Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
But of course, it wasn’t the same.
We’d learned fear. And lived a grief so serrated that the scars ached to this day.
“Do you think we’ll ever be how we were again?” Vansi had asked me the night when part of me had gone permanently numb. The whites of her eyes had been red, her voice a rasp, and her skin such an ashen shade of brown that, for a second, I’d thought I was speaking to a mirage, a stealthy shadow of my friend.
I’d stroked the wavy mass of her hair with a gentle hand, hugged her close . . . and held my silence. Because we’d both known the answer to her question. There’d been no need to give voice to the agony of it.
Bea was dead.
Her body erased out of existence.
There was no coming back from that.
3
An hour and a half until we reached the estate where Darcie and Ash waited for us. A shorter time until we left the state highway that hugged the jagged rocks and wild green of this coast with its massive white-capped waves and deadly undertows. Even the plants were eerie at times, so ancient that they appeared alien growths transported from another planet.
Click. Click. Click.
The big SUV hummed alone through the alien wilderness, no other cars on this silent stretch devoid of human settlement, but the sun shone bright, the colors of the landscape vivid. A pop of red berries I barely caught as we rolled by, a shot of golden green leaves against the sooty black trunk of a tree fern, a capture of Vansi’s laughing face as reflected in the side mirror.
“You’ll have a thousand shots just from the road, Lunes.” Kaea bumped my shoulder. “Control yourself.” All big shoulders and wicked dark eyes set against glowing brown skin, I’d thought him the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen the first day of high school, when we’d ended up in the same form room.
I’d soon learned that he was also a player. The boy around whom trailed a line of slack-eyed groupies and—once he hit his late-teenage years—whose bedroom had a revolving door that spun so fast it was a health hazard.
Back when I’d shared a flat with him, Vansi, and Aaron during our university days, I’d met so many young women in the kitchen on weekend mornings that I’d given up even exchanging names with them. Poor things always thought they’d be back, but Kaea had an endless smorgasbord from which to pick—and no desire for a steady girlfriend.
“Relationships are too much work,” he’d told me once. “I’m here to graduate in the top one percent of my class, get headhunted by a major corporate law firm, and make my way to partner in under ten years. I don’t have time to be the doting boyfriend.”
Arrogant ass, I thought with an inward grin. Because while he might not do relationships, he was an amazing friend. A friend who’d shipped me a giant order of my favorite local supermarket chocolates after I admitted to being homesick after moving to London—even though, according to him, my love for the cheap chocolates was a “screaming chemical-laced affront to good taste.”
Lifting the camera, I snapped a photo of his grinning face.
When I looked at the tiny image on the screen, he was as beautiful and as charismatic as ever, some part of him still the boy on whom I’d had a crush. Thank God that hadn’t lasted; he’d have obliterated my heart. “So, no third Mrs. Ngata yet?” I asked, after snapping another shot, this time of the couple in the front seats of the big black SUV that was our ride.
Another rugged vehicle—this one a dark green, per the recent photo in our group chat—hugged the road some three hours north of us.
Driving down as we drove up, our destination the same.
Like me, Aaron and his new fiancée, Grace, hadn’t been able to join the hiking detour the others had organized. We’d link up at the estate. I hadn’t yet met Grace, as Aaron’s romance with her had taken place while I was out of the country, but Kaea and the others had reported that she was a sweetheart.
“What about his family?” I’d asked Kaea privately. “Any pushback there?” I knew that they’d expected Aaron to end up with someone from the African diaspora.
“I saw a photo he put up of her heading to church with his family. Huge smiles on everyone’s faces, and his grandmother was holding Grace’s hand. Fact Grace shares their faith will have been a major point in her favor. And she’s just like Aaron, you know? Generous and warm, just the kind of person they’d want for him.”
Trust Aaron to find a woman with a nature as gentle and kind as his own. Back when we’d flatted together, Aaron had always been the one most likely to organize a pick-me-up if one of us was struggling, or to make dinner for us all. He’d even packed me lunch one semester after he realized I was exhausted from study and work, and as a result was barely eating.