Chapter 9

THE OTO ROOMturned out to be a little sound-proof booth set up in one of the staff cabins, which were sited in the least glamourous part of the island, where the lush landscaping and palm frond roofs gave way to concrete paving and corrugated iron. It had clearly been used as a temporary sleeping area for the workmen—I could see folding beds stacked against one wall—but now it had been converted into a kind of makeshift interview room, with a wicker chair at one end, draped with embroidered throws and cushions, and opposite a row of chairs for the crew. The contestant end looked glamorous, but it was hot as hell inside the cabin, and I could smell the sweat of the camera crew and the people who’d been interviewed before me. The crew had clearly been stuck inside for hours and were visibly wilting.

Thankfully, when it came to my turn, the interviewer didn’t press me on the pregnant women thing. In fact, there was very little interviewing as such at all. It was mostly a case of reading my own answers straight to camera, and then guessing Nico’s.

One thing that Nico and I hadn’t had a chance to discuss was how to play this and how early I should start trying to flunk the challenges. In the end, after a moment’s quandary, I answered straight down the line, doing my honest best to predict what I thought Nico would have said. Partly, I didn’t know how they were scoring this, and, if we were being marked as a couple, I didn’t want to accidentally sabotage Nico’s position and risk him being sent home early too. Partly, I would have to drop out at some point, and fairly soon, but I didn’t really want to do it on the first night. I’d come all this way and the thought of getting straight back on the boat wasn’t enticing. There was plenty of time to intentionally mess up when we knew how the scoring worked.

It was a relief when we were finally done and I could escape back out into the comparative fresh air, but that didn’t mean the filming was over. Instead, we went back to the Ever After Villa to do some background footage of us chatting—“Talk about your boys, ladies!”—as well as reshoots of each of us writing, wearing appropriately thoughtful or nostalgic expressions on our faces.

The sun was almost setting by the time we were back at the cabana where the men—or boys, as the production team kept referring to them—sat grinning at the far side of the table. They had clearly been drinking as much as we had, and a production assistant hastily swept a stack of empty beer bottles off the table as we sat down.

I was starving and had been hoping for another spread like brunch—I could have murdered one of the plastic brioches by this time—but it seemed that wasn’t to be. Instead, someone distributed more beer and wine—the last thing I felt like at the moment—and Camille stepped up to the head of the table.

“Okay, so this will be another voice-over section, so you can react to what I’m saying—in fact, please do, we want lots of nice reaction shots—but try to keep it nonverbal, okay, because we’ll be dubbing over with the mystery presenter’s voice. Okay?” We all nodded, and Camille pulled out her script and began to read, a broad smile on her face. “So, couples. You’ve spent the afternoon looking deep into your own hearts and trying to guess the secrets of your partner’s. Now it’s time to see how well you did. How well do you really know the person you came here with? Do you know the inner workings of their heart—or is it a closed book to you? Or could it be that your perfect match is on the island… but arrived here with someone else? It’s time to find out.”

She rustled through some sheets and then said, “Okay, so at this point there will be a montage of everyone answering the questions to camera, intercut with their partner guessing the responses. We won’t be showing all of them obviously, just the funniest or most moving or whatever. We haven’t settled on the final lineup, but in the meantime, here’s a rough cut of some of the best.”

She pressed something on a remote control on the desk, and a screen above the bar lit up with what I guessed was the logo for the show, a stylized desert island in the shape of a heart. After a short countdown, Conor’s face appeared. He was sitting on the wicker chair, speaking directly to the camera, and looking thoughtful.

“My perfect night out… I’d have to say… taking Zana somewhere truly stunning, maybe the restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or a gondola in Venice. We’d drink champagne… I’d feed her her favorite dessert—chocolate-dipped strawberries—and then we’d walk home hand in hand and kiss under the stars. As for hers?” He blushed, his tanned face looking almost embarrassed for a moment. “I— God, I don’t want to sound hopelessly big-headed but… I think she’d say a night at my place. I know that’s not really a night out, but she just loves spending time together.”

The camera cut to Zana, staring into the lens with her huge brown eyes.

“Conor? Oh, I think he’d say… a dinner somewhere sophisticated and exotic—a restaurant in Paris, maybe, or the Maldives. Fine wine, good food. We’d toast each other and then walk home—he loves to walk at night, he loves the stars. As for me…” She looked down at her lap, twisting her fingers. “The truth is, I’m more of a simple stay-at-home type. I’d be happy anywhere Conor was happy, that’s the honest truth.” Then a shy little smile flickered across her face. “Though I wouldn’t say no to a chocolate-dipped strawberry.”

