

# WHEREVER YOU GO

JEB OLSHAM

Jebolsham@gmail.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Copyright © 2018 Jeb Olsham. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

" _The universe wants you to be happy and the way to happiness is to chill the fuck out."_

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life
Chapter One

She had become unsteady on her high heels, and if fear of falling over had not made her stop for a breather before returning to the pub she might never have heard anything. Over the following year she would often wish that had been the case. Other times she would wish she had reacted differently. But it was over so fast, and she had stumbled over the name she heard. The name had frozen her and trapped an uncertain grimace on her face in place of a smile.

She had not gone far from the pub. Down the deserted side street running parallel to the city's famous beachline, the big trees and parked cars had blocked her view. Not that she had been looking for anything but fresh air and a connection on her phone. They had gone for drinks in swanky Leblon that largely turned in on itself at night, with thick metal bars in front of the luxury residences to keep out the abject poverty that in Rio was never more than a brisk walk away. But she had not been alone.

The voice had drifted to her ear on a light wind, an uninvited monologue dismissed as drunk-talk until she became unsure.

"Don't' be frisky. I told you I feel funny..."

"Just a little bit funny, you know. And I want to go to the bathroom..."

"You know, Nick, you look funny. Have you also been drinking? Do you feel funny too? Naughty, drunken Nick. What are you up to, naughty Nick?"

A car door had slammed then and the voice died, or at least it became muffled so she could not make out what words it was saying anymore. All that remained was the wind rustling the trees and the hem of her best red dress, and from half a block down faint sounds of music and voices, English and Brazilian, laughing. The motor had started and she had felt a lot more sober all of a sudden, but still dizzy. Exposed to a wind that had turned cold and a dress that had become flimsy. Once the car was gone she had still been perplexed by the voice and the name but by then it was too late anyway. She had smoothed down her wavering dress over her thighs and fiddled with her phone thinking she should maybe try calling Nick again, a few more times, and see if he picked up.
Chapter Two

We try so hard to be what we're not. To possess what we don't need. I should know. Been there done that. But I'm here to tell you to stop struggling to live up to the crazy expectations someone else has put into your head, and start following your heart. It knows what you really need. Don't swim against the current of happiness inside. Swim with it, or even better, just let go and see where it takes you.

\- Nick Wade, speaking at TEDx London

Jennifer swirled a fork through the boiling pasta and extracted a single strand, whirled the slippery but firm string deftly around the fork, and lowered it dangling end first into her mouth. She needed it to be encouraging - if not inspirational – pasta to keep her spirits up after reading the post Nick's new girlfriend had added to his blog earlier that day. Half a year had passed and Jennifer still thought of Isadora as Nick's _new_ girlfriend.

The post was titled "Sulawesi Shenanigans" and proved that the gang was still on the wrong Indonesian island. It had been a genuinely funny/romantic post and reading it had wound Jennifer's stomach so tight she was not sure she would actually be able to squeeze any spaghetti into it. But she still had to cook. What was 'Jen's travelling kitchen' without Jen's cooking? And what was Jen with without her traveling kitchen? What else was she going to do, go back to school like her parents wanted? Admit defeat at twenty-seven, while there was still time to start over? Jennifer shuddered at the thought, then shuddered at the thought of time ticking by. Half a year.

It did not salvage her appetite that the pasta was indeed boiled to perfection. But it did soothe her pride to be reminded that she could get something just right, despite getting most everything else in her life just wrong as she had been getting it for the past six months. Ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life. Ever since she had forced Nick to leave her. Somehow it had all fallen apart then, and it seemed he had taken everything with him but the ability to cook perfect pasta.

She lifted the pot off the plate and poured the steaming pasta into the sieve she was holding with her other hand. She was still pouring when her phone vibrated where it lay on the other side of the sink. Still holding the sieve, Jennifer leaned over to see. It was Nick! He had twittered. Jennifer twisted her body and craned her neck to read the first few characters. To access all one-hundred-and-forty of them she would need her hands free to swipe and press, but if she was quick and limber she could read the first line of his post before the screen dimmed again. Get the general idea of what he was saying, rather than having to wait excruciating seconds to find out.

She read: "When you're just chillin' while your girl..." Jennifer spilled boiling water on her right hand, swore out loud, and dropped the sieve into the sink. Perfect pasta spilled out and a few strands slithered down the drain. She quickly scooped most of it back up and rinsed it briefly with bottled water \- lab results of tap water controls were state secrets in Indonesia \- and bottled water was cheap. She poured the pasta back in the pan, wiped her hands down on her pants, blew on the scalded parts, and picked up the phone again.

The full tweet read: "When you're just chillin' while your girl takes care of the biz #easymonday." It was basically a link to the blog post Jennifer had already seen but it came with a picture of Nick, Jonas and Trevor in a bar. They were relaxing with beers in front of them and Trevor's arms around a dolled up Indonesian girl Jennifer did not recognize.

At least Isadora was not in the picture, but the praise of her made Jennifer's stomach clench even tighter. Beautiful, fun and carefree Isadora was apparently a capable businesswoman now. Jennifer remembered Isadora's marked Brazilian accent and endearing struggles with the English language. A fast learner, then. Now Isadora was Nick's trusted partner. A layer of sweat started to coat Jennifer's skin despite the air-conditioning in the kitchen.

