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I’d paced the sand and listened to the waves and begged the moon for any hint on what I was supposed to do.
She’d been thirteen the first time.
It’d been the night after her thirteenth birthday when I’d helped Anna supervise six young girls swimming in the pool with unicorn rubber rings and mermaid lilos. I’d suffered between second-hand enjoyment from Neri’s excitement at officially becoming a teenager and agonising grief that I would never be able to be a chaperone at my own sister’s birthday.
Nothing ever got washed up to hint they’d survived.
No fishermen mentioned survivors being plucked from obscure islands.
Jack had done what he could to find out information and even requested all the paperwork that would be required to turn me from illegal into citizen.
We’d huddled over the documents for days, trying to find a loophole for someone already living here under the radar. Someone who had no official identification or itinerary on how they got here. Someone who’d been living secretly in the back garden of the nicest family I could ever have been found by.
Visited by their daughter who didn’t take no for an answer.
“I know you’re not asleep. I can tell by your breathing,” Neri whispered, hovering by the cracked door as she peered into my room.
In the two years since this gazebo had been mine, I’d changed nothing.
I still had the bedside light and side table that’d been dragged here from the guest room. The chest of drawers that I’d salvaged from the side of the road, and the extension cord feeding electricity from the house. The money I got paid had morphed into a substantial amount, spent only if I needed something essential or if I wanted to find a way to repay the Taylors by buying them dinner or treating Neri to something for school—even though it still felt strange to buy them gifts with their own money.
“Go away, Nerida.” I curled up tighter on my side.
Flashbacks of saving her a few days ago still flickered behind my closed eyelids. I hadn’t been able to sleep well ever since diving into the ocean after her. My blood felt sharp and slicing. My veins felt thin and feeble. I felt as if my entire body was rejecting this comfortable, safe life by remembering the tragic, painful one I’d done my damnedest to forget.
“But I brought a thank-you gift.” Her bare feet shuffled quietly on the floorboards of the sala. Moonlight spilled over my bed before being forbidden to enter as she closed the door.
The energy in my room intensified every time she stepped foot in it.
Tonight was no different.
If Jack and Anna knew she regularly paid me midnight visits, would they care?
They trusted me.
They trusted me even more now that I’d set aside my own issues to save her life. Jack had pulled me aside the evening they got back from the hospital. Neri had undergone a full check-up and was put on antibiotics just in case she got a bacterial infection from breathing in seawater. Her ribs were bruised but not broken, and she’d make a full recovery without too much special attention.
I’d never seen Jack as fragile as he had when he brought me a beer and sat on the edge of my bed, fumbling for ways to thank me.
I’d done my best to assure him it was the least I could do.
He’d already done so, so much for me.
He’d clasped my hand with a bruising promise that I was welcome to stay with them for however long I wanted. Decades. Centuries. Forever. He’d embraced me so fiercely, I’d remembered how it felt not to breathe under the sea, and then he let me go and marched back to the kitchen.
The next morning, I found a basket of muffins, fruit, and ten sudoku books waiting outside my door with a simple thank-you card from Anna signed: You saved my heart, and I will never be able to repay you.
And now it seemed as if that heart of hers was determined to ruin mine.
“I don’t need any gifts, Nerida. The only gift I’m interested in is you going back to your own room and letting me sleep.”
“You suck at sleeping. You can’t deny it.” Tiptoeing across the small dark space, she hissed under her breath as her toe found a splinter. She landed heavily on my bed.
I growled at her as she sat on my ankle.
The ankle that’d well and truly healed but still ached every now and again. “Goddammit, Neri.” Groaning, I swung my legs out of her way and sat up. Rubbing my face with my hands, I glowered at her in the faint moonlight coming through the Perspex windows. “These visits have got to stop.”
“Ask nicely.”