Camille paused the screen and turned back to the group, a big smile on her face.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I’m giving that… ten out of ten! Right?”

There was a wave of assent, rather half-hearted from the other contestants, and some laughter and clapping. Conor put his arm around Zana, squeezing her hard, as Camille hit play again.

We went through all of them. There were some incredibly lucky hits (I scored a bullseye guessing that Nico’s perfect vacation would be Las Vegas, which was a total shot in the dark, and another when I said that his biggest secret was that he used fake tan, I’d guessed correctly that he wouldn’t mind admitting that). There were also some comically bad misses. Angel had said, understandably, that her worst habit was smoking, whereas Bayer had said that it was clipping her toenails in the shower and leaving the shards, which caused her to shoot daggers at him.

I also knew perfectly well what Dan’s biggest secret was, because he’d told me—it was the fact that he had a boyfriend. I could see from the panic in his eyes as he answered that question that he knew Santana would be skirting around it and wasn’t sure how best to handle the uncertainty. In the end he said that his biggest secret was that when he was little he’d wanted to be a cage fighter when he grew up. Santana on the other hand guessed that his biggest secret was that he couldn’t tell the time on a clock with hands. That provoked a gale of laughter—the secret as well as the mismatch between the two—though it was fairly sympathetic. Dan, however, looked like he’d had a sense of humor bypass, and I could understand why.

“What?” Santana mouthed across at the table at him. “I’m sorry!”

“It was one time! I can tell the fucking time!” Dan said irritably, prompting a throat-cutting motion from one of the producers, reminding us about swearing.

But the biggest surprise—to me, at least—was how many things Nico got wrong about me. I wasn’t sure if they were picking out comically bad examples, but I didn’t see them screen a single right answer from him. He said that my childhood crush was Harry Styles, whose career didn’t even launch until I was in my twenties. He said that my biggest secret was that I was afraid of mice—which I’m not and have never been. He said that my perfect night out would be a pub curry and a pint with friends, which, okay, I enjoy a curry as much as the next person but it’s not exactly my dream night out, and I don’t drink pints. It was just bad shot after bad shot. I couldn’t believe this was the person I’d shared nearly two and a half years of my life with. Had he been paying any attention at all? Nico had ended up on the other side of the table from me, between Dan and Bayer, and as the clips unfolded, I tried to catch his eye, see what he was making of it all, but his gaze was fixed the screen, laughing along with the others, as if it was hilarious that he seemed to know nothing about his own girlfriend.

At the end of the reel, Camille clicked off the screen and turned back to the group. The sun was properly setting, fairy lights had winked on around the edges of the cabana, and I could see that everyone was very tired, very hungry, and very drunk. Tempers were, if not fraying, at least wearing a little thin. Dan looked like he was still seething over the telling-the-time thing. Bayer, who had made several stupid mistakes with Angel, including revealing that her biggest secret was that she’d had a boob job, looked sulky. In the camera lights I could see moths and mosquitoes beginning to gather. I swiped as something settled on my arm and was glad I’d remembered to put on repellent beneath my bronzer.

“And now…” Camille said, “the moment of truth. Which couple truly knows each other through and through, and which couple are a hopeless mystery to each other? And finally…” She paused dramatically. “Which couple are really the most compatible on the island?”

There was a long pause. I could hear crickets in the trees, and far off a bird screamed, or maybe a monkey, I wasn’t sure.

“The person who got the highest score on their partner’s answers was…” There was a long pause, Camille dragging the tension out until I could tell everyone around the table wanted to scream. “Lyla!”

There was an audible gasp from around the table, maybe because they’d just watched Nico fuck up response after response. Nico looked positively smug.

“Congratulations, Lyla! You truly know your partner through and through; his heart is an open book to you.”

I had no idea what to do. I could tell the cameras were zooming in on my face and I could only blink and say, “Oh, um, thank you.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “I love you, Nico!”

“Love you too, babe!” he called from the other side of the table and made a heart shape with his hands.

“But!” Camille was still speaking, and the table quickly hushed, hanging on her words. “The person who scored the lowest on their partner’s responses was…” There was another long pause, even longer than the one before. This time Camille really dragged it out. I heard a groan from across the table, and saw Bayer drop his head to the tabletop and bang it on the surface in what looked like real frustration.