In the picture, Nick was wearing a tightly fitting shirt and a stupid hat he somehow managed to pull off even though it hid most of his exquisite brown curls. He'd probably chosen that hat precisely because he knew he could swing it even though that should not have been possible, and he wanted people to wonder how he did it. Of course, he would claim it had simply been the nearest hat on the shelf. Would say Jennifer was overcomplicating things.

Jennifer longed to hear him say it, something gently ironic but reassuring, like: "I can tell you're jealous, Jen, but you can have a cool hat too, you know. I'll even help you pick it out. That way you too can benefit from my expertise and style." She could almost hear his voice and she started to actually want a matching hat of her own. That was how powerful her memories of Nick were.
Chapter Three

Harper let the phone ring itself out while she changed the settings to 'ignore everything they throw at you'. It was not that she was avoiding the call, she just did not want to take it for another couple of hours. She had told her client she would call back in the afternoon and would be working until then, which was entirely true. She had implied she would be working on the case the client would be calling about, which was slightly less true.

Harper leaned back and took a deep breath, leaving the disarmed phone on the ergonomic desk in front of her. She was pondering her reputation as a daydreamer and admitting that it was true.

At the neighboring station, two youngsters high-fived each other. They must have done something clever on their computers. As far as Harper knew 'doing clever things with computers' was their job description. Sal had told her so. The youngsters had not been her neighbors yesterday. Apparently fluid seating arrangements were good for productivity. Harper would not try to deny it, but the arrangement did make it more difficult to get familiar with them. She recognized them just fine and she knew their names, as in she knew there was a Daniel in the mix, a Trudy somewhere, an Aicha and so on. She had just not figured out how to combine names and faces yet. It made her feel old and slow. She shook her head, wondering what sixty would feel like when this was thirty-seven. She reminded herself she was still sort of young. Young enough to start over at least.

Sal was the one who had suggested Harper lease a desk in the shared office space in Southwark that HG Investigations now called home. Sal had claimed she felt like an alien among the young tech-workers, though it now appeared Sal was basically their entire HR department and absolutely indispensable to everything the company did. Sal had made it sound like Harper would be doing her a favor by moving in, like the two of them could sit all day and shake their heads at young folks. Harper had figured that shaking heads at young folks would be useful practice for her later years.

Of course, on her first visit to the place Harper had seen that Sal was in constant demand despite her claims to be helplessly mystified by the business model and products of the company she worked for. Harper barely saw Sal during the day and had not really expected otherwise.

But it was looking like time for one of those rare sightings because Sal was whisking past the row of tables towards Harper's desk in the corner, a cup of coffee in one hand and some thick folder in the other. A clear sign that Sal was multitasking vigorously, as usual.

"Ah! There you are darling."

"Yes, here I am." Harper said. "Rather predictably, I'm afraid." Sal always found Harper at her desk, but liked to give the impression of having looked for Harper for a long time and that the sight of her was the tonic that gave Sal the courage to go on.

"So, Harper." Sal made a serious face. "I see you have booked M2 for the next hour."

"Yes. But I'll probably be done in thirty minutes. If my client is not too late."

"I'm sure he wouldn't dare. Are they often rudely late, these clients of yours?"

Harper shrugged. "From time to time. Not less than other people." Sal smiled sympathetically and cocked her head. "Listen, pumpkin, do you think we might slip in there for a few minutes before your big meeting? We'll be out again so quick you won't hardly know it."

"Well the only thing is that my client is actually due right now."

"But you know how clients are." Sal said, undiscouraged. "Never on time, doesn't call to let you know and ten minutes later they cancel the appointment by e-mail. So here's the situation: Chris and Aicha have a recording of Trudy at the karaoke bar last Friday, giving Beyoncé a run for her money. We can't play it out in the open for everyone to hear. That would not be professional. Not before I've made sure it's as funny as they say it is."

"Sally how does poor Trudy feel about the HR department organizing a bullying campaign against her behind her back?"

"Bullying campaign? Behind her back? Trudy's the one who's begging me to find a room." Sal waved at a small group of young people waiting politely by the door to the meeting room. A very young woman, quite possibly Trudy, waved enthusiastically back.

Harper smiled weakly. "You promise to herd them out of there if need be?"

Sal put a hand on Harpers shoulder and turned her head to call out, rather loud: "It's alright. Don't dillydally now! Let's get the show started." Back to Harper: "You're a jolly good girl you know. And I promise that as soon as your client walks through the door I will drag those hipsters out of there by their non-prescription glasses myself. Trust me Harper. Have I ever let you down?"

"No." Harper admitted. And she knew that if anyone could successfully wrangle a congregation of hipsters, whatever those were exactly, it would probably be Sal.

"Of course I haven't. Now excuse me, I have to go and try not to laugh too hard at poor Trudy. Foolish girl."

Harper never could tell if being around Sal made her feel younger or older than she was, but she was happy with the office accommodations her friend had let her to. The price matched the still modest list of clients Harper was tending to and she was invigorated by the sometimes hectic atmosphere and the presence of young people. As long as Harper was not the one who had to disrupt the app-ecosystem and 'change the game' every few months, she was happy to soak up the lively atmosphere and once in a while relax in the bean bags.

And Sal was right. Her little group was soon filing out of M2 with no word from Harper's client yet. They were still looking cheerful, even the girl who was probably Trudy. Especially her. She was performing a few dance-moves as they were leaving.

Harper leaned back in her chair with another deep breath. She saw him then, appearing just behind Trudy. At least a head taller than the crowd and with a bearing that made one think of morning assemblies in private schools, he took in his surroundings from up high.

