

Zana shook her head.

“No, but Conor did. He saw his name in the dossier, and I got the impression he was looking forward to seeing him. In fact, he was the first person he asked about when we got to the boat. He asked Camille whether Hunter was here yet. When Camille said Hunter and Lucy had dropped out, Conor laughed. He said something about it, something like, Hunter always was a pussy.”

“I do not see the point of this,” Angel said, but not dismissively. She sounded puzzled. “You have lost my thread.”

“Think about it,” I said softly. I was answering Angel, but I was looking at Zana. “Think about what all the couples have in common. Everyone except me and Nico. Really think.”

Angel looked surprised.

“Chérie, we have nothing in common. Isn’t that the point? We are all so very different. Models. Actors. Fitness coaches. Teachers. Scientists. The whole idea was to have a diverse cast.”

“No.” I shook my head. “Everyone had one thing in common. At least, one person in each couple did. You all had some kind of history with Conor.”

Santana frowned, and I pressed on.

“Santana, you were at school with his ex-girlfriend, the one who killed herself. You could speak to his past as an abuser. Romi was a victim of his YouTube channel, all his followers descending on her to call her a body-shamer or problematic, or whatever it was. Hunter—well, I don’t know what happened there, but clearly there was something. Maybe Conor had screwed up someone he loved.”

“And what about me?” Angel said. She sounded skeptical. “I had never met the guy.”

“No, but you did have personal experience of being in an abusive relationship. Is there any way Baz could have known about that?”

“I mean… I have tweeted about it,” Angel said with a shrug. “I did a thread about relationship red flags that went viral.”

“Well there you go,” I said. “You were the ideal person to recognize Conor for what he was. And Bayer—well, he was the perfect person to rile Conor up, to get him to drop the nice-guy act and show his true colors. Which was exactly what he did, the first moment there was any kind of tension. You, Santana, Bayer, Romi—practically everyone on the island was hand-picked to either speak to Conor’s past or make him come clean about his present. Nico and I—well, we were dropped in at short notice, so there was no time to research someone with a link as good as Santana’s. The best they could do was find someone like me, someone who might clash with him politically.” I remembered Baz’s questions at the interview, the ones that had puzzled me so much. Would you call yourself a feminist? And your politics. Would you say they’re left of center? Now I understood. He’d been trying to find someone Conor would butt heads with—and ideally a woman. “Add in plenty of booze to oil the wheels, and some stressful tasks designed to make everyone lose their rag… The storm was never part of the plan, of course. That was just horribly bad luck.”

“But why?” Santana said, her voice bewildered. “Why would Baz go to all this trouble to take down a total stranger, however much of a shit?”

I shook my head again.

“I don’t think they were strangers. Dan told me, right back at the beginning of all this, that Baz knew Conor. He said that Conor had dated Baz’s niece. And I started to wonder… What if she didn’t walk away unscathed either?”

There was a long pause. I could see the other three thinking about my words, turning them over in their heads. Then Santana’s face changed. A kind of horror came over her expression.

“Wait a minute, what was his name?”

“Baz’s?” Angel asked, puzzled.

“Yes.” Santana was tapping frantically on her new phone—part of the emergency package the British Embassy official had arranged for us, so we could contact our families. “What was his surname? He only ever introduced himself as Baz to me. Baz from Effing Productions.”

I pulled out mine too and began searching back through the emails from Ari. It was true that Baz only ever signed off with his first name—his surname wasn’t even in his email address. But finally, deep down in one of the contracts, I found it.

“Basil Ferrier,” I read out. “Sounds kind of posh, doesn’t it? Not really in keeping with his man of the people act. No wonder he preferred going by Baz.” And then, as I realized the connection. “Oh, I get it now. Effing Productions. F for Ferrier.”

“Exactly. And—that was her name. The girl I went to school with—Cally. The one who killed herself. Her full name was Calista Ferrier. She told me once she had an uncle in Australia. She was Baz’s niece.”

I stared at her, and Santana stared back—holding each other’s gaze as the final pieces slotted into place and I felt a profound, terrible compassion for Baz sweep over me, in spite of his stupidity, in spite of the way he’d lied to us all.

It must have been bad enough for your beautiful, nineteen-year-old niece to kill herself after breaking up with her boyfriend, but to watch that boyfriend go on, year after year, growing bigger and bigger and more and more famous. To watch his YouTube subscribers tip a million, and then two and then ten million—to watch his followers lapping up his rhetoric, more and more of them hitting that like and subscribe… I had watched some of Conor’s videos since getting off the island, sitting on the toilet with the door locked and the shower running to cover the sound, and I had become more and more disturbed. Beneath the faux-reasonable tone was a vein of poison that his supporters celebrated openly in the comments. Yes, I could imagine that a man like Baz would not be able to stand by and watch that.