“Was…” Camille repeated, and then, finally she put us out of our misery. “Nico.”

There was another set of gasps from around the table, and I realized that one had come from me. I knew Nico had done badly, but the worst out of everyone? We’d been together a little over two years. Clearly I had been paying attention at some point during that time, long enough to salt away enough information for a bunch of lucky guesses, anyway.

And what did this mean for the show? Was Nico—

But then my stomach seemed to drop. No. Absolutely not. There was no way Nico could be… going home? My results had to count for something, didn’t they?

“Nico,” Camille was saying, and now she looked compassionate and, something else, something close to a little nervous, I thought. “Nico… I’m so sorry.”

“What?” Nico said, interrupting.

“You’re going home.”

“What?” He looked from me to Camille, his expression genuinely confused. “But—you can’t. I’ve only just got here.”

“I’m sorry, Nico,” Camille said again. I could see the cameras zooming unforgivingly in on Nico’s face. “It’s time to go.”

“I’m—no,” Nico said flatly. He gave a little laugh, as if this might all be a huge gotcha. “I mean, no. I’m not going.” He folded his arms as if to prove his point. “What about all the stuff I got right? You have to give me another chance.”

“I’m sorry, Nico,” Camille repeated. She glanced at the camera crew and nodded, and one of them, a big guy with powerful shoulders, put down the fluffy boom mic he was holding and moved forward.

“Is this real?” Nico asked, this time with a tinge of real outrage creeping into his voice. “Are you seriously kicking me off the show?”

I felt a sense of panic grip me. This was not the plan. This was never the plan!

“Nico?” I said blankly, and he turned to face me.

“You stupid cow!”

I recoiled.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Honestly, what the fuck were those answers! A paneer what the whatever it was fuck? How was I supposed to guess that? And Keanu Reeves? He’s old enough to be my dad!”

“Paneer cheera is what I always get!” I felt my temper flare, not helped by Camille making stop swearing gestures behind Nico’s head. I didn’t need reminding that this was all on camera. “Every single time! It’s not my fault if you always leave me to order. And Harry Styles? Seriously? How could he have been my childhood crush?”

“You sabotaged me,” Nico said. His face was suddenly ugly. “You did this deliberately. What game are you playing?”

“What the actual fuck.” I knew Camille was signaling, and I didn’t care. The more I swore, the less likely they were to use this footage of my relationship imploding. “Are you serious? I don’t care about your stupid little—” Fuck fuck, no. I had enough self-control to backpedal from what I’d been about to say, which was stupid little reality TV fantasy. Whether or not Nico went, I would still be stuck here for another week. Insulting the show in front of people who were presumably happy to be on it wouldn’t go down well. “S-supposed games,” I finished, stumbling over the words as I tried to recover. “I’m not playing anything. I tried to say things I thought you’d guess. It’s not my fault if you guessed wrong.”

It’s not my fault if you haven’t paid attention to anything I said the entire time we’ve been together, was what I really wanted to say, but that felt like I would be crossing a line. Whatever he’d just said to me, I wasn’t ready to dump my live-in boyfriend on national TV.

I remembered Joel’s words on the boat. If they succeed in breaking one of the couples up… it’s going to be car crash TV. A real long-term relationship ripping apart on-screen.

And now that car crash was Nico… and me.

“You’ve humiliated me,” I heard from Nico, but two crew members were leading him away. He was still shouting over his shoulder. “You set me up. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This wasn’t what we agreed!”

And then his voice faded between the trees, and he was gone.

There was a long, stunned silence. The thing that kept rattling around my mind, absurdly, was how upset my mum was going to be when I told her what had happened. She loved Nico. He was the son she’d never had—handsome, charming, a little bit cheeky. But for myself, I felt… nothing. Only numb. Was I in shock?

Angel silently slid a bottle of wine across the table to me, and I forced a smile and filled my glass, knocking it back with a hand that was still shaking.

“Well…” Dan drawled, leaning back in his seat. “At least you didn’t accuse him of not being able to tell the time.”

There was a sudden gale of laughter, the nervous, explosive laughter of people with pent-up emotion, relieved to channel it into humor rather than anger.

