Page 152 of The Unfinished Line

Dani could go fuck herself.

“Are you coming back?” Kam’s voice was carefully neutral. The question felt so loaded, so much more implied than what was asked.

“Yeah,” she said after a long pause.

Kam passed the back of her hand across her eyes, her face hidden in shadow. “Is that a promise, Dillon?”

“Yes.” She breathed the word through a strained smile, adding it to the long list of promises getting harder to keep. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

Kam struggled through a deep breath before turning to face her, a trail of mascara darkening her cheeks. “You know I love you, right? More than all of this.”

She didn’t need to definethis. They were standing on a glass balcony a dozen floors above the Pacific Ocean. Kam’s face was plastered on every bus that lumbered down the street. Taylor Swift had left a voicemail singing her happy birthday. TheCartierdiamonds hanging from her ears could have put a deposit on a Lamborghini.

Dillon wanted to reach out. To touch her. To smooth the tear streaks from her face. Stains that never should have been there, especially tonight.

But, she didn’t.

“You’re daft, Kam-Kameryn,” she forced another smile instead.

This time, Kam smiled back, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’m going to make us a cup of coffee. Will you come inside?”

“I’ll be right behind you.”

When she had gone, Dillon released a deep exhale, feeling her entire body sag. Her knee ached, the mercy of the alcohol long faded, and an unfamiliar sting came from her palm. It was the sea turtle, she realized, unclenching her fist. She looked at the little creature for a long minute—at the incongruity of thenames trapped inside—and then allowed the figurine to slip from her fingers, disappearing over the railing into the dark.

Scene 49

It was the fourth day Dillon hadn’t returned my calls.

I knew she was okay—earlier in the afternoon, I’d watched a livestream fromBritish Triathlonfeaturing her and Georgina Potter. They’d filmed an open-water training session to promote the upcoming race in Leeds. I recognized the bright bobbing buoys of Serpentine Lido, the swimming club where Dillon often swam. It was a glorious spot in the middle of Hyde Park, only a few miles from her apartment in South Bank. We’d walked there together a handful of times that first blissful week I stayed with her in the city—the week we had ridden the London Eye.

Days that seemed to belong to someone else, now, as I once again sat on my balcony, cloistered away from everything resembling real life.

I hit redial.

I needed her to answer. I needed to hear her voice.

The woman I watched on the livestream had seemed almost foreign to me. Someone I didn’t know. I mean, it was Dillon alright, with her sunbleached hair hanging damp in her eyes, and dusting of freckles beneath exertion-pinked cheeks. But it somehow felt like the hollow version of her. Like a knockoff replica or poorly cast body double for daytime TV.

She said all the right things in the post-swim interview, answering questions with Georgina in all the appropriate places.She acknowledged her only option for Leeds was a podium finish after her missed top-twenty in Yokohama. It would be the only way to prove to theBOAthat she was medal-contender-worthy.

Visibly annoyed, she brushed off the reporter’s queries when he asked about the improbability of her comeback story.Did she think she had a chance on Saturday?

“You think I’d really be out here freezing my arse off before the sun pipped the horizon just for a bit of a lark?” Her smile had been tight, the green of her eyes unblinking.

The man backpedaled, circling around to the excitement leading up to the race, and emphasizing that the entirety of Great Britain was behind her. With her storied success on the podium, it was unquestionable, he emphasized with a thump on her back, she would make their nation proud.

I’d watched, analyzing every detail of her expression, trying to get a glimpse behind her facade. Wanting to find some indication in the stone-faced, glassy-eyed competitor on auto-pilot that told me it was just her typical race mode—that it was her armor of hyperfocus I was struggling to see through.

But I couldn’t reconcile the woman on my screen with the woman who’d once kissed me so soundly on those same stone steps leading into the lake, we’d ended up turning her pre-dawn workout into a ridiculously risky—yet wildly passionate—tryst in the swim club’s empty changing room. I could still smell the baby powder she’d sprinkled on her skin, hear the way she’d laughed as I clumsily struggled with the zipper on her wetsuit.

The woman today didn’t resemble that woman at all.

She was a dimmer, more stripped-down version of the woman who’d left my apartment a month earlier, two days after my birthday.

I’d initially been relieved, the morning after my party, when she told me she’d decided to race Leeds. It allowed me to accept her abrupt decision to return to the UK. It gave me hope theuncomfortable distance newly come between us was less to do with Dani and her idiocy, and instead, was Dillon’s switch to competitive mode. That making a firm decision on the upcoming race had toggled her into hyperdrive.

But it was different this time, and I could feel it immediately. She didn’t text me for two days after she’d landed back at Heathrow. When I finally got a hold of her, the conversation was brief.Yes, she’d arrived safely.Yes, she was fine.Yes,she’d call me again in a few days. It had ended with a curtlove youwithout enough time for me to respond.

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