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Abandoning dinner, they started dragging their mattresses back into the main hall. Josie, Sandrine and Alice clustered their mattresses on the opposite side of the room from Brian and Nicola. Sandrine put the pasta and salad in the fridge. Josie was afraid she would regret not eating later but she didn’t think she could keep any food down at the moment. It was a surreal feeling knowing that someone there was a cold-blooded killer and that they were all forced to be civil to that person until rescue came. It hadn’t felt quite so horrifying when she thought there might be a chance that an outsider or Cooper had killed Meg. She wanted badly to return to the rage room and check her phone to see if Gretchen had any more news, but they’d agreed to stay together. She also wanted to talk to Sandrine and Alice about what she had discovered but there was no opportunity for that either.
Josie took her blanket and curled up in one of the chairs near the stove while everyone settled into their beds. Brian joined her, sitting opposite her. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his vape pen. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It still doesn’t work.”
“At this point,” Josie said, “if it worked, I’d ask you to share it.”
Brian laughed softly and turned the pen over in his hands.
They fell silent. Josie periodically glanced over at the mattresses. Sandrine, Alice, and Nicola were all under their covers. One of them snored lightly. Josie wasn’t sure if anybody would be able to sleep under the circumstances, but everyone was exhausted, physically and emotionally. She was, as well, but her insomnia was stronger than ever. Only now, after a week under Sandrine’s tutelage, she could identify the underlying anxiety and hypervigilance that went along with it. It felt like a low-level vibration coursing through her entire body, a buzz keeping her awake even at the height of her fatigue. Tension pulled the muscles of her neck taut. She had to concentrate on her breathing in order to slow her heart rate. If she didn’t, she’d get lightheaded.
Her therapist would be so proud that she was able to do the body scan successfully.
She sat still as long as she could, noting all the sensations and the feelings attached to them, but the longer she did, the more uncomfortable she felt. A headache began pulsing in her temples. The more she focused on it, the worse it got. She had hours to go before she could rest in her own bed. Even if she didn’t sleep, she had to distract herself.
She thought over Sandrine’s lessons about moving her body, shaking things off, or even dancing. She couldn’t shake or dance right at that moment, but she could get up and move around. She stood up and walked over to the stove. Sandrine had left a bucket beside it filled with random pieces of wood gathered from the rage room. Aware that Brian was watching her, she knelt and began loading more wood into the stove before returning to her chair.
Her headache was still there but the lightheadedness had gone. Her thoughts drifted to Brian, Nicola, and Taryn. She mentally reviewed the week, going over every interaction she’d seen them have together. They’d betrayed nothing. Even in an intimate setting where they were sharing deeply personal accounts of traumatic experiences, they hadn’t slipped at all. Josie would never have guessed that Taryn knew Brian and Nicola. Even Brian and Nicola barely seemed to know one another, and they were married.
Perhaps the couple had not known Taryn well in real life. Maybe that part wasn’t an act at all. But they had some connection that was compelling enough for them to team up, spend a great deal of money on the retreat, and lie about their true identities. What kind of connection could it be? She didn’t even have enough information to form any theories.
Mettner’s ghost voice whispered to her.You’re asking the wrong questions.Focusing on the wrong aspects.
What are the right questions?she asked but she knew the answer already. She was, after all, constructing this entire conversation with Mettner in her own mind, based on what she believed he would say if he were here.
Stop wondering about what you don’t know, Mett told her.Zero in on what you do know.
Staring across at Brian, Josie remembered that she had just spent a week with these people. What she knew was how they’d acted and how they’d conducted themselves. Nicola and Brian had appropriated Nicola’s childhood tragedy in order to ensure that Nicola would be included on the retreat. It was clearly important enough that she attend the retreat for them to lie about it. The lie also explained why the two of them had seemed so shut down and mentally distanced from the tragedy. It wasn’t really theirs. It belonged solely to Nicola, but she hadn’t experienced it in the role of a mother. Yet, they’d both been engaged in all the group sessions. Things had been fine but as the week went on, Nicola grew more and more irritable. Josie assumed it was because they were digging so deep into their trauma, but now she wondered if it was because they were getting closer to the end of the retreat and their goal had not been accomplished.
Once the blizzard hit, Nicola began to openly accuse Sandrine of being a fraud. Josie had thought she was simply lashing out from the stress of Meg’s death and being stuck on the mountain, but maybe she would have acted that way regardless since the retreat was coming to a close and they had limited time to achieve whatever they had come to do. Nicola had complained to Brian that she was the only one trying. But was that true?
While Nicola and Brian had played the grieving parents all week, Taryn had been firmly establishing herself as a sort of superfan of Sandrine’s, always sitting beside her, mimicking the way she dressed, picking her brain about methods for processing trauma. She’d even kept notes in her binder. In fact, Sandrine had met her previously on several occasions in the last year. That meant that Taryn had been using a fake identity to get close to Sandrine for a very long time, maybe even longer than Brian and Nicola. Yet her approach this week, even as the retreat was ending, had been the opposite of what Brian and Nicola had done. She had even defended Sandrine to them on more than one occasion.
Had all of that been an act as well? Had they thought all of this out ahead of time to try to manipulate Sandrine into giving them whatever it was they wanted? Were they using a good cop, bad cop strategy? Make Nicola and Brian push Sandrine to her emotional breaking point so that Taryn could offer comfort as a way of manipulating her into telling them what they wanted to know?
Again, she wondered what that could possibly be.
“Hey. Josie.” Brian said her name just loudly enough for her to hear but not so loud that he would disturb the others.
She startled. Blinking, she looked up from where his hands cradled the vape pen, fingers tapping along its length, to his eyes. “Yes?”
“I can’t take the staring anymore,” he said. “Let’s just get this out of the way since we have to sit here together for like four more hours. You think it’s me, don’t you? You think I’m a psycho killer.”
Josie pulled her blanket up to her chin, prepared to lie. “I’m sorry I was staring. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
He hunched forward, broad shoulders rounded, and put his elbows on his knees. “You don’t have to lie.”
Josie pointed at his hands. “I was looking at your wedding band.”
He looked down at it as if it had just appeared. “My wedding band? Why?”
She slid her hand out of the blanket and wiggled her fingers. The light from the fire danced along her silver band. “My husband and I got matching rings. I wanted silver. He wanted titanium. I won. Now I’m wondering why it mattered at all. You two have different rings.”
He let the vape pen rest on his thigh and rubbed a finger across the silicone band. “This was cheap. That’s why I bought it.”
“You didn’t want an inscription?” Josie asked.
His brow furrowed. “What?”
Josie tapped her own ring for emphasis. “You had the inside of Nicola’s band inscribed. You didn’t want an inscription inside your own ring?”