“I’m glad you’ve forgiven me, darling,” Santana said. She moved round the table to thread her arm around him, poking him in the ribs, and he snorted and tickled her back. I wondered in that moment whether the producers could possibly be fooled. They were so obviously more like brother and sister than girlfriend and boyfriend, with their physical, bantering antagonism. Was this going to be the next big reveal—Dan’s boyfriend coming on with folded arms to denounce Dan as a traitor? It would certainly make good TV.

I refilled my glass and was shakily downing another gulp, when Camille came back out of the darkness. Presumably she’d finished escorting the raging Nico back to the ship.

“Right, gosh, well that was dramatic.” She gave a little laugh, but it was slightly nervous. I wondered how much experience she had on this type of show. “Are you okay, Lyla?”

I shook my head. I honestly wasn’t. This had blown everything out of the water. All my plans. All Nico’s dreams. No one was going to be offering him any fantasy boyfriend roles on the back of that performance. And it had also put me firmly on the map as far as the TV series went. I’d been hoping to slip in and out of the series before anyone much remembered me. There wasn’t much chance of that now, after that scene.

“Are you ready for your OTO? We’d love to get a few thoughts from you about Nico’s departure.”

“Oh God.” I put down my glass. “Seriously? Now? I think I’ve just been dumped, live on TV, or near enough. Could I not have a drink first?”

“Um…” Camille looked over her shoulder and one of the other producers beckoned her over. They had a whispered conference, and then Camille came back.

“Okay, sure. In fact, there’s one other bit of business we probably ought to do before we do the OTOs anyway, so let’s get that out of the way and you can have a moment to collect yourself, Lyla. And then we can do the one-to-one sessions while everyone eats. Does that sound okay? I think everyone needs some food.”

There were nods of assent from around the table, and someone muttered something about being fucking starving. I was fairly sure I wasn’t the only one with a sour champagne headache setting in.

“Okay, so the last bit of filming is the big reveal,” Camille was saying, and I saw some puzzled frowns, people shooting glances at their partners across the table. I didn’t have a partner anymore, so I didn’t have anyone to share my puzzlement with. But surely that had to be it. There couldn’t be any more big reveals—could there?

Camille was pulling out her script again, and standing just behind the camera she began to read.

“Making up and breaking up is all part of finding the one true love, the person you’re really meant to be with. For Lyla, it looks like that wasn’t Nico. But on Ever After Island, breaking up doesn’t mean you have to be alone. As the highest scorer, Lyla gets to spend the night in the Ever After Villa.”

I blinked, remembering the picture-perfect water villa perched on stilts over the turquoise sea. Okay, well, every cloud, I guessed, although it would have been more fun to be there with Nico, not recently single, and presumably about to depart from the show myself, unless I could make a strategic alliance with one of the other soon-to-be-singletons, which I didn’t particularly want to do.

“The twist?” Camille said, quizzically, and then answered her own question with dramatic emphasis. “She won’t be there alone. The Ever After Gods have compared the islanders’ secret answers, sprinkled on a little Perfect Couple magic, and the person whose answers most closely corresponded with Lyla’s was…”

I felt my eyes go wide. What. The. Fuck.

“Joel.”

There was a moment of utter silence. You could have heard a pine needle drop.

Then, “I’m sorry, what?”

It was Romi, her voice shrill with wine and shock.

“Joel,” Camille said, “you’ll be spending the night in the Ever After Villa with Lyla, to find out if the two of you are really the perfect match for each other. Romi, you’ll be spending the night alone at Island Dream. Everyone else, you’ll have one week to look deep into your hearts, to figure out if the person you’re coupled up with is really your perfect match—and if not, to seek out a new coupling in time for the first Ever After Ceremony this time next week.”

She closed the script, and then said, “And that’s when we’ll go to credits. I should say, you won’t necessarily have a week before the first Ever After Ceremony, the week refers to the viewer’s week, not yours. We’re playing the schedule by ear, but it’ll be at least a couple of days, as we have to get some of the other challenges out the way first.”

“Hang on,” Romi said icily. “You, what’s your name—”

“Camille,” Camille said without rancor.

“Camilla, yes, look, I’m sorry, but my boyfriend is not spending the night with some slag—” She turned to me. “No offense—”

“None taken,” I murmured, trying not to let the hysterical laugh that was threatening to erupt, bubble out.

“—in some shag-pad villa. That was all for the cameras, right?”

“I’m afraid not,” Camille said apologetically. “They do actually have to sleep there. I mean, obviously no one has to do anything they don’t want to—”

“I should fucking hope not!” Bayer growled into his beer.