He looked quizzically around, probably wondering if he was in the right place. He might have been expecting rows of fedoras and trench coats hung by the door, not karaoke cubicles and dancing hipsters. He would be looking for a private detective, after all. Harper imagined he looked pleasantly surprised when she caught his eye. She went over and extended a hand: "Nick Wade, I presume."
Chapter Four

People ask me all the time what chilling out actually means, often with a little smirk like they've got me all figured out as this stoner who's just on a long happy trip that ultimately has nothing to do with anything. And I understand that. I know you're all imagining Seth Rogen smoking a joint in some Hollywood movie, or maybe Jeff Bridges if you're older. Like my step-dad who thinks I'm basically in The Big Lebowski.

So does chilling out mean smoking a lot of weed and not giving a shit about anything? No, it's the complete opposite of that. It's about accepting the world as it is and for that you have to be out into the thick of it, with open arms and an open mind. Embracing the beauty and ugliness that is out there and realizing that you are already a unique part of this wonderful and terrible world, every bit as wonderful and terrible as the rest of it. To me, that is the meaning of chilling out.

\- Nick Wade, speaking at TEDx London

Had this been one year ago, Nick's tweet could have been about her. Jennifer could have been the one taking care of the biz. She had done it often enough. Hell, it had been her biz too. Yet these days it took everything she had just to take care of herself, and she was barely managing that.

Suddenly remembering, Jennifer rushed to extract the roasted salak and bell pepper mix from the oven. It had roasted longer than intended but was still juicy, thanks be to whatever tropical gods presided over this Balinese kitchen. She put a portion of pasta in a simple bowl, spread roast on top and sprinkled with lime juice and coconut flakes. Then she brought her phone out again to snap a quick picture of the completed Indonesian-hostel-style sweet-and-sour salak pasta.

She caught a few close-ups of the dish. Only close-ups, because the minimal hostel-kitchen where she was plying her craft was not eye-candy. Although, it was possible there was a down-to-earth charm about it, with pictures on the walls of young travelers long gone on to other destinations, and stains on the floor which would never leave. A you-don't-need-a-fancy-kitchen-to-make-an-awesome-snakeskin-fruit-pasta kind of charm. Jennifer took a few snaps with the kitchen in the background, just in case.

She would review the pictures later and compare with her original vision: A meal enjoyed in the midst of tropical paradise. For which she would obviously have to leave the kitchen. Fortunately, she knew just where to go.

Sticking a fork into her dish, Jennifer took the bowl outside. A few curious glances from the hostel lobby followed, but she paid them no heed. Outside, mid-morning traffic in Kuta was boisterous like always. Jennifer could almost see the layer of scooter-exhaust settling on her precious dish. Which, since she wasn't actually hungry, was to be more of a meal-ticket than an actual meal.

After five minutes of brisk walking she reached Nusa Kuta Hotel, where tropic idyll was what you walked through to get from the guest huts to the main building. Jennifer had stayed at the Nusa in better times and hoped the little stone bench would still be there and that the surroundings were still as charming as she remembered.

From the gate, the path into the hotel grounds passed the reception, but as far as Jennifer could see it was deserted. She slipped in and made her way by memory to the bench. It was exactly as remembered, surrounded by lush vegetation and a small stream winding through the grounds. With a sigh, she needed a chill moment more than she needed to breathe, she sat down, leaning against the bench as she had done each morning on her stay there, more than a year ago. She raised the pasta to her face and captured it from several advantageous angles.

It was the perfect location for the perfect pasta. The only thing missing was Nick. A year before, he had sat on the bench next to her and she had hugged his legs playfully, like a koala bear. He had tried to hug her back but she had refused to release him so he just had to sit there until she was all hugged out. Jennifer sank into pleasant memories of Nick. In her distraction she even swallowed a few bites of food. "I'm a good chef." She mumbled to herself and adjusted her position closer to where she remembered Nick sitting.

But as she moved she felt the weight of the phone in her pocket. The weight of the present reality. The truth that lived in her pocket was always there to knock her down, to notify her what a loser she was. It was always ready to remind her she was a screw-up and it had the pictures of Nick and Isadora's perfect lives to prove it. Jennifer knew she would have no defense against that kind of hard evidence and she knew she would not be able to look away either.

A man holding a bucket and a pointed gardening implement, looking ominously like a pitchfork to Jennifer, passed by and smiled exuberantly in the Balinese way, the kind of smile that would make British hospitality workers collapse with facial cramps in seconds. It jarred Jennifer. In her mind her minor trespass was magnified to a great existential crime. Identity theft against her past self. Trying to be a person she was not. She was sure nobody would tolerate such folly and also felt that they should not. That after six months of refusing to face the facts the agents of reality had to be on to her. And the man had specifically noticed her and was now moving towards the reception. And you never could tell what a person was thinking behind a smile like that.

She had not planned to stay long anyway. She got up and, anxious to get out, she took a wrong turn and ended up at the wall separating the grounds from the street but without a gate in sight. She turned back and on the second attempt located the exit. The receptionist had returned to her station and was engaged in conversation with the man who had smiled at Jennifer. When Jennifer approached them the receptionist looked up and with a grand smile made as if she were about to speak. Jennifer quickly waved the bowl of pasta at her. That was bound to give the woman pause. A bowl of pasta was useful that way and a second or two later Jennifer disappeared into the din of Kuta traffic.

She did not care whether the receptionist had merely been hospitable or had been trying to catch her sneaking into a paradise she could no longer afford to enter legitimately. The mission had been a success, she had sallied into the past and returned now with a little of the good feeling that still clung to it.

