The Girl in the Mirror(78)

I’ve never heard her talk like this before. She’s so angry. No, not angry. Sneering.

Hateful.

And something else. Triumphant.

This is not an accidental meeting. She didn’t just turn up here. This was a plan. Snuff movie. She intended me to find that footage.

Summer talks about scuttling a yacht—what yacht?—off the coast of Australia. Opening the seacocks, watching till the tip of the mast sank below the waves. But she’s not telling me this to let me in on a secret. She’s boasting. She’s taunting me.

It’s bad enough what she’s already said, but she’s leading up to something worse. The reason she did this. Her plan.

I want to know and I don’t want to know.

And there’s something else worse than any words. It’s what she’s holding in her hand. She’s trying to hide it, keeping both hands behind her back, but I can see the glint of black metal.

Summer is holding a gun.



The floor lurches like a ship in a storm. I want to crumple to my knees, but that gun behind Summer’s back tells me that I can’t. This isn’t just about humiliation. It isn’t just about money. Summer’s been playing a bigger game than that. And now we’re in the endgame.

I’ve got to keep my sister talking. I’m hoping, praying that she doesn’t know Virginia’s here. A pregnant teenager is an unlikely rescuer, not much of a match for an adult with a gun, but she’s all I have. If I play for time, maybe Virginia will overhear us. Maybe she’ll call the police or sneak up on Summer from behind.

“I saw the boom hit your head,” I say. “I saw you hit the water. How could you fake that?”

Summer smirks. “It was tiresome, Twinnie. I hate falling in the sea. I had to act it out nine times to get it looking legit, and then splice the footage into the feed. Can you imagine?”

“But it hit you so hard . . .”

“Well, the footage you saw was sped up, and you wouldn’t have realized I was wearing a helmet under my hat, but yeah, it still hurt. It put my neck out.” She wiggles her shoulders. “I’m fine now, though. Thanks for your concern.”

“But where were you? I searched every inch of Bathsheba. I even dived off and checked under the hull.”

She laughs. “I knew you would do that. Everything you did was totally predictable, but you were hours too late. I’d already made my getaway while you were having a nice long snooze. A pharmaceutically enhanced snooze.”

“Pharmaceutically enhanced?” I repeat. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t have time for this, sweet pea. We need to get moving. I don’t know why you turned up here tonight, but now that you’ve seen what you’ve seen, we have to make the best of it.”

“Wait, no,” I say. “This doesn’t make any sense. Where did you go? Who picked you up?”

“No one picked me up. The big I-can’t-sail routine was all for your benefit. Don’t you get it? I pumped up a rubber dinghy, clamped an outboard on it, and off I went. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t need any help.”

“But we were hundreds of miles from land. No dinghy can take you that far.”

“According to all the charts on board we were hundreds of miles from land, yes. And you thought you knew the Indian Ocean so well.”

“But, but—” I’m trying to think what to say next to keep her talking. “Why would you make me think you were dead? And our mother? And Adam?”

“Can you not figure it out, Iris? Well, as Dad always said, nice is dumb.”

My sister filmed herself nine times getting hit by the boom. She drugged me and climbed into a dinghy and sped off into nothingness in the middle of the night. She went to an island she had deleted from our charts, where, it seems, a yacht was waiting. She solo-sailed all the way back to Australia.

And she did all this while she was pregnant?

It’s like being hit with a hammer. I get it at last.

“You weren’t pregnant,” I say. “You were never pregnant. You can’t have a baby.”

“Congratulations,” says Summer. “Clever you.”

She points the gun at me.



I’m standing with both hands raised, trying not to sway.

“Take your phone out of your pocket,” says Summer. “Or I should say my phone. Smash it.”

I reach into my pocket and pull out the iPhone. I think about trying to dial someone, but there’s no way. I hit it against the corner of the vanity. The screen shatters.

“Again,” says Summer. “Harder. Hit it against the tap.”

I smash the phone over the tap. Its innards spill out and fall into the sink. When I look up, Summer is holding the other phone. Iris’s phone. My phone. She tosses it to me.

“Same deal,” she says.

I smash this phone harder. I’m praying that the banging will rouse Virginia. The sink is a jumble of smartphone parts.

“Don’t worry about your rings,” she says. “You can keep them. They’re replicas.”

I glance at her left hand. Her princess-cut diamond engagement ring gleams in the faint light. I’ve been wearing a cheap fake all this time.

“Tarquin told me that he saw you,” I say. “You took him to the bridge, didn’t you?” Now I understand Tarquin’s confusion about the baby. Baby’s back. Baby’s out again. Did he know his mother was two people, or did he think the baby was popping in and out of me? He was asking for an explanation, but no one was listening.