“—but that’s the format. The winner of each task and their perfect match—and that’s decided by a different format each time—will spend the night together in the Ever After Villa, and after that, the two contestants can decide whether or not to return to their former partners or make a new couple.”

“Well, the format,” Romi spat, “can go fuck itself right in the hole.”

“Romi—” Joel said. He had stood up and was leaning across the table towards her. Romi rounded on him.

“Did you put her up to this?”

“What? No! Who?”

“Her.” She jerked her head at me. “I saw the two of you plotting together on the boat. Did you give her your answers?”

“No! Of course not. How would I even know to do that? We had no idea what the task would be.”

“Well, if you wanted to humiliate me—congratulations, you’ve succeeded.”

“Romi!” Joel was scarlet with mortification. “First, could we please not do this here—” He made a small, almost involuntary gesture towards the ranks of camera operators spaced around the cabana. “Second, why the hell would I want to humiliate you?”

“You’ve never got over me and Dean. Even though I told you I was drunk and it was a mistake. Even though I said sorry like a thousand times. Are you ever going to stop holding him over my head?”

A muscle twitched in Joel’s jaw and there was a short, charged silence in which the only sound was the palm trees rustling in the wind coming off the sea.

“You’re the only person mentioning his name right now,” he said at last, very evenly.

“Well, he’s not doing it,” Romi announced, turning to Camille. “He’s not going to that villa. Are you, Joel?”

“That is enough.” A deep voice came from the back of the room, and my first clue as to who’d spoken was the fact that the whole crew seemed to stiffen and stand to attention. A small group of producers and assistants parted like the Red Sea and Baz came through, his face dark as thunder. “You—” He pointed to Romi. “I’ve heard enough from you. If you don’t like the rules, you can get off the island. Now.”

Romi opened her mouth to speak, and then shut it again.

“And you”—he pointed to Joel—“and you”—jabbing a finger at me—“will be sleeping in the Ever After Villa tonight, end of. What you do there is between the two of you, but you’ll abide by the rules or fuck off. Got it?”

“Got it,” Joel murmured. He shot an apologetic look at Romi, whose face was scarlet with a mixture of wine, sun, and the effort of not biting back at Baz.

“Now wind this shit show up and get the crew across to the water villa to do the Ever After sequences,” Baz snapped. “I want the whole crew back on the boat by nine p.m. to go over today’s footage.”

“Do you want to leave Phil and Jen here to go over the—” Camille began, but Baz raised his voice.

“I said the whole crew. This is an all-hands meeting. Capiche?”

“Yes, Baz,” Camille whispered, and “Yes, boss,” came filtering back from the few other crew members who dared open their mouths. And then Baz turned on his heel, with Camille hurrying after him, and left, the camera crew following in his wake like a flock of little ducklings trailing after their mama.

After they’d gone, nobody said anything for a long moment. The fairy lights strung round the cabana were swaying in the wind, casting shadows that lurched drunkenly back and forth with each gust. It was Romi who broke the silence.

“Shit show is right. I mean, he said it. Where’s the fucking welfare team? Where’s the psychologist? I know how this stuff ought to run, and this show is a joke. Maybe I will walk.”

“What do you mean?” Santana asked. She was frowning, and looked pale and sweaty, a sharp contrast to her dewy glow from earlier. Now she drew out a boxy blue monitor and pressed something. “God, I need to get some food inside me. My bloods are really low. Has anyone got anything sweet?”

“That!” Romi said, pointing at the glucose monitor stuck to Santana’s upper arm. “That’s exactly what I mean. Where’s the medics keeping an eye on us? Where are the psychological interviews to make sure none of us are off our fucking nut? I’ve tried out for a bunch of these things and none of them have been run like this. We should have had evaluations and access to a trained counselor. You can’t just stick people in front of a camera and wash your hands—not anymore. They’re running this like it’s 1999.”

Angel had stood up and walked across to a corner of the cabana, where the debris from lunch had been stacked up, and now she came back with a banana, more or less intact apart from a bruised stem.

“Here,” she said to Santana. “Is this okay for your sugar?”

“I mean…” Santana took the fruit and looked at it a little dubiously. “Something like juice or gummy bears would be better but… yeah, it’ll do for the moment—at least until I can get to my glucose tablets, or they feed us.” She pulled off the peel, stuffed a piece in her mouth, and said, through a mouthful of fruit, “So… do you think this is shady? I thought it was supposed to be big budget. Isn’t it Real TV’s flagship show?”