Jennifer was sure she needed all the success and good feeling she could get her hands on if she were going to win Nick back. And that was, after all, in its own convoluted way, the whole reason it was so important to show the world she had still got it, pasta-wise. That she was still an asset. A wholesome, young and desirable woman. That there was no reason for Nick to keep avoiding her and not answer her messages. Really, she loved him and he had absolutely nothing to fear from her no matter what anyone said.

Chapter Five

Nick smiled boyishly as he shook Harper's hand. His manner was all easygoing posh and relaxation. Harper imagined him as the most laidback person at the country club. "Harper Gill, I presume. Nice digs you've got here, though I must say I was starting to fear I had barged into a wayward division of Google."

"Oh no." Harper smiled back. "I'm a different kind of search engine." He did not seem to understand that she had made a joke. Not a very good one, she admitted that. "But to be fair, I actually do google quite a bit. Of course, most people have already tried that before they come here, but it's often a big help regardless. Please step inside my office, then we'll discuss what I can do for you."

From the way he dressed, with a blazer and a large grey scarf thrown over a T-shirt and a pair of standard blue jeans, he could have been one of Sal's colleagues or the lead guitar player in an indie-rock band. He possessed a kind of charm like a magnetic field that would imperceptibly point the inner compasses of complete strangers towards him. Harper had encountered this a few times in her life, usually in highly accomplished men who had never had occasion to let go of lady luck once they had caught her by the throat the first time. She suspected most of them of being immature narcissists and in a few cases had definite proof. Harper believed everyone was an immature narcissist at heart. But she still reminded herself to be careful around Nick. She was too old to pretend to herself that she was immune to the charms of tall dark strangers. Even if their kind of handsome was perhaps more boyish than dark and mysterious.

His confidence did not need to be asserted to be felt, and Harper wondered if she had been wrong to suppose him nervous about the job he was there for.

The walls of the meeting room was transparent glass and all around a scene from a bustling newspaper office in a silent movie played out, but with no cigarettes and paper thing laptops instead of typewriters.

"I see this is not my dodgy American uncle's kind of PI office." Nick said. "So I don't suppose I will be offered a glass of whiskey?"

"Afraid not. Blatant violation of workplace policy. But you may find acai smoothies and quinoa lunch boxes in the vending machine outside."

"That sounds delicious." Nick Said. And Harper realized he was serious.

He was back in a few minutes, savoring his smoothie and seeming in no hurry to get to the point. During the meeting he would sip his acai whenever he paused for thought or for listening to Harper speak. It was vaguely comical and Harper understood it as a kind of fidgeting. That maybe he was uncomfortable here, after all.

Nick cleared his throat. "My girlfriend is Brazilian."

"Aha." Said Harper.

"Like acai." He explained. "She sort of got me into it. It's full of antioxidants, you know. And, um, fibers. Yes, lots of fibers I believe."

"I see. So, Mr. Wade, what can I do for you today?"

"Ah yes." Nick said, applying himself to his smoothie like a schoolboy clutching a carton of milk with thirty seconds to go before the bell. Harper got the impression he was trying to finish the smoothie so he would have an excuse to leave the room to get another one.

"To tell you the truth, I'm conflicted about this appointment." Nick said. "But I have been compelled. I'm here about Jennifer, my ex-girlfriend."

Harper nodded encouragingly.

"Now, Isadora, um, she's the one who likes acai, like I also do. She and I are planning a one-year anniversary trip to Thailand, and Isadora thinks Jennifer might, um, interfere. The thing is it will also be the anniversary of Jennifer and I breaking up, and Jennifer has had a bit of hard time since then. A hard time moving on, you see."

Harper gave him the time he needed to speak. Speaking seemed painful to him, and Harper felt him to be one of those overly polite types who could not bring themselves to say bad things even about their exes. It was kind of sweet.

"Isadora thinks Jennifer might be dangerous." He explained, like this was really an issue of the two women not getting along. "She thinks we might need, well, not protection but some kind of warning system in place. You see Jennifer has developed a habit of showing up wherever we go. I don't think she means any harm, but I'll admit it's a little unnerving not knowing where she might pop up next."

"Why do you think she does that?" Harper asked. "What does she want?"

Nick looked confused. "Me, I suppose."

"Have you asked her?"

The question hung in the air for a few seconds. Nick cleared his throat was perhaps a little annoyed.

"We're not really on speaking terms. She was not loyal to me and I value loyalty very highly."

"Let me get this straight. She shows up from time to time but you don't actually speak to her?"

"Yes. I mean, she's spying on us. Hiding. And she runs away as soon as we see her. It's disconcerting. I mean, what mustn't she be going through?"

"I see. And I think I understand your predicament. But bear in mind my specialty is information. Not personal security."

"That's perfect. We, I mean I, want you to spy on Jennifer. If you follow her, you can warn us before she gets close. And you can take photographs to document what she's doing. Because if she keeps this up we may have to get the police involved." He sounded uncertain about that. "Isadora is losing sleep."

Harper nodded, considering Nick and what he had told her. She checked the time on her phone and was reminded she ought to get going. Before the client called again.

"Oh, by the way." Nick said. "We travel quite a bit. Also abroad. That does not deter Jennifer so for this to work you would need a lot of flexibility and a valid passport."

Harper nodded. "This sounds like a big job." She said. "Consuming of time. Open of end. And, let's just say it, exorbitant of price." She had always wanted to say that.

