It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at since the picture was blurry from being enlarged so much. I saw my father’s reflection on the water. His head was a silver blur ringing the square of the camera, the rest of his body a dark blur. Another humanoid shape stood just behind him, some kind of long stick held in their raised arm.
I picked Lena up in my newly repaired car, and we drove to Enrico Ristorante, one of Inverness’s higher-end Italian restaurants, as I’d promised her Italian that night on the island. She looked as nervous as I felt, dressed in a flowy red dress. We hadn’t seen each other, hadn’t spoken other than by text, since everything went down, and the weight of that hung between us. Neither of us seemed to know how to breach it.
“How are you doing, really?” I asked once we were seated at our table. The restaurant had a wide open layout, mostly lit by candlelight so that the corners were shrouded in shadow. The whole room felt like it was moving through space, each table and its candles a star amid the dark. Though the effect was rather dreamy, I felt bad for the servers trying to navigate and work within the dimness.
“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve been trying everything that happened and everything that I… that I did. Ainslee asked to see me, but I haven’t been able to work up the courage to see her.”
“Maybe it would help both of you,” I said.
“She pulled Finn from my class.”
I winced. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
We ordered drinks as our server swung by the table, and as soon as he was gone, Lena buried her face in her hands. “I just feel so guilty!”
I hesitated for a second and then reached across the table and took one of her hands. “You did the right thing in the end. Maybe that’s what counts.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Elias was just such a presence. It was hard not to go along with him.”
I understood that. My mother could be a bit of a force of nature. Sometimes, you just had to go along with what she said, no matter what you thought.
“Have you seen him since he escaped the island?” My biggest fear this week had been that Elias would track her down, seeking revenge for her betrayal. I’d asked a constable to keep an eye on her, even after she’d given her statement. Because she hadn’t been directly involved with the kidnapping, we hadn’t charged her with anything.
Lena shook her head, pausing so the server could deposit our drinks and take our food order. “I haven’t. I keep thinking I see him on street corners or driving down the street, but it’s never actually him. I’ve been giving myself a nonstop heart attack for the past week.”
“If I were him, I’d have left the country by now,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring tone.
Lena nodded, but she didn’t seem to believe me entirely.
“So what’s next?” I continued, seeking to change the subject. As I asked it, I realized that it was a rather loaded question. Her life had been overturned completely. She hadn’t lost her job, but if Ainslee decided to share what had happened with the rest of the parents, she could very quickly find herself a teacher without a class. And I was suddenly afraid that I’d implied that ‘what’s next’ involved me, too, and I don’t want to put that pressure on her.
“My band is actually looking into booking a tour,” Lena said, and a ghost of her old cheer crossed her face. “Probably around England and Wales with a hop over to Ireland. I think it will be good for me. A new setting, away from everything that happened here.”
A stab of disappointment hit me. Tours last a month, probably more, and we had only just gotten started. I didn’t know if something so new could survive that much distance and time.
Lena saw it on my face despite my best attempts to hide it. Her brow crinkled and then fell, and I felt terribly guilty that I’d even thought about inserting myself in her plans.
“I think that sounds great,” I said, hoping to reassure her.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “Who doesn’t want to go travel around the country for a couple of months? Especially doing what you love.”
“I think reconnecting with my music will really help me put this behind me.” She smiled, the expression soft and a little sad. “What about you? What’s next for you?”
“Back to work,” I said with a shrug. “And you remember that photograph my sister found?” Lena nodded. “Well, Martin the lab tech found something… weird in it. There was someone else with him that day, and it kind of looks like they weren’t there to hold his equipment.”
Lena’s eyes widened. The candlelight turned her brown eyes almost golden. “Really?”
“Maybe there’s something to my family’s theories.” It almost hurt to admit it because I’d spent so long denying that there was anything nefarious going on, but I owed it to Sam and my mum to look into it.
“That’s… crazy,” Lena said. She couldn’t seem to decide on the right word for all that she wanted to say. “How do you feel about it?”
Our meals arrived before I could answer, the waiter setting steaming piles of sauce-coated pasta in front of us. Lena had ordered an alfredo while mine was red and robust and meaty.
“I’m freaked out,” I said once the server was gone. “There was a person in that picture. They looked like they were about to bash my father over the head with a bat or something. Maybe something really did happen to him.”
And that would mean I’d hated him all these years for nothing.
We turned to lighter conversation as we began to eat. Typical first date stuff. Favourite movies and books, top uni experiences, gossip about
