Page 48 of The Triangle

I smile, catch Alec smiling too, but not for the same reason. Not entirely, anyway. If she remembers Aitutaki that’s a good sign. And it was fun. It was a fuckin’ blast, if I’m being honest.

The Cook Islands were something to behold. White sand and turquoise water. Scuba diving and sleeping on the beach, or the deck of the yacht, or not sleeping at all because we were having too much fun and didn’t want to miss a single moment of it.

“I think back on that time and wonder… will it ever be as good again? Will we ever love each other the way we did then?” She allows a small laugh to sneak through her sudden sadness. “Remember that yellow dress I wore like every day?” She guffaws despite herself.

And we laugh with her. Because she did love that stupid dress. And she looked amazing in it. It was right around her sixteenth birthday. And she wasn’t the little girl I once knew. She was almost somebody else entirely. And when she put that dress on for the first time, well, that was when I noticed she’d grown up.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her body was still very slim, but well-muscled from the hard life we lived. And it was difficult to remember that hard life at the time. Paradise has a way of doing that, ya know? Erasing all the bad things and replacing them with bright sunshine days.

Dinners under the moonlight. Swimming under the stars. Laughing with the only two people who matter.

She was tan, and beautiful, and happy.

What happened to us?

“I want that again,” she says. Looking at me, not Alec.

I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “I know.” And I almost say ‘me too’ but I just can’t do it. I can’t say it because I don’t think it’s true.

I don’t want us. I don’t want the triangle.

I want her. Just her.

CHAPTER NINETEEN - ALEC

BEFORE

Sydney Harbour glimmers outside the window of the suite. Inside, Christine and Danny glimmer in a different way. Christine shines like the diamonds around her neck. And Danny like the ones in the cufflinks I’ve convinced him to wear.

He claims to hate wearing a tuxedo, but once he’s in it, he really shows it off to its best effect. Christine has never had such reservations about donning an evening gown. If I had her particular genetic endowments, I wouldn’t either.

A boozy effervescence suffuses the suite. It is, I imagine, equal parts champagne and endorphins. We came to Australia to visit an old friend of mine. Someone who used to come round and visit, back before my parents died. Someone who, I always suspected, was well aware that the accident that killed my parents two years ago was only an accident by the broadest definition of the word. But I don’t know what one calls an automobile accident when there was nothing accidental about it. “An automobile intentional” sounds right stupid.

In any case, my father’s old business acquaintance, Roderick, is someone with whom I’d been meaning to have a bit of a Q&A about my parents’ death for a while. But life got in the way. And Danny got in the way. Danny’s more thorough. More cautious. The voice of reason. I do a fair job of feigning control, but Danny actually possesses the ability to maintain his self-control. And so Danny convinced me that we needed to wait to confront Roderick until all the facts were in.

But once the facts did come in and it was confirmed that dear old Roderick had knowledge of the circumstances that led to my parents’ passing before the ‘accident’ happened, and chose to keep that information to himself… Well. Cautious though Danny may be, once he has his arms around the particulars of a situation, his call to action is loud and swift.

I had almost moved past my need for retribution. Almost. One never really lets go of something like that, I suppose. Anger that is born of pain and betrayal can take root and fester for a lifetime. When one least expects it, the demon can rear its head. I was just-turned-twenty-one when Zander and Yolandi van den Berg were set upon by thieves and run off the N2 Highway just outside Durban, causing their vehicle to crash through a police barricade and careen down the side of a ravine.

The number of things about that story that are fundamentally shit are too numerous to consider, but the resulting effect is that having just turned twenty-one, I was in both the position and of the need to take over my father’s business. Gone were the days of flitting about the globe making mischief for mischief’s sake. The mischief we got into following my parents’ death had to be about maintaining control and power of a highly-tiered, complicatedly-structured organization that is at once obscenely visible and yet necessarily cloaked in shadow.

In other words, it’s a fokken balancing act, man.

So, after my initial need to hold Roderick to account for his betrayal had passed, my attention turned to other affairs. But Danny didn’t forget. Behind the scenes, he went about confirming Roderick’s role in the deaths of the van den Bergs and—after two years—presented me with the opportunity to ‘make it right.’ As he said.

Because Danny Fortnight believes, above all else, in loyalty. He believes in doing what is right by the people he cares for. One must note that in our world, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are morally relative terms, but moral relativism aside, Danny lives by a set of ethics by which I have not felt burdened, historically. I’ve always admired that about him. It’s what I suppose has kept him alive. Whereas what has kept me alive is pure luck. And a lot of fokken money. Money is a wondrous thing.

In any event, to celebrate the conclusion of a burdensome chapter in our lives, what with the dismissal of one Mr. Roderick whose services as a human were no longer needed, I thought we should do something special to celebrate.

“Who wants to go to the opera?” I asked.

Neither of them showed much enthusiasm.

But. A production of Salomé happened to be having a premiere at the Sydney Opera House, and taking them to see the story of King Herod’s feral desire toward his own stepdaughter—a virgin temptress with a taste for blood—just seemed too deliciously on the nose to pass up…

When Christine discovered that it meant getting to dress up in evening wear, her tune changed. She’s very likely the toughest person I’ve ever known, but she is also very much a creature of feminine urges like none other I’ve met. She’d deny it, probably. Somewhere along the twisted path that led us all to each other, something or someone taught her that feminine equates to fragile. I suppose it was just survival. This world is a cruel place. Frequently more so for women. And Christine is a survivor.

But for about the last year, since she turned eighteen, I’ve been working diligently to show her that she can be both tough and delicate. An iron fist inside a velvet glove. It suits her, and she’s taken to it beautifully, but there are years of conditioning I’ll still have to work past to get her to fully embrace both sides.