Reckless Girls(74)
It ended up being “friends of his parents.”
Who didn’t know he had a girlfriend. Too complicated to explain, he didn’t want to make her feel awkward, he’d be back in a couple of hours, and then they could go drink beer on the beach. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Caroline doesn’t know what she hates more—how lame that story is, or how she hadn’t called him on it, how she had just smiled through numb lips and watched him go.
Then she’d packed her stuff.
Except, she knows buying an earlier ticket home is going to eat up the rest of her money, and it’s all just so fucking unfair and stupid.
Because when Tanner gets back, when she texts him and tells him she’s leaving him, he isn’t actually going to care that much. If anything, it might come as a kind of relief. After all, he has plenty of money. His trip will go on, and there will be other Ainsleys, and all Caroline will have from the last two weeks is a sunburn and a sad story.
She takes another sip of her beer, which has gone warm and flat.
Outside, it’s started to rain, the sound echoing on the tin roof. Bikes whiz by, sending up sheets of water and filling the open-air bar with the smell of diesel and burnt rubber.
She doesn’t want to leave.
There is so much more she wanted to do here, more to see and explore. She supposes she could always go back to the hostel, pretend she’d never seen the text, suck it up, and at least get something out of—
“Are you okay?”
Startled out of her misery, Caroline looks up to see a woman sitting on the stool next to her. She’s pretty, with bright red hair framing an angular face and big green eyes. Her shoulders are bare and a little burned, and she has that kind of windblown, sun-streaked look that makes Caroline think she spends a lot of time outside.
“Yeah,” she answers, sipping her beer even though she doesn’t want to. “Just … a guy thing.”
“Ah,” the woman replies, nodding. “Boy trouble. The cause of at least eighty-five percent of all crying jags in bars.”
That makes Caroline laugh. The woman seems nice. Friendly. There’s an ease and confidence about her that Caroline wishes she could project, too—like she could fit in anywhere, talk to anyone.
“And,” the woman goes on, leaning one elbow on the bar, “if you’re traveling with a guy, that ups the percentage to a solid ninety-two.”
It’s her joke, and the inviting smile that accompanies it, that makes Caroline launch into her whole story. It’s only when she’s said it out loud that she realizes how silly it all sounds. How minor in the grand scheme of things.
But the woman isn’t looking at her with pity or condescension. She gets it. Caroline can tell. It’s something in her eyes, in the way she nods at certain details, like Ainsley’s stupid fucking Instagram captions—Fit to be Thai-ed!!!—or the even stupider lie Tanner told.
“Anyway,” Caroline concludes, “now I can either waste the rest of my money going home, or I can … I don’t know. Go back to him, and get over it. I mean, I could try to get by on my own for the next three weeks, then meet up with him when it’s time to fly back.” The thought of having to deal with Tanner in any capacity is preemptively exhausting, but Caroline knows that’s probably her best bet. Make her last few hundred bucks last as long as she can, and hope Tanner doesn’t cancel her ticket.
But fuck, she hates that. Putting that power in his hands when what she really wants to do is ditch him entirely.
The woman nods again before glancing over her shoulder. “Or,” she says with a shrug, “maybe there are other options?”
“Like what?”
The woman shrugs again, then smiles. “There are always options. Particularly when you let go of the version of yourself that got here in the first place. You can cling to the before, or you can try to live in the after, you know?”
In the after.
Caroline isn’t sure what it means, but she likes the sound of that.
She likes this girl, too.
By the third beer, she’s not a stranger anymore, though. She has a name, an unusual one that Caroline has never heard before.
She also has a boat.
And that night, when Caroline steals back to Tanner’s room at the hostel, she knows that she does have options. Her new friend has just shown them to her. She’ll take Caroline on her boat, sail her anywhere she’d like to go. Caroline just needs to do one thing first.
She finds the money clip in a drawer, underneath his underwear.
She picks it up, sliding it into her bag, then slips back out into the night, toward the bar and her friend, and her freedom, and it surprises her how easy it is. How there was a before, when she was sad and miserable and trapped—and now, just a few hours later, there’s this glorious after.
Caroline steps into it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is the book I’ve been wanting to write since I was twelve years old and first came across a copy of And the Sea Will Tell in my local library. I can still see the turquoise cover, the leering skull. To finally get to write my own “boat murder” book is a (slightly macabre) dream come true, and I am so thankful to everyone who helped make it happen!
Holly Root has been my agent for more than a decade, and I hope she will still be talking me off ledges and helping to steer my ideas into port for decades more to come. This book particularly benefitted from her excellent notes early in the planning stages, and I am so grateful for her expertise.