Nick smiled. "Do you accept then? Do you think it will work?"

Harper leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. "Let me think about it."
Chapter Six

The biggest secret about dreams coming true is that it's not as big a deal as you think. The morning after your big parade you will look in the mirror and the only thing new about you will be the hangover. Then you will realize you had another dream while you were sleeping. You will not stay happy for long until you learn to be happy while you are awake. I will break this metaphor down a little bit, because sometimes I get carried away with metaphors, and this is important: Unless your dog just died, being happy is never going to get any easier than it is right now.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Back at her own, less idyllic, hostel, Jennifer found a crowd congregated outside the kitchen. A few people inside, as many as would fit, were doing their best to make what looked like breakfast. They must've been out late Sunday night if they were just getting up, Jennifer thought, and was struck by a pang of guilt about the state she had left the kitchen in.

She pushed through the crowd, elbowing and jostling her way inside to tidy up. She felt the glances of the other guests. "I'm so sorry, guys. I'll clean up now." She desperately wiped a counter down, then heard the voice of the hostel manager behind her. The manager was a small but tough tiger of a woman who liked to treat her mostly young clientele like ill-behaved nieces and nephews.

"Many people use kitchen. Must clean up." Said the tiger-woman.

"I know, I know. I'm really sorry." Jennifer said. She swept flour quickly into the sink, accidentally blowing it on her dress and the remains of her pasta bowl. She wet a piece of cloth and started wiping down another counter. Making fresh pasta had been gratuitous. She regretted it now. She had just wanted to do something right.

"Many people waiting, but kitchen not clean."

"It's not as bad as it looks, really. I'll have it sorted out in a minute. It's just, it's not a very large kitchen to begin with." She had waited until after usual breakfast hours to use it, and she had planned to be done before lunch. She had not wanted to inconvenience the other guests. She had never imagined anyone's lunch would be delayed because of her. But really, even that was not all that bad. A more reasonable hostess would be able to see that.

"Kitchen is large enough." The manager said. "You make food, clean up, and get out. Plenty of space for other people then."

Jennifer wanted to get away. She most of all wanted to shake the tiny woman, but failing that getting away was the next best thing. She started scrubbing the pot violently and felt everyone's eyes on her back. The pasta was still in the sieve, but someone had taken that out of the sink and put in on the counter.

"Why you made mess?" The woman demanded. "Cheap food outside. Leave no mess."

Jennifer smiled thinly and nodded. She finished the pan and picked up the knife she had cut the salak and peppers with.

Inexplicably, the manager persisted. "Listen." She said. "Kitchen must be cleaned after use." She pointed to the list of hostel commandments hanging on the wall, which instructed guests to enjoy themselves, respect each other, and clean the kitchen after use.

Jennifer wiped the knife clean on the towel and turned to the hostess, clenching the knife so tight her knuckles turned white.

"Lady." Jennifer said. "I'm cleaning." She raised the knife in front of her, as proof.

The tiger-woman stared her down. "You late. Kitchen must be cleaned after use." They stared at each other. Neither woman flinched.

Another guest, a small blond girl who was slicing up an orange in the kitchen, suddenly took an interest in the roasted salak and bell peppers. She cleared her throat.

"This looks delicious." She said. Jennifer got the feeling the girl was just trying to change the subject of the conversation.

"Do you want it?" Jennifer asked. "I'm not hungry."

"Tell you what then, leave it to me, I'll eat it and clean it up too. Don't worry about it."

Jennifer became suspicious. Was she that pathetic? Was this girl, she looked no more than twenty, taking pity on her? Was she being taken care of by some little sweet thing on her first trip away from home? Or was it even worse, was she being managed because the girl despised Jennifer and wanted to get rid of her for everyone's sake? Like Jennifer was some kind of crazy person.

"Please." The girl said. "It'll be like a surprise brunch, right guys?" She looked around at the others. They all nodded in agreement though they did not seem to share the girl's enthusiasm. Jennifer noticed they were all the same age and looked vaguely alike. That was great, so they were probably all friends and once Jennifer was out of the kitchen they would have a laugh together about the old crazy pasta-bitch. Being twenty-seven-years old was no joke to Jennifer. Not when she still had the budget of an eighteen-year-old and therefore kept running into eighteen-year-olds wherever she was resigned to accommodate and feed herself.

"Sure, thank you." Jennifer said, putting the knife away in the drawer. "Don't forget the lime and coconut flakes." She indicated the ingredients without enthusiasm.

"Oh, we definitely won't forget that."

Jennifer forced herself to smile briefly, even at the manager. What did that woman want? Jennifer stumbled back through the narrow hostel hallways, back to the privacy of her six-person dorm room.

One of her room-mates, she didn't know his name and had only seen him twice before, was still in bed. The other bunks were empty. Clothes and chargers for electronic devices were spread over two of them and two were unoccupied. Jennifer crawled under the sheet she had suspended from the bare bunk above her own, which gave her a semblance of actual privacy, and threw herself under the covers. She lay facing the wall with her eyes open and listened to the snores from the other side of the room. She lay there a while.

Chapter Seven

Having seen Nick off and still considering his predicament, Harper left the office. She bussed to Waterloo station and took the tube from there to Camden so that half an hour after leaving the office, she was knocking on a door with a number on it that matched the one she had saved on her phone, and was hoping for the best.

A young woman with black lipstick and a spiked leather collar around her neck that someone's mother might once have worn to a Sex Pistols gig opened the door. She looked Harper over suspiciously but said: "Yeah?" amiably enough. She wore pink sweatpants and looked more hung over than about to tear the system down. So far so good.

