Page 112 of Swept Away

“Not in a bad way, I just think…Look at the houseboat, for instance. You would have told me about that, before, but you didn’t.” I raise a hand when she starts to protest. “Thingshavebeen changing. I think I’ve been living in the past a bit. It’s like I’ve been stuck in that first year with Mae, when you really needed me, and she really needed me, and I had…” I trail off.

“You had…?”

“A role. Someone to be.”

I remember feeling in a weird way that I had been waiting for it. Like when Penny phoned me and choked out the truth about the pregnancy, something fell into place.Aha, my brain said.Here’s what you were born to do.

“Who do youwantto be, Lexi?” Penny whispers.

I fasten the jumpsuit at the waist, then lift my gaze to the full-length mirror.

The jumpsuit makes me look like myself, but fiercer. Walking through the wind after dropping Mae at school has turned my hair wild—I’ve stopped wearing it tied back, enjoying how good it feels to have clean hair, and now it tangles and tumbles over the jumpsuit’s bold shoulders, giving all its sharp lines an edge of chaos. The woman in the mirror looks as if she’s survived storms and heartbreak, but she also looks like she’s running the show. She has main-character energy; that’s what Zeke would say.

“Her,” I say, meeting my own eyes, pointing at my reflection. “I want to be her.”

Marissa is driving me to theMorning Cuppastudio, but Penny insists on coming along to support me. She seems almost as nervous as I am, fidgeting in the front seat—she always goes up front because of her car sickness. I’m sweating. I can’t believe I’m doing this. The money is amazing, but I’m not sure any amount is worth what I’m about to do. Not the television part: I mean seeing Zeke.

“Christ,” Marissa says after a long stretch of silent motorway. “Where’s Mae when you need someone to chat shit about Peppa Pig for an hour or so?”

“I should have called Zeke,” I say, leaning my head against the glass. “I should have called him before now. Seeing him again for the first time like this, it’s…”

“Cruel?”

I swallow. Ihavebeen punishing him. I know that, deep down. I wanted him to figure out what he’d done, and I wanted him to feelawfulfor abandoning Mae.

But I also knew that if I spoke to him, I’d break. I’ve been living in Penny’s flat, in Mae’s world, and the idea of letting Zeke into my life again even aninchfelt like such a monumental betrayal. I’ve been using every ounce of energy not thinking about him.

“What do you mean, it’s cruel?” Penny says, voice too high.

“You haven’t seen the poor boy at the bar every night, pining,” Marissa says, reaching for her sunglasses as we turn westward. Her car is cluttered with unopened mail, empty Coke cans and various spare pairs of glasses, all serving slightly different purposes, all largely indistinguishable to the untrained eye. “He looks worse than he did when he got off that boat.”

I press my hands into my stomach and close my eyes. “Don’t.”

“Why?” Penny says, turning to look at me over her shoulder. “Why is he looking so awful? Do you think he knows about Mae?”

“No,” I say, voice strangled, as Marissa says, “No, Penny, I mean because he’s madly in love with Lexi.”

“Marissa, shut up,” I say, glancing at Penny for long enough to catch her shocked expression and then shutting my eyes again, pressing my head to the glass.

She’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. We’re only onMorning Cuppafor a fifteen-minute slot, so I’m hoping there isn’t time for us to talk in too much depth about what happened at sea, but there is no way we can discuss that experience without revealing quite how deeply we fell in love.

“She doesn’t know?” Marissa says, catching my eye in the mirror. “Lexi.”

There is a lot of weary judgment in thatLexi.

“Are you serious? Lexi?” Penny is straining around in her seat now, gripping the headrest, staring at me with the exact horrified expression I’ve been desperate to avoid.

“It doesn’t matter if he’s—if he thinks…It doesn’t matter what he feels about me,” I say, turning my gaze to the gray town streaking past the car window. All towns look gray to me lately. “He’s turned out to be a dickhead.Thedickhead, the original dickhead, the dickhead we refer to as the standard by which all other dickheads are measured. He’s the man who abandoned you, Penny.”

She’s quiet for too long. Still staring at me.

“Marissa,” she says, with a wobble in her voice. “Can we pull over?”

“What, here? Now? Are you going to vomit?” Marissa asks, already checking her mirrors. “Stop turning around, you know that makes it worse.”

“Just do it, would you?”

We pull over into a parking space. Penny climbs out of the carand walks away down a suburban street—one of those ones where everyone has extended their houses so much they all look kind of monstrous, growing attic conversions out of the tops of their heads. The cars are shiny and sleek; a woman pulling up weeds in her front garden eyes the staggering Penny with open suspicion.

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