“Car crash TV” was what Joel had called One Perfect Couple, and he’d been more right than he knew. A car crash was exactly what Baz had been aiming for—an engineered one, with Conor at the wheel. But with Conor’s supporters weighing in on social media, it wouldn’t have been just car crash TV, it would have been viral car crash TV, and a double win for Baz: a ratings bonanza for him, and a career-destroying meltdown for Conor. Baz would have walked away a made man—the hero who exposed a YouTube guru for the problematic misogynist he was, and created the must-watch show of the year. The rest of us… well, we were just cannon fodder.

There was a long silence. I could see the other three women slowly turning my suggestions over in their heads.

“It would explain why they hadn’t sold it,” Santana said slowly. “If the draw was going to be this prominent YouTuber melting down on-screen… well they’d kind of have to wait for that to happen before they could present it as a USP. But… God. Could it be true? It seems… it seems crazy.”

I shrugged.

“I don’t know. But it’s the only way I can make sense of all these threads leading back to both Conor and Baz. I mean, your friend Cally—I don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?”

Santana shook her head. Her face was pale.

“And I don’t know much about reality TV, but it seems to me that what Baz was attempting, it’s kind of just an extension of what they all do, isn’t it? They pick volatile people, people who’re going to perform for the cameras, they wind them up as tight as they can, they engineer a bunch of high-stress situations that are practically guaranteed to make someone lose their shit, throw in some alcohol—and then they sit back and let the cameras roll and the tweets pour in.”

“Fuck,” Angel said. “I mean, it is crazy, but you are right—all these links to Cally, they don’t make sense otherwise. So Baz destroys his enemy, and creates the TV événement of the year. And fuck the rest of us in the process.”

“Jesus,” Santana said. Her jaw was clenched, a muscle there ticcing. When she spoke again, her voice sounded like it was coming through gritted teeth. “Jesus Christ. I knew this whole thing was shitty from the start. I didn’t even want to do it, it was Dan’s idea. He’s never wanted to be ‘just’ a model.” She put air quotes around the word. “He’s always wanted to be an actor or a presenter. I mean…” She trailed off, realizing her mistake. “He always wanted.”

“Fuck him,” Angel said. There was a contained fury in her voice that I’d never heard before. “L’homme de ma vie—my poor Bayer, he is dead. And for what? For nothing! For Baz to make his stupid plan! Seriously, fuck him!”

Zana was bent forward, and her hands were over her face. I couldn’t tell if she was crying, and if so whether it was with shock, grief, or relief. Maybe all three.

But when she sat up, I saw that she was laughing—laughing through her tears with a kind of bitter, mirthless fury.

“If this is true—” She was struggling to get the words out. “If this is true, then you know, you know the fucking worst thing?”

She gave a kind of hiccupping gulping laugh, and I shook my head. Angel and Santana were looking at her with a mix of horror and sympathy.

“We’ve made a fucking hero out of him,” Zana managed. She was rocking back and forth, almost crouching, her head in her hands, but now she threw back her head. “That diary—that fucking diary I wrote. We’ve made him into a saint. Have you seen the headlines?”

She dug in her pocket for her phone, tapped something into the search bar and held it out.

“Look. Look.”

I leaned forward, peering at the tiny screen. And there it was in black and white, headline after headline—most of them illustrated with Conor’s charming, grinning face.

YouTuber’s Tragic Death Saving Pals

Co-Bros Mourn the Loss of Their Hero as British YouTuber Conor Brian Reported Dead

Conor Brian: A Remarkable Life. A Selfless Death. A Last Gift to the World.

I pushed the phone away.

“That was what Baz achieved,” Zana spat. “He put us all through hell, just to canonize his enemy. And now we all have to live with this—this lie forever. And I have to live with what I did—with what I let happen.”

There were tears streaming down her face, and I didn’t know whether it was because of Conor or everything else. Maybe all of it.

“Look,” I said. I took the phone out of Zana’s hand, switched off the screen. “Look, Zana. Baz is dead, Conor is dead—they’re all dead.” A lump rose in my throat, thinking of Dan, of Joel, of Bayer, of Romi, and the poor, nameless producer—and of Nico, of his last words to me. You set me up. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This wasn’t what we agreed! And it was true—more true than any of us could have known at the time. We were all set up. None of us had agreed to Baz’s stupid, stupid plan. “They’re dead,” I said again, my voice more vehement than I had meant it to sound, “and there is nothing we can do to change that. We can’t help them. We can’t fix what they did or change what they suffered. All we can do is protect the living—protect us.” I looked around the circle. “And that is what I’m going to do. No matter the cost. Okay?”

There was a long silence. Then Angel nodded.

“Yes. Fuck Baz. Fuck Conor’s legacy. So it is a lie. So it is of lots of people. The living is what matters. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Santana said. Her face was wet, and she dashed at her eyes. “Zana?”

“Okay,” Zana said. Her voice was low. “But I hate that you’re doing this for me.”

“We’re not doing it for you,” Angel said. Her voice was hard. “We’re doing it for us. For all of us. For the survivors.”

She picked up the beaded glass of lemonade sitting in front of her.

“To survival.”

“To survival,” Santana echoed.

“To survival,” I said. We turned and looked at Zana.

“To survival,” she said softly. And then she smiled.