"I'm looking for Jamie Dalton." Harper said.

"Yeah?" The woman repeated. Then she disappeared, leaving the door ajar. Harper wondered if the door was open wide enough to be an invitation to come inside. A few seconds later, the collared woman stuck her head back out: "Wait here, alright?"

Harper smiled and nodded. The woman closed the door, a few minutes passed. Then: "Did you say Jamie Dalton?"

Harper nodded again. She wondered how many people lived in there.

The woman looked her over again, as if she had not paid attention the first time.

"Yeah..." She disappeared again.

The next face to appear was a young man's with dark skin and close cropped hair who eyed Harper suspiciously.

"So?"

At least it was a new word, Harper thought.

"I'm looking for Jamie Dalton."

"She's not here." He started to close the door.

"Are you Leslie?" Harper asked quickly, before the door shot. "Are you Jamie's boyfriend?"

Through a sliver in the door: "So?"

"If Jamie doesn't want to be found that's OK. Tell her I can work around that."

A girlish, scornful voice piped up from behind the door: "You can work around that? How fucking flexible of you. Couldn't you have done that from home then?"

Leslie resignedly opened the door and revealed the pretty blond girl Harper had seen in photographs, shown to her by Jamie's mother. The girl was half hiding herself behind Leslie.

"Jamie, your mother is worried sick about you." Harper said. "She wants you to come home."

Jamie's smiled sarcastically. "I'm touched. But I'm staying here, forever. You can tell her that."

"OK, Jamie. But you know you are still a minor, so your parents could call the police and make you come home whether you want to or not. For now, your Mom has said she does not want to do that."

"Big fucking surprise." Said Jamie. Jamie's mother had been meticulously polite, if a bit cold and reserved. The complete opposite of her daughter. The husband worked in politics. Harper believed she had seen him on TV once but was not sure.

"I'm a private investigator. Harper Gill." Harper extended her arm and let it hang there, ignored. "Your mother just wants to know that you're safe and sound."

"Big fucking lie." Said Jamie with a derisive snort.

"Listen, Jamie." Harper took a step forward but Leslie blocked her way.

"Who invited you in?" He asked.

"No, you're right. I'm sorry." Harper stepped back again. "Jamie, if you could just give your mother a call that would mean the world to her."

"Big fucking chance."

"Can I at least take your picture? Give your mother something for her peace of mind."

"I suggest you try brandy. That's worked in the past."

Given how prim and proper Jamie's mother had seemed, uptight except for unravelling at the thought of what might have happened to her reckless daughter who was now alone in the world, that was surprising. But you never could tell.

Harper said tentatively: "I know you must have had your reasons to run away, but I also know your Mom cares enough about you to have hired me just to get any kind of message back. That's what she said, Jamie. Anything at all you can give her."

"She just wants a message? Why don't you send her a picture of me and Leslie?" She wrapped her arms around her boyfriend's round chest and slid out from behind him. This reveled her whole face. The right side was swollen grotesquely, her delicate features magnified and discolored like a cruel caricature of the left side.

"Jamie, you need to see a doctor!"

"Fuck you." Said Jamie. "Don't you want a picture to show my mother I'm all safe and sound? Go ahead then."

Harper decided it was best to get the formalities out of the way and snapped a quick one with her phone, with Leslie looking carefully blank and Jamie's good side smiling like a prom queen in an American movie. Perhaps a horror movie, though. Considering how sad it made Harper to see, she did not want to dwell on what it might do to Jamie's mother.

"Thank you both." Harper said and tried not to flinch as she looked Jamie in the eyes. "Jamie, my job was to find you. I consider that done. For today, at least. So I am not speaking in a professional capacity anymore but, if you will allow it, as one woman to another. Can you tell me who did this to you?"

When Jamie did not say anything, Harper's eye wandered to Leslie. "That's racist!" Jamie said, and hugged Leslie.

"I wasn't implying anything." Harper explained. "Just looking around. Jamie, did your Dad do this?"

Silence again.

"Your Mom?"

"Hard to tell." Jamie said defiantly, though the air was going out of her balloon. "Since we were all a bit drunk at the time."

Leslie made a pained grimace and sucked air in through his teeth, then mumbled: "I knew I shouldn't have let you go home like that."

Jamie gave him a fierce look: "First of all you didn't let me go home. I just went home. Second of all, I can handle my parents. Most of the time, anyway. Any other night they would have passed out before I got in. It was, I don't know, the opposite of a miracle that they were conscious enough to catch me. Like this was God's punishment for my sins, or something." She gestured to her face. "Because that tour-de-force of relative sobriety required some kind of divine intervention."

"Shit, Jamie." Said Leslie.

"Yeah." Jamie agreed. "You can't argue with the Good Lord in Heaven."

Blasphemy, Harper thought, was just one more coping mechanism, working alongside Jamie's tough-girl demeanor and vanishing act. A multi-layered defense that would still not be enough to protect her from shitty parents.

"You could talk to someone." Harper suggested.

Jamie smiled sarcastically. "A priest?"

"A counsellor. The police."

"I could tell them I got into a fight over a fag at the pub. You should've seen the other girl."

Harper sighed. She did not know if Jamie thought she was protecting her parents or somehow herself.

"So you are staying here until you think they've learned their lesson. I hope that works out. Your parents know about this place?"

