Chapter 67

67

So what exactly do you want to talk about?"

"Like I said, you and me." Hana raises her voice above the strengthening sound of the wind. It's pulling at the tops of the pines overhanging the pool, making them shift and sway above them. "And Liam?"

"Liam?" Jo echoes, walking around the pool. Bending at the waist, she rolls up her yoga mat, tucks it under one arm.

"Yes, Liam. I know what happened." Hana's proud of herself then. Proud of how calm she is. In control. She knows now she'll remain steely throughout this conversation, won't be easily swayed by Jo's charm and easy patter. "I know it all, how you lied. All this time."

"You know it all ." Jo's voice stutters, misfires. "How?"

"You don't need to know how . You just have to know that I know what you did." Hana doesn't recognize her own voice, the deadened quality of each word.

The breeze gusts, jerking the half-open window behind them shut with a thud. There's a wild fear in Jo's eyes, her mouth twisting into an odd shape.

Then the words start coming out: "Han, please, you have to know that I didn't mean to leave him. I panicked. I knew he was dead, I did. I wouldn't have left him if I wasn't certain. I'd have called an ambulance, stayed. But he was gone, I knew he was. I keep going over it—wish I hadn't cycled away to do the other jump or persuaded him to come with me, but he was stubborn, said he wanted to try it again. I was out of sight, but I heard it. This thud..." Jo briefly closes her eyes. "I went straight back, and I swear, I checked to see if he was breathing, but he was gone, and I was going to tell you, but I couldn't. How could I?" She's wrapped her arms around herself, is doing a strange rocking motion, backward and forward on her heels.

Hana stares at her sister and feels a funny fizzing in her head. The awful heat that was there before, morphing into something colder, darker. "You were what ?" She has no idea where it's come from—this self-control that she's managed to muster. "You were there when Liam died? At the bike park?"

"But that's what you're saying, isn't it?" Jo's face pales. Beads of sweat are dotting her forehead. "That you knew it all. That I was with him when the accident happened."

A horrible, weighty silence.

"No," Hana says eventually. "I found out about the affair, the fling , whatever it was. That was it . " The words are like acid in her mouth. "Not this. That you were with him when he died and then you left him."

She can't absorb it. She's played out Liam's final moments so many times in her head, forensically picked over the reports, it's as if she were there as it happened. This new narrative doesn't work, the pictures she's clung to now grinding to a juddering halt in her head.

"I panicked, Han, that's all it was, and I promise I've tried to tell you so many times, but there's no way I could have done it right after he died, and every moment since, it wouldn't happen. I'd open my mouth or start writing a letter and the words wouldn't come." Jo drags her gaze up to meet hers. "I never wanted to tell you like this, you have to know that. It's the last thing I wanted. I planned to do it properly, but Bea's accident, and then Seth..." Tears are forming in her eyes. "There was never the right moment."

"Bea knew, didn't she?" Hana watches a tiny insect crawl up the underside of the yoga mat toward Jo's hand.

Jo nods, a jerky, puppetlike movement. "Yes. She saw a photo on my phone of the two of us together. A few weeks ago she confronted me and it all came out. She said I had to tell you. I promised I would, said I'd do it here, on the holiday. That night, when Bea got to the island, she called me, asked if I'd done it."

"And that's when you went to meet her, wasn't it? It was you who left the villa that night."

"You knew it was me?" Jo's grip on the yoga mat tightens.

"Caleb overheard you talking to Seth."

As the insect on the mat reaches her thumb, Jo looks down, flicks it away. "She asked me to meet her there. I've no idea why she wanted to talk there and then. She was in an odd mood, kept going on about needing to make things right, telling the truth." She frowns. "But we cleared it up, I promise. I told Bea I'd tell you the next day and she seemed happy with that."

"And you definitely left her on the beach?"

"Yes. She said she was going to get her stuff and then come to the villa. She still wanted it to be a surprise for the rest of you."

