Nev ignored the touch, but didn’t move away. “Maybe someday. I need you to watch the farm.”
Ronnie looked down at her friend’s phone again. A church. Men with shovels standing behind a rectangular hole full of half-buried bones.
“They found that one recently. It had at least four hundred and fifty people buried in it.”
Ronnie swore.One murder is a tragedy, but a hundred is a statistic...
“You must have pictures you can’t publish.” It occurred to her that the photos in frames on Nev’s wall were only a fractionof her collection. Nev must have taken thousands of pictures before the UN forcibly evacuated westerners.
Nev raised her eyebrows, looked down at her phone. That was a yes.
“What did you do with them, the graphic ones, the ones you couldn’t publish?” Ronnie imagined sinister cardboard boxes in the attic at Stone House. Photos that Rainbow must never, ever see.
“Evidence of war crimes I gave to the UN, who probably tossed them in the bin.”
Ronnie’s chest hurt. “That’s hard.” She breathed shallowly. Nev’s cold hand felt nice, so she focused on that. “Were they all adults, or…?”
Nev looked at the window. Ronnie swore in her head. Nev had seen dead kids.
“No one wants to look at pictures of dead kids.”
“You’d be surprised. The people who want to probably shouldn’t, and the people who should probably won’t.”
She had so much respect for this woman that sometimes it amazed her—amazed her that a badass like that would be friends with her. What did Nev get from the relationship? What did Ronnie do for her that she couldn’t do for herself?
“Were you shooting on film back then?” Ronnie asked. “Did you keep the film?”
“Negatives? Yeah. You’re never going to see them.”
“It must be lonely, not being able to talk about it.”
Nev shrugged. She had captured evidence to give the dead a voice, ammunition for future prosecutors. When the Rwandan government released thousands of murderers and rapists back into the community, she must have been disappointed. Crushed. Betrayed. Neutrality in war zones must blow.
She tried to picture Nev as a bright-eyed twenty-something, hopeful and idealistic, with Joni Mitchell hair that looked softand smelled nice, a ghost partially caught in the reflection on a bulletproof truck window in a paper portrait behind glass on the wall at Stone House, so many layers removed from the person holding her hand now.
Reg and Mattie returned smelling like cigarettes. Their low voices made her sleepy.
“Rainbow wants to visit,” Reg said.
Ronnie opened her eyes. The others were looking at their phones. Her hands were too swollen and numb. She swallowed saliva and listened to nurses debate whether it was time to try walking again. In the next room, a newborn cried and adults laughed.
“Do you want Rainbow to visit?” Reg asked.
Suddenly, it felt like someone had turned a hair dryer on her face. She leaned back into the pillow and focused on breathing. She was having some kind of blood pressure thing.I can’t deal with her right now.She couldn’t manage a nine-year-old’s feelings when she could barely regulate her own. “I’ll see her at the house.”
“My house?” Reg asked. His eyes flicked from her to Nev, who remained silent.
“Of course your house. Where else?”
Black windows. Nighttime. Reg and Mattie took turns bending over the bed to kiss her on the forehead. Mattie hugged Nev, shrinking her down to child-size. “I’ll be back in the morning. Text me if anything changes.”
Ronnie lay with her eyes closed, waiting for sleep to swoop in and save her, carry her away from here. Machines beeped. Nurses crept around. Her friend lay facing the window on the couch that looked hard. She hoped her friend was asleep.
22
MORNING
The sun rose slowly all at once, lifting the hospital room high into the air over Cairns. Ronnie watched Nev watch the sunrise over the ocean from the floor-to-ceiling window. She couldn’t see it from the bed, but could tell by her friend’s expression that it must be magnificent. Ronnie couldn’t be bothered to move—the most recent diagnosis was low blood pressure and anemia.