Harper had found Jamie with the help of one of Jamie's classmates, who was concerned that her friend had not been showing up at school. Jamie's mother, Mrs. Dalton, had not mentioned the apartment, only 'that boy Leslie' Jamie sometimes hung out with, but Harper realized Jamie's mother had not told her everything there was to tell.

Jamie laughed incredulously. "She didn't tell you?"

"I got hold of some of your friends through Facebook, Jamie. They're worried about you too." This startled Jamie, though she tried not to show it. Harper wondered if Jamie's home situation was an open secret at school. Or maybe only a few people knew where she went and why when she disappeared for days at a time, waiting for the bruises to fade, and maybe she liked to keep it that way.

"Actually, just the one friend. Valerie. Hawthorne, I think."

"Oh." Jamie seemed relieved. "For a moment there I thought you'd fucked me over in a major way. But Valerie is cool."

Harper was out of business to attend to but she did not want to leave. She wanted to give Jamie a hug and some motherly advice about excessive swearing.

"What are you going to do?" Harper asked instead.

"In two months and thirteen days I'll be eighteen and then I'll do whatever the fuck I want. Lessie will get me a job at the restaurant where he works. He's a chef."

"I'm a trainee, and don't call me Lessie."

"That's what his Mom calls him." Jamie explained. She was starting to relax.

"Tsk!" Said Leslie.

He was starting to relax too, but Harper had little reason to hang around and her chest felt tight and would benefit from some fresh air. Besides, what could she do? Family problems were like intricate knots tying everyone and everything together into one mess and Harper had enough complicated problems of her own.

Still, before she left she gave Jamie a card with her phone number on it and instructions to call anytime.

"Call anyone, really. If you ever feel you need to, just call somebody. You won't believe how much grief you can spare yourself by something as simple as talking things over. If you won't trust me on anything else, you can trust me on that." Advice given, Harper left. She had a client to call.
Chapter Eight

Here's my advice: Just give up. Don't laugh, try it. Give up and see if it's not a relief. This is not meant to be defeatist; you can always pick up where you left off, but once you have let a dream go you may realize you could pick up any other dream you wanted instead. Think of the freedom, to no longer be a slave to your dream but to be in control of it. To have the power to just chill the fuck out.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer was grateful her followers on Instagram could not see her, but driven by self-loathing she nonetheless took a series of desolate self-portraits and fantasized about uploading them. Honesty could be empowering, #realme. But Jennifer knew the real her would not empower anyone. The real her had crossed the line into cautionary tale territory some time ago. She deleted the sorrow-selfies as fast as she could take them.

Long after the late sleeper in the other bunk had woken and left the room, probably without ever realizing she was there, Jennifer roused herself by remembering how the morning had after all been a success. She should not let one angry tiger-woman overshadow that. Jennifer pulled out her laptop to finish har article on simple meals with Balinese vegetables.

She decided against using the pictures from the hostel kitchen, though they did illustrate under just how simple circumstances the dish could be prepared, and went with the Nusa Hotel pictures like she had planned. Those had a cheerful quality to them which Jennifer's work had lately lacked. They would not even be out of place next to the old pictures from when she had stayed at the hotel properly, with Nick. Except, she looked older in the new ones. She had cut her hair short in an attempt to cut herself loose from bad experiences and start fresh. She had cut it pixie length because she wanted that pixie energy and witchcraft, but had since come to fear that all her magic had resided in those locks because she had lost some kind of mojo for sure. The other change was that her face now appeared to her so droopy that when she relaxed it looked like it had started to come lose from her bones. But as long as she made an effort to smile the muscle strain held up her face. That was why you barely saw the uncomfortable strain around the eyes in the new pictures. But it was hard work these days, smiling.

Nostalgically she browsed further into old photos, dragging them next to the new ones to compare. Naturally, Nick was in several of the old ones and she became curious to see how he had changed too, so she went to his blog for a recent photo and ended up reading Isadora's post again. About Isadora and Nick's funny/romantic shenanigans on Sulawesi, the ones that made Jennifer's stomach clench.

Jennifer sometimes felt a demon was living inside her, one that liked to torture her by making her watch Nick and Isadora's happiness practically in real time. Rubbing every felicitous day of their union in her face, making her watch what her own life might still have been like if she had not forfeited it through her moment of weakness. Because no matter how it hurt her, she just could not look away from Nick.

As is the nature of web-browsing, Jennifer eventually progressed to Isadora's social media feed and her work-out videos that always failed to mention how Isadora had been born looking like that. Isadora, Jennifer felt, exercised more to show off what she already had than to improve on it. She opened Facebook, wanted to look back in time to before Isadora even met Nick, to see if maybe even Isadora looked a little older and more worn out these days. But, to her horror, Jennifer found she could not access Isadora's private pictures anymore.

She had been blocked. Unfriended. Until recently, Jennifer's and Isadora's lives had been intertwined online, just like Jennifer's and Nick's still were. But now Isadora had cut her off. Breaking out in a cold sweat, Jennifer switched to Nick's feed and assured herself she could still go as deep into that as she liked, which made her breathe more freely again.

