47

ALLIE KEPT WAITING TO FEEL BETTER. AFTER CONNOR WALKED OUT THE door, she wanted the echoes of his words to fade so she could get on with her long vacation. But they didn’t. They rang true and loud, repeating themselves in the back of her mind in an endless loop. “You decided to lie to me, to ruin everything we built together, and then to run away and leave me holding the bag. What you really mean is that the right choice was hard, so you want to pretend it didn’t exist. Well, it did and you blew it.”

It was as if an invisible cloud of dirt, decay, and guilt surrounded her, penetrating to her very bones and clinging to her day after day. She called it “the Smell.” The Smell followed her everywhere. It covered her bed like a fetid comforter. It greeted her anew when she stepped out of the shower, wrapping her in its slimy embrace. It corrupted her breakfast and tainted her coffee. It trailed after her as she walked out the door, and it polluted the cool morning breeze coming in from the sea.

And then there were the eyes. She saw them in her dreams and felt them watching her when she woke. Sometimes they were Connor’s eyes, looking down on her with contempt and disgust. Sometimes they were her father’s, their light fading as his blood spilled out onto the cold asphalt. Sometimes she saw Jason Tompkins’s clear blue eyes, staring at her from his yearbook picture.

She did the things that made her happy. She took a shuttle flight to Nassau and spent the day impulse shopping and the night dancing at an exclusive club. She watched an entire season of The Office, one DVD after another. She went diving at the Wall, Treasure Reef, and other spectacular sites off Grand Bahama Island. She ate an entire two-pound box of Godiva chocolate. None of it worked.

The Smell grew stronger and fouler as the days passed. The gaze of the eyes weighed on her like a scarf of lead wrapped around her neck, choking her and pressing her down. She couldn’t escape.

Even the hissing ocean and muttering breeze tortured her, whispering her crimes to each other. Their noise used to lull her to sleep. Now it grated on her nerves, and she had to close her windows at night to create a brittle silence in which she could slip into haunted dreams.

She couldn’t even talk to anyone. The only one who knew what she was going through and why was Connor, and she couldn’t call him, of course. Mom? She knew vaguely that Allie was hiding, but not why. Besides, they’d never had the sort of confessional relationship that some mothers and daughters did. Talking to her would do nothing to lift the black fog that filled Allie’s soul. Trudi or one of her other friends? Right.

She was so alone. So utterly cut off from everyone she knew. So separated from the joys of the world around her. She walked through a sunlit paradise, sealed in her own private bubble of hell.