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The front door.
I turn around, and Greta is on the street. Close enough for me to see the trail of red flowing from her nose. She’ll be on me in seconds.
I run. My right leg drags, each step sending a shooting pain through my core. But my adrenaline wins out.
I make it to the end of the street, hearing her coming closer with each step. I turn the corner without thinking, cutting through the empty intersection and heading left. I’m running blindly, the pain blurring my sight with flashes of black and red.
After a few steps, I realize I don’t hear her anymore. Have I lost her?
That doesn’t make sense. She has to be faster than me.
I turn around to see where she is, but I can’t spot anything through the sheet of rain. I keep moving, blinking hard and trying to clear the blood and water from my eyes.
I look up, just in time to crash into something.
I hit it with the force of a truck. The impact sends explosions of pain through every inch of my body, propelling me to the ground. My vision goes dark as I land on my back, but I cling to consciousness.
Slowly, my sight returns. Pixelated, as if I’m recording through my phone.
The colors form into the image I know so well, and I realize why Greta stopped chasing me. As my eyes lift upward, they take in the muscled, tattooed calves, the board shorts faded from years of sun, the slicked-back curls, wet from the rain.
“I’m so sorry, love.” The voice is so familiar, a part of me.
Logan.
37
BROOKE
When I come to, something wet is leaking into my eyes. Everything comes back slowly: the storm, the light, the crash. I wipe my hands across my face, but when I pull them away, they’re covered in something much thicker and darker than rainwater.
I’m bleeding. I can’t tell where it’s coming from or even what hurts. But then I remember.
Alani.
“I’m okay, Brooke,” she says. Her voice is pained, and I realize I must have been screaming her name. She’s close, having landed only a few feet from me. I turn to look, but my vision is still blurred. The rain and blood aren’t helping things.
Then I hear something else, footsteps coming from my opposite side.
“Well, hello again, Brooke. And who is this?”
The voice is familiar, but in the tumult of the rain, I can’t quite place it. My eyes finally focus on dirty tennis shoes as I try to lift myself up.
The same voicetsksat me. “Not so fast there. Let me help you.”
The next thing I know, I’m being pulled up to my bare feet—my flip-flops lost during the crash. The pressure is so great it feels like my shoulder might rip from my torso. I cry out, but it does no good. Once I’m up, an arm wrapped around my back to support me, I look over at the face next to me. The dirty-looking hair, wet and snarled, hidden beneath the black hood of a sweatshirt. The hazel eyes and the short yellow hairs breaking through the flesh on his chin.
“Doug,” I manage to say through my dry mouth. I turn my head slightly, enough for the pain to radiate down my neck, and see the trunk-like branch of a palm tree spread out across the street. That was what caused the accident. Doug must have thrown it in front of my bike when he saw us coming. He wanted us to crash.
“Shut the fuck up, bitch.”
The playful tone from before is long gone. I think about how often I’ve seen words like that written in the comments beneath my Instagram photos. But this is different. It takes me a moment to understand Doug’s hostility, but then I remember my post, the secrets I shared about Koh Sang. I’ve invited the world’s attention into this haven, where people only stay to escape. And Doug is no different from the rest of them.
My gaze moves to his broad chest, clothed in a black zip-up hoodie. I take it in with sudden horror. I assumed the person I saw in the hooded sweatshirt leaving Lucy’s room the other day was Daniel. But it wasn’t. It was Doug.
Before I can voice this, Doug pulls me along next to him, my limp toes dragging thin lines in the mud.
“Whoever the fuck you are, come on,” he commands Alani.