“I do think they’re cutting corners,” Dan said. He looked a little worried. “I wasn’t sure at first, but Romi’s right about the psychological stuff. A friend did Love Island, and this absolutely isn’t how it’s supposed to work. There’s supposed to be welfare teams and so on.”

I frowned. Now Dan said it, I recalled there had been mention of a welfare team in the booklets Camille handed out. But where were they?

“And the crew is weirdly small,” Dan was continuing. “From what John told me, they’ve normally got dozens and dozens of people working on this stuff. But Baz seems to be stretched bloody thin. I mean, they’re relying on all these remote cameras that aren’t even working properly.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that there’s no staff outside the production crew?” Santana said through a mouthful of banana. “I thought there’d be, you know, maids and chefs and cleaners. But it seems to be just us and the TV crew. I do accept that the resort isn’t up and running yet, but shouldn’t Baz have brought those people in temporarily?”

“I’m not convinced they’ve sold it,” I said. My voice was quiet, and Bayer turned to me, his eyebrow raised so that the ring glinted in the glow from the string lights.

“What did you say?”

“I said, I don’t think they’ve sold the show,” I repeated more loudly. The others turned to look at me, their expressions ranging from skeptical to perplexed. “Something Baz said in our interview, about everyday contestants like me and…” I looked around the circle, trying to assess who wouldn’t mind being described as everyday. “… and, um, Joel, being what would sell it to the networks. Ari—that’s Nico’s agent—he made it sound like a done deal, but I haven’t seen a single bit of evidence that Real TV is actually on board. Have you?”

There was a quiet murmur from around the table as everyone assessed this idea. Dan spoke first.

“It would fit with there being no presenter. I mean, they’re not going to get a big name for a show that hasn’t sold… are they?”

“And it’d make sense of why the budget is so tight,” Santana said slowly. “If Baz is doing this out of his own pocket, hoping to sell it on spec. Shit, do you think it’s true?”

“If it is true, I will fucking kill him,” Conor said. His voice was low but full of menace, and turning to him, I realized it was the first time he had spoken. He looked extremely contained, but in the way a bomb might—a sealed package full of volatile material. “I’ll strangle Baz with my bare hands, and then I’ll fly back to the UK and do the same to my agent. If they’ve dragged me halfway around the world to some show that hasn’t even sold to a network—”

He broke off. Zana’s eyes were fixed on him and she was biting her lips, looking almost as pale as Santana.

“Look, I have to get some food,” Santana said at last into the strained silence. “Or I’m going to go hypo. Does anyone want to come down to the staff quarters with me to see what we can fix up? They must have some kind of supplies—and presumably there’s a kitchen.”

The others nodded with varying degrees of resignation and exhaustion, and then began making their way down the pebbled path towards the staff area.

As they did, almost unconsciously, they paired off, two by two, into their original couples, leaving me trailing in their wake, a lone singleton. It felt… I don’t know. Symbolic, maybe. Was I single now? Had Nico and I just broken up? I wondered what he was doing, whether he was having some kind of debrief on board the Over Easy right now, spewing his resentment to the camera. Or maybe he was sitting in his cabin, head in hands, as shell-shocked as me, wondering how it had all unraveled so fast. He had spent longer on the flight from the UK than he had on Ever After Island. If he caught a flight out tomorrow, which was the fifteenth, he could be back at his barista job by Monday—the whole thing like a distant dream. Except that when he woke up, I wouldn’t be there.

As I walked down the path in the wake of the others, I realized something: if tomorrow was the fifteenth, today must be Valentine’s Day. No one else had mentioned it, perhaps because we were all disoriented by the time zone changes and endless flights, and perhaps too because when the show aired it would seem weird to have contestants celebrating something that had happened months ago.

But today was the fourteenth of February—and the anniversary of the day Nico and I had made out at my friend’s Valentine’s Day Massacre party. If our relationship had just ended, live on camera, and I still wasn’t sure if that was the case, then maybe it was oddly fitting that we had stumbled from one horror show to another. Because, no matter how you spun it, this was a horror show—or at least a pretty far cry from what either of us had intended. And now I was alone on a tiny island, thousands of miles from home, wondering what on earth I’d let myself in for. I supposed I was about to find out.