Page 91 of When We Believed in Mermaids

Which has haunted me more than I want to admit. “I had to keep my distance, Josie, but that didn’t mean I hated you.”

And for the first time, I see the lost Josie I knew then. “I’m so sorry I did that.”

I shake my head. “I mourned you. I didn’t want to,” I admit. “But I did. We both did. For months and months after you died, I combed the internet for any possibility that you could have survived.” I shake my head, winded. “For years, I’d think I saw you in a crowd and...”

She closes her eyes, and I see that tears are gathered on her lashes again. “I’m so sorry.”

“That doesn’t really help all that much.”

She takes a step closer. “Don’t you see, Kit, that I had to kill her? I had to start over.”

We’re standing face-to-face, both of us with our arms crossed. I’m so much taller than she is now. I think of the things I think I know about her, about what happened to her, this tiny woman who once loomed as large as a dragon over my life. “How did you do it?”

“Let’s go inside. I’ll make tea.”

She shows me around as the kettle boils, and then we carry our mugs into the lounge, where she opens all the doors to the sea breeze. We face each other on a sofa, and she tucks her legs up under her. Something about the way the light comes in strikes her scar, an uneven zigzag through her eyebrow that healed poorly. “The doctor who stitched you up did a terrible job,” I say. “I could have done better first year.”

“I think it was because it was so long before it got attention.” She touches it, the old wound. “Everybody else was so much worse off.”

“Triage,” I say.

“That’s right. You’re an ER doctor.” She smiles. “By the way, did you save a kid’s life on Rangitoto?”

I blink. “What? How did you know about that?”

“Simon asked me. It was in all the news. Human interest story and all that.”

“It was me, but it wasn’t exactly a big deal.” She starts to interrupt, and I raise a hand to stall her. “Remember how kids always jumped off the cliffs? And how every year somebody would crack their head wide open? It was me standing right on the rocks where they go in and seeing that somebody knocked themselves out on the way down.” I shrug. “I was in the water before he was, I think.”

She laughs. “I love it. Still heroic.”

“Whatever.” I’m feeling a little faint or something and take a long gulp of tea. “Tell me the story.”

“Okay.” She takes a breath. “I was in France with some people. We’d been traveling all over, surfing. A lot of drugs.” She looks down into her cup, and I see the weight of it on her shoulders. “I was...bad.” She lifts a shoulder, meets my eyes. “You saw me. When I stole all your stuff. I’m so sorry about that.”

“Later.”

A nod. “So the plan was to go to Paris and then down to Nice. I didn’t have much at that point. A backpack and my board. That’s all most of us had. We caught the train in Le Havre. I went to find a bathroom, but the first one was filled, and I just kept going down to the next one. I was high, shockingly enough, and when I came out, I turned the wrong way, and I got all the way to the back of the train before I realized it.”

My stomach aches with the tale.

“The bomb blew when I was in the back. The cars were all derailed, and I was thrown out.” She’s frowning toward the past, over my left shoulder. “I don’t honestly know what happened right after, just that I woke up, and I was...okay.”

She stops. Looks at me with alarm.

“What?”

“I just realized that I’ve never told anyone this story. Ever.”

And because I loved her once, I reach out and touch her knee. “Just tell it.”

She closes her eyes. “It was awful. People were dead. They were screaming. There was all this smoke and sirens and...noise. Smells. I just wanted to find my friends, find my backpack—like, that’s all I could think about. My pack.”

She stops. Looks out to the ocean. Taps her fingers against her cup.

I’m quiet, letting her tell the story.

“The closer I got to where they should be, the worse it got. Like, not just dead people but...pieces. An arm. I saw an arm, and I threw up, but I just couldn’t stop. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was thinking; I was just fixated on that pack.”