Chapter Three: Ten Minutes Ago
1040 Words
The drawing shows a man's face mid-scream, coffee splattering across white porcelain like blood spray, and I don't recognize him yet because I haven't met him yet.
I stare at the page until my eyes ache. The sketch is rough, rushed, done in the kind of frantic strokes I use when my hand moves faster than my brain can object. A young man, sandy hair, resort uniform, a tray tilting out of his grip. Steam curling off spilled coffee. His face frozen in that particular panic of someone who just ruined a stranger's morning.
I don't remember drawing it. I don't remember opening to this page at all.
"Marin's up early," Priya announces from the doorway, wrapped in one of the resort's absurdly plush robes, hair still damp from a shower I apparently slept through. "And Marin looks like she's seen a ghost. Which, considering where we are, might not be a metaphor."
"Funny," I say, and close the sketchbook a little too fast.
She narrows her eyes, padding over to flop onto the end of my bed. "That's not a normal-person reaction to a joke. That's a guilty-person reaction."
"I went for a walk."
"You went for a walk and came back looking like you saw your ex at the airport." She pokes my knee with one toe. "Spill."
So I do, mostly. The trail, the trees parting like an invitation, the garden that shouldn't exist with its impossible frost-and-bloom flowers. I leave out the part where I'd already drawn it on the plane. I'm not ready to say that out loud yet, not even to Priya, maybe especially not to Priya, because saying it makes it real in a way I'm not prepared to defend.
I tell her about Kieran, though. I can't not tell her about Kieran.
"Wait." She sits up so fast her robe slips off one shoulder. "A guy just appeared in the forest, told you not to come back after dark, and then vanished. Like, actually vanished. Not walked away and you lost track of him. Vanished."
"I told you it sounds insane."
"It sounds like the setup to either a horror movie or the best romance novel I've ever lived vicariously through, and I need you to tell me which." She grabs my hands, delighted in a way that makes my stomach twist with something between affection and dread. "Marin. Your face. You liked him."
"I don't even know him."
"You don't have to know someone to feel it," she says, softer now, and there's something underneath the teasing, something that makes me wonder how much of her own dating history is folded into that sentence. "What's his name?"
"Kieran."
"Kieran what?"
"He didn't say. He barely said anything. It was like talking to someone who's already had the conversation before and knows exactly how much of it he's allowed to give you."
Priya's expression shifts, the playful edge sharpening into something more focused, more her. This is the look she gets when a client tries to lowball her on a contract, the look that means she's decided to start pulling threads until something comes loose.
"Okay," she says. "We're investigating this."
"Priya."
"What? You come back from a solo walk rattled, glowing, and hiding something, and there's a guy who apparently teleports. I didn't drag you across an ocean for rest just to watch you get menaced by a hot ghost and say nothing."
I want to argue, but the truth is some small, treacherous part of me is relieved. I don't have the language yet for what happened in that garden, the calm that settled into my ribs like something coming home, but Priya asking the questions I'm too scared to ask myself feels like relief with a body attached.
We find the answers, or the start of them, over breakfast, in the kind of accidental collision that only happens because Priya can't help herself.
The concierge from the night before is stationed near the terrace doors, tablet in hand, that same too-composed smile fixed in place. Priya beelines for him with the confidence of a woman who has never once doubted her right to information.
"Quick question," she says, all breeze and charm. "Marin's family used to summer somewhere like this, way back. Her grandmother's maiden name was Ashworth, actually no, sorry, it was Ashwood. Elena Ashwood. Any chance this place has any old records? Marin's been dying to know if there's a connection."
I go still. I never told Priya my grandmother's maiden name. I'm not even sure I knew Priya knew it, buried as it is somewhere in a conversation from years ago about family trees and school projects and grief neither of us wanted to sit in for long.
The concierge's tablet slips half an inch in his grip.
It's small. It's fast. If I weren't already primed to notice wrongness, watching for the seams in this place the way I watch for shadows in a bad sketch, I might have missed it entirely. But I see the exact moment his composure cracks, the professional pleasantness dropping away for a fraction of a second into something closer to shock, maybe fear, before he catches himself and rebuilds the smile like nothing happened.
"I'm sorry," he says, voice perfectly smooth again, perfectly wrong. "I don't have access to guest genealogy records. If you'll excuse me."
He's gone before Priya can ask anything else, moving with a speed that doesn't quite match a man simply walking away to attend to other duties.
Priya turns to me, all traces of playfulness gone. "Okay. That was weird, right? Tell me that was weird."
I don't answer, because I'm still staring at the space where he stood, my pulse loud in my ears, thinking about a stranger in a forest who vanished the same way, and a sketch of a man I hadn't met yet, spilling coffee I hadn't been served, and a name, my grandmother's name, that just made a total stranger's hands shake.
"Marin." Priya's voice cuts through, sharp with something that isn't playing anymore. "What did you not tell me about that garden?"
I open my mouth to answer.
That's when the waiter arrives with our coffee, and trips.
- Writer