"But what about this?" Hana pulls Bea's broken phone from her pocket. "I found it in your room." Her voice cracks. "You took her phone, Jo. Something we might have been able to give to the police. You destroyed it, took the memory card. Why would you do that?"

Jo looks at her, stricken. "I didn't destroy it. It was like that when I found it, the morning Bea was discovered. I saw it under one of the planters near the yoga pavilion. The memory card was gone when I picked it up."

Hana mulls over her words, a thought edging out from the corner of her mind. "So that's what you were looking for when I saw you by the pavilion after I spoke to the detective. You knew what people would think if they realized you'd met Bea that night, the messages between you. How it would seem, out of context."

Jo flinches at the words. "Yes, and I feel shitty about it, Han, but I didn't know what else to do. I never found the memory card, honestly. Either it's still there somewhere or it was taken by whoever smashed the phone in the first place." She meets Hana's gaze. "I acted stupidly, impulsively, like I always do, but I'd never hurt Bea, Han. You know that."

"But you'd leave Liam..." Hana's never had a noise inside her brain like this before, this loud buzzing. It's as if her skull is filled with a teeming mass of tiny, angry flies.

Jo doesn't reply, just steps toward her, but Hana edges away, onto the grass.

"You left him, Jo," Hana spits out. The buzzing inside her head is morphing into a strange kind of electric energy. "You left him there, to die."

She thinks of all of the moments prior to Liam's accident and after it when Jo could have told her. All the moments on the way to the hospital, the way home, at the funeral. The weeks that came after.

Moment after moment seared upon her brain and Jo has taken them all and she will never remember them without hate again.

But the worst thing that Jo's stolen from her is the only thing she really has left, the most precious thing of all.

Her memory of Liam.

"You think you can get away with this? Stealing everything from me? Because that's what you do. Take everything."

"I don't know what you mean..." Jo can't look at her and Hana knows why. Jo, more than anyone, knows that it's a pattern—Jo steals from people, always has. Jo stole her hobbies, her friends, and made them hers. And for a short while, Jo would feel better about herself simply because she'd beaten someone.

"I'll tell you." Hana lists them all, coldly, brutally: petty things that only a sister would remember or find important. Hana tells Jo about the barbed comments she always makes, how she took up ice-skating just because Hana did, and how she practiced and practiced until she was better than Hana. How she'd talk over Bea when she did well at something and how she'd try to drop in a sly negative when someone else had something good to say.

The words keep coming. Hana's hot when she finishes speaking, her skull pounding.

Jo is watching her, silent, but her body language—shoulders sagging, head hanging low—says it all. It's hit home. Finally something has penetrated the barrier.

"I'm sorry," she says finally, her voice muffled by tears. "I'm so, so sorry."

It's actually the worst thing she can say: Hana wants something meaty in return, something she can toy with and rebut. She doesn't want Jo's apologies, because there's pity in that and that's the last thing she wants. Pity makes her feel silly and small, and she wants to wipe it off Jo's face.

Hana doesn't plan what happens next, and she surprises even herself because she has never been physical—has always been the one to run away from conflict and not toward it. Bea and Jo were more likely to scrap it out, wrestle on the sofa, but never her.

Striding forward, Hana roughly grabs Jo's wrist. "But I don't think you are sorry."

Jo recoils. "Stop, you're hurting me." She tries to twist away, mascara now smudged in watery black streaks beneath her eyes.

"No," Hana replies. The buzzing in her head, the black flies, are taking over. "I want you to say it properly."

"Please, Han," Jo pleads, trying to dislodge her hand. "You're scaring me."

But it's as if Hana can't hear her. Looking at Jo's face, the fear in her eyes, all Hana can concentrate on is the feeling this is giving her, a heady sense of power.

"Han..."

But Hana's silent.

She squeezes harder on Jo's wrist, so hard that she can feel the rigid line of bone beneath her sister's skin.