Page 112 of The Deepest Lake

“Is that our baby’s name?”

“Do you like it? It means first power, or the beginning.”

Eva’s living daughter is named Adarsha. The one that died was Adhika. This baby is “the beginning”—but whose beginning, and whose ending?

“Do you like it?” Eva asks again.

“It’s perfect.”

33

ROSE

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She didn’t have the nightmare.

That’s the first thing Rose thinks, opening her eyes to the dim light filtered through the cabin’s curtain-covered window. After her melancholic final evening on the beach, thinking about Jules, she thought the nightmares would plague her all night. But they didn’t. She didn’t dream at all.

Maybe after so many nights of interrupted sleep, she was simply too tired. Or maybe this is the part of her brain that knows she is going home and it’s time to start dealing with the past in a new way, inviting some sort of peace into her heart.

Because Rose is going home. First, she needs to ask Modesto at the front desk how to arrange an earlier shuttle back to the capital. Later today, she’ll call Matt to tell him what she’s learned. He’ll be surprised she’s coming back early. But less so when she tells him what she has discovered. With his preference for facts and figures, he’ll help her figure out how to report the fundraising corruption—to someone not based in San Felipe, necessarily, but someone who cares, in the US if not in Guatemala. He can also help track down the musician, Sahara, just to confirm those final details about Jules’s last day. And then, at home, they will find some other way to honor the end of Jules’s story.

Home. Can it really be home at all, once you’ve lost the person who mattered most to you? But you have to live somewhere. You have to work, eat, sleep and find routines that will take you from this time in your life toward whatever will come next. She thinks of the few times she enjoyed herself during this trip—the opening party, moments talking with Lindsay, Isobel and K—and she issues herself a stern reminder. You can’t feel shame for small moments of joy. Jules never would have wanted that. Jules would have wanted her to make new friends, to have new experiences, to learn and to travel. Rose has done all those things here, much as she still resents Lake Atitlán and hopes never to return.

Rose is standing at the reception desk, waiting for someone to notice her, when she hears a maid and the manager in the back office, talking about someone who was found just two hours earlier, outside her room, on the sidewalk, passed out. Briefly, they thought she was dead. The maid panicked. But then the woman regained consciousness. She refused help. She wasn’t willing to wait for the sun to rise. She only wanted a taxi—and to leave Atitlán as soon as possible.

Rose’s first thought is: Scarlett. But she’s wrong. It isn’t Scarlett. Or Noelani, who comes to mind only because Rose heard her walking outside the cabins last night: swearing, stumbling, giggling, drunk.

It isn’t Diane, either, even though they all heard Diane’s plan to sever ties with her family and quit her job, even though it was the one thing that Diane seemed to like about her old life.

“Did you hear?” Lindsay asks when Rose comes down to breakfast. “Rachel left.”

“That’s who it was?” Rose grabs her phone from her bag, opening email, in case Rachel sent her anything that would explain, but instead she sees only an email from Eva. “I feel terrible. Wait—let me see if Eva has sent us all details on what happened.”

Lindsay shakes her head. “This isn’t right.”

Because it’s bad enough that Rachel has fallen off the wagon, so distraught by the last forty-eight hours here in Atitlán that she’d be willing to throw away years of progress. What’s even more disturbing is the fact that they weren’t sure it was Rachel. It could have been any of them, given how the last several days have gone.

“Someone should talk to Eva and set that lady straight,” Lindsay says.

Rose skims the email from Eva. “She says she’d like to hear from anyone who knows how Rachel was feeling the last few days, ASAP. Maybe Eva feels the need to get some cover, in case people start talking.”

“I think we all can guess how Rachel was feeling. Like shit.”

Rose seizes on an idea.

Eva has avoided her all week. Rose’s group workshop was last on the schedule, only a little later than Rose’s one-on-one. She’s never even managed to get seated next to Eva at lunch.

But now, finally, Rose has something Eva wants: insight about Rachel, if only to spin the story of her breakdown more favorably.

“Rachel was asking me to read her new pages. Maybe Eva will think I’ve read them and know what made her break down.”

Rose starts typing a reply even before Lindsay chimes in with encouragement.

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