Katie stepped out onto the balcony. A bird nesting in the hotel gardens flew off, startled, its dark wings lapping at the night sky. She wrapped her hands around the wooden railings and inhaled the smells of frangipani and cooling earth.
Finn joined her. Neither of them spoke. She listened to the far-off call of the surf and the breeze stirring the trees. She hadn’t yet read on in the journal as he’d asked her to do. Everything was rushing forward, pulling out of her reach. She needed to centre herself, to think.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice having lost the intensity of earlier. ‘I should have told you about my email sooner. I was ashamed.’
She understood a lot about shame; it lived within her like a second heartbeat. She had told no one about Mia’s phone call. Instead, she had lived with the shame of that conversation, feeling its inky guilt sliding through her veins. ‘I haven’t been completely honest with you either.’
He turned towards her.
She could feel his gaze on her, but she wouldn’t look up. She stared into the darkness as she told him, ‘Mia called me. It was the day before she died. We hadn’t spoken since Christmas when I told her I was engaged. Three months – that’s how long it’d been.’ She sighed. ‘When she finally rang, it was to ask for money.’
‘Because I hadn’t given it to her.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you lend it to her?’
‘I didn’t even consider it.’ Katie closed her eyes and felt the night press against her skin. She thought of their conversation, the one she had been playing back in the bottomless depths of grief ever since.
‘What did you say?’
She glanced over her shoulder towards the lit room where the journal lay. ‘Do you know why I didn’t read her journal when I first found it in her backpack?’
‘You said you wanted to keep Mia’s memory alive.’
She laughed a single sharp note. ‘That’s what I told myself. It’s funny what you can make yourself believe. But the truth is, Finn, I’m a coward. I’ve never sat down and read it in one go because I didn’t want to know what Mia had written about our last conversation.’
Katie thought of the dark truth she’d so coolly released, and the sound of Mia’s breath catching in her throat as it hit her.
‘I could not bear to read that it was my words that led her to the edge of that cliff.’