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She didn’t know how to say goodbye, opening and closing her mouth so many times she lost count, so she just met Joy’s gaze and turned, passing through the arch that led to the steps back aboveground. No physical locks—just witchcraft keeping unauthorised people out.
“I didn’t mean it,” Joy said in a panicked voice, just as Gabi reached the steps. Gabi turned, confusion pinching her eyes. Joy was pressed to the bars, her pale fingers wrapped around them, her expression desperate. “I didn’tmeanit, Gabi. What I said, after my mum … I was angry and I just … I lost control of my tongue. I didn’t mean it. Any of it.”
“Any of it,” Gabi echoed, staring down at the wide stones that made up the floor, unable to hold Joy’s gaze. “You didn’t meananyof it.”
Gabi had never been able to forget what Joy had confessed that day, when all Gabi wanted was to comfort her girlfriend and Joy locked her out. She’d wanted to hold Joy and tell her she wassorry. But Joy wouldn’t let her in, wouldn’t evenlookat her after she’d had to pull Joy out of her mum’s bed—with her mum’s body still between the sheets—and into her own room while Gabi’s dad took Mrs Mackenzie away.
Joy had lashed out, Gabi knew—had known all these years that was why Joy had said what she did—but she thought she’d lashed out with thetruth. Not with lies.
“You didn’t mean it,” she repeated, the disbelief wearing off. Anger rose in its place, andoutrage, but one look at Joy, scared and suffering in the cell, and she couldn’t hold onto it. Gabi’s voice was hollow when she asked, “Then why did yousayit?”
Joy shook her head, the slow trickle of tears becoming a fast stream. “I don’t know.”
Gabi had to turn away just to pull her thoughts together. She couldn’t think about this now. She had a job to do, and that was more important. She couldn’t … she couldn’t face this, not now or ever. “I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Gabi—”
Gabi took the steps at a fast clip, her chest cinched tight. Nothing had changed—she had to find whoever had killed that girl, she still had weeks of work to fit into hours.
Nothing had changed.
But that was a lie to herself, and she knew it.
FIVE
JOY
“Leave me alone, Gabi,” Joy said in a dead voice, curling up tighter on the bed, clutching the teddy bear her mum had given her for her nineteenth birthday.
A sigh came through the door, sad but frustrated too. “I’m your girlfriend, Joy. Let me in. I just want—don’t shut me out. Please.”
Joy gripped the bear tighter, her mum's pale, lifeless face flashing behind her eyes. She couldn’t stop seeing it, couldn’t stop reliving that moment she’d snuck in after being out all night and realised the house was far too quiet—the moment she’d come upstairs and reluctantly opened her mum’s bedroom door, part of her already knowing what she’d find.
“Don’t shut you out?” Joy’s laugh was callous and brittle, an alien sound even to her own ears. She had no control over it. “Why would I let you in? You kept me down on that beach, Gabi. You convinced me to sneak out and watch the stars while my mum wasdyingin her bed. I didn’t get to say goodbye, or tell her I loved her one last time, or even hold her hand as she slipped away, and it’s—all—your—fault!”
A pause, as Joy breathed erratically fast, tears scalding her cheeks. And then in a choked whisper, Gabi said, “I know.”
“Leave me alone, Gabi. I don’t want to see you again.” The words were like piling pain on top of pain. She didn’t know what she was saying—she didn’twantGabi to leave, not really. She didn’t want to be alone. Except she did want to be alone, at the same time. She felt empty and too full of feeling, her mind both silent and roaring.
She wanted to be left alone for the rest of her life, and she wanted Gabi here holding her, even if her touch wouldn’t mend the hole inside Joy, even if those two things were incongruous.
Gabi was quiet for a long time, her voice carefully stripped of any feeling when she asked, “Are you breaking up with me?”
Joy screwed her eyes shut, breathing impossibly fast, furious and bereft and desperate for solitude, fortouch, for her mum’s arms around her.
She didn’t know why she said it, but there was a hole in her chest, a screaming howl inside her head, and she just wanted it gone. She wanted it allgone.
She wanted her mum back.
“I don’t love you anymore,” Joy choked out, her voice a whip cutting any and all ties between them, shears severing the threads that had linked every bit of their souls for years. Joy almost took it back, almost unsaid that heinous lie, but the pain inside her had found an outlet and it took full advantage of it. She kept speaking, poison falling from her tongue.
“I used to love you, but I haven’t for a long time. I didn’t know how to tell you.” This last part was the worst deception, because it made everything she said more believable.
What was she doing?
“Then why did you—” Joy could hear Gabi take a deep, long breath. “Why did youstaywith me, Joy?”
Joy squeezed her eyes shut, her fingers in fists around the teddy bear. The words sliced her tongue as she spoke them. “There wasn’t anyone else, and I didn’t want to be alone.”
