“I was so angry, Jude. I didn’t look at the bottle before I threw it. I wasn’t aiming for her, but it broke, and she got splashed and…” His face contorts, lost in a harrowing memory. “Her fucking EpiPen was in the car! She always had it with her. Always. Until the one fucking time she needed it! Jesus,” he sobs, hanging his head.
“She had an allergy?”
His face is stricken with grief. “Peanuts. My father wouldn’t allow any nuts onboard. But cooking oil had been brought on somehow.Goddamn peanut oil.” He holds his hands up, staring at the backs of them like they’re weapons used to end someone’s life. “I held her. I felt her struggling to breathe beneath my hands. Felt her dying. She fucking tried tosmileand tell me it would be okay as I ran off to get her medication. But I knew.I fucking knewI’d be too late. Before I made it back, I blacked out.Only after I woke up on that other boat did I find out my father’s had gone up in flames.”
“With your mother still on it.”
He screws his face up, pushing his head into his hands. “Yeah.”
The final night in South Africa he told me about the stranger on the boat who helped him.
I can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like for him waking up without the people he knew and loved. Then never seeing them again.
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him in a gentle voice. “You were going back to her with her medicine. She might have been fine if you’d gotten to her. You don’t know?—”
“I do know! I killed her. Fire or not, she wouldn’t have survived without her medication. She almost died as a child and again as a teenager. The only reason she survived those times is because she got a shot quick enough. She should have been safe on my father’s boat. She should have been safewith me.”
“Shewassafe with you! It’s not your fault. You could ask why she left her medication in the car, or why that oil was on the boat. You could ask if it was the fire that was the real cause of her death. You could ask a million questions about how what happened that day came to be. But you don’t. You keep blaming yourself for a horrible, horrible accident. Why? Why are you torturing yourself?”
He lifts tear-filled eyes to mine and the sight makes my heart stall.
“You’re not a killer,” I whisper. “I know you. I’ve seen the real you. And you’re not this evil person you’re making yourself out to be.”
“Itwasme. I know it. And my family knows it. They know it wasn’t the fire that killed her. Her cause of death must have been in the autopsy.”
“You don’t know that,” I cry, desperate for him to believe me, to consider for a moment that there could be another explanation.
There has to be.
“It’s the one thing I’m certain of. I know my family, Jude. It’s why they held that press conference the day after it happened. It’s why my father used the specific words he did. He was delivering a message to me. Theyknew. And they wanted me to know that they did.”
“Beauforts stick together,” I whisper.
He drags in a slow, rough breath. “It was my father’s message to me. Telling me they knew what I did and were covering it up.”
“They announced to the world you were dead,” I say.
“It was that or let me face a life behind bars. They were giving me a chance to remain free.”
I wish I could shake some sense into him.
“Why didn’t you tell them? Explain what happened with her allergy? They’d have understood.”
“They wouldn’t. Don’t you get it? They held that press conference because they thought I killed her. They blame me for her death. If they’d thought it was an accident, they would never have declared me dead from the fire too.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say again, not knowing what else I can do or say to take the look of utter devastation from his face.
“Maybe I’d have believed that once if it wasn’t for the fact my entire family blame me. They know I can be hot-headed. They’ve seen me punch walls and smash windows when I’m mad. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but no matter what you want to believe, Iamcapable of hurting someone, I know I am. And my family knew it too.”
“You’re not, though. You’ve never hurt me. You saved me at the beach. And you didn’t hurt Callum just now, either.”
“Only because you’re here and I don’t want you to see me like that.”
“That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it. You’ve been following him for days. You’ve had ample opportunities to hurt him if you wanted to. But you didn’t. Smashing up stuff when you get mad is not the same as taking someone’s life. I threw all Callum’s stuff out the window and some got broken. Does that make me capable of killing too?”
“You threw his stuff out?”
“All across the sidewalk.”