Jennifer was looking at pictures of a young Nick setting out from home on his first journey around the world, the one would take him into Jennifer's arms, when her phone buzzed. She quickly swiped it open and her heart skipped a beat, when she saw the news. She clutched the phone to her chest. It was a status update from Nick that Jennifer had been waiting anxiously for:

"Yo! We've been delayed and postponed (and chilled out) but we've never given up the dream. That's right folks, Bali here we come!"
Chapter Nine

It seemed Harper was, technically, working for the villains of the story. Earlier when they had told Harper their side of events, and it had not involved beating up their daughter, only concern that she had run away, they had seemed nice enough. They still might be, Harper supposed. A few slips of the fists did not completely define a parent to a daughter who was after all still alive and not permanently disfigured, but it did leave a sour taste in Harper's mouth to be on the payroll all the same. She wondered if she was a henchwoman now, an ignominious state of affairs in the best of circumstances. Not what she signed up for when she got her PI license. Not what she was trying to become. But life could be strange like that.

And all she had been able to offer Jamie was some heartfelt but trite advice. As if there were not enough of that to go around already.

She was looking at Jamie's picture on the phone while riding the bus back to the office, so she saw the green button pop up soundlessly and recognized the number of Jamie's mother. Not answering or throttling an incoming call as soon as she saw it was a struggle for Harper. She was a compulsive responder. Unanswered phone calls or unread emails tugged at her conscience, buzzing and vibrating in the back of her mind until she gave them the attention they demanded. But she did not want to take this call on the bus.

She was just back at the office when the phone had another fit of the shakes. They were coming on more frequently, it seemed. A conversation that wanted to be born. A sign of genuine concern perhaps, or of just wanting to know what the hired help was up to. Harper pressed the green banana icon, feeling her heart rise in her chest as she did so.

"Hello Mrs. Dalton. I was just about to write."

"Oh, good. I was wondering when I would hear from you." Mrs. Dalton's voice oozed authority and poise. "I've been trying to call you all day. Is my daughter alright?" There was a coldness in the tone that was now seem potentially preemptive.

"Jamie is safe and sound, though a little worse for wear." The silence on the other end of the line was icy cold. Harper continued: "She does not want to come home, but I will send you a picture of her. She is well, all things considered."

Mrs. Dalton drew in a sharp breath. "You have a photograph of my daughter?"

"There. You should have it any second now."

Harper imagined the mother looking at the swollen face of the child, having to wonder how much the person on the other end knew about it. More than Mrs. Dalton would have liked, no doubt. Harper almost felt bad for her.

"It is as I feared. She is with that man again." Mrs. Dalton was keeping her composure pretty well under the circumstances.

"At least she appeared to be in fighting spirits." Harper said tentatively. "Despite the bruising."

"Lack of fighting spirit has never been one of Jamie's problems, Ms. Gill. As you can see she gets herself into all kinds of trouble despite our best efforts to dissuade her. It's enough to break a mother's heart."

Warily, harper said: "Jamie let me know the efforts had been rather too forceful this time. It is also my understanding of pedagogy that her views are in line with current opinion in that field."

"Is it now?" Mrs. Dalton's voice was icily polite. "Do you personally have a lot of experience in pedagogy, Ms. Gill? Do you have children of your own?"

"I do not."

"I see." Mrs. Dalton said. "So I suppose it's understandable if you feel the stirrings of a motherly affection seeking purchase from time to time. We all remember that from our younger and more impressionable years, I'm sure, and now look back with fondness and forgiveness in our younger selves. Because of course the realities of motherhood is another thing altogether, as you must realize."

"I'm sure there is much truth in that."

"But this is neither here nor there, Ms. Gill, and we are both busy women, no doubt. I thank you for your service, though I must say I had imagined you would go about it with a little more discretion. I've just been on the phone with the concerned mother of a girl in my daughter's class, inquiring about Jamie's wellbeing. That was not at all what I had in mind when I hired you, you understand. But rest assured that the matter shall not come between us and that I shall settle your bill at the earliest opportunity. Goodbye, Ms. Gill."

The phone went silent. With her cheeks still warm and tingling, Harper checked her calendar and inboxes. There was nothing to grab onto and she needed something. Work could be a salve for Harper so it was too bad that in this summer of starting over, her new professional journey had entered the doldrums. Work was light and time was consequently ample. She was sure Jamie's face would creep into her dreams if she did not prop up some kind of bulwark against it. Jamie's corpse might even make an appearance. Harper's dreams were not sticklers for facts more than anyone else's. Harper shuddered at the prospect.

With no other work to distract her, Harper began thinking of Nick. Of his worries about the crazy woman stalking him around the world and his proposed countermeasures. It was a mess of a situation. Ill defines criteria for success and a worldwide scope of operations. That was a lot to think about. Certainly a change of scenery. And maybe that was just what Harper needed. Maybe fate had cleared her schedule for a reason.

Since Harper did not believe in fate, she gave the doldrums two hours more and a few cups of coffee before she let her thoughts return to Nick and Jennifer. A young woman flirting with insanity and its legal consequences. Sure Nick was rich and handsome, but still, what was Jennifer thinking? Harper wanted to know more. She was curious about how well she could come to understand Jennifer. It seemed not very loyal to her proposed client, but somehow still important to do. Or at least irresistible. So Harper made the decision to see a lot more of Nick and Jennifer that summer.

Chapter Ten

Classic symptom of giving too many fucks: Feeling like there's nothing on this planet as frustrating as other people; that every encounter and in particular every date is like a lottery ticket you pay for with your time and patience. Long-suffering you, hunting for the jackpot, a martyr of the casino. The problem is, of course, that nobody sees themselves as a jackpot for you to cash in, they were hoping you would be their jackpot. In other words, you all need to chill the fuck out and realize you don't need to win the lottery to be happy. You need to get happy to win the lottery. You think that's unfair? Well, you know what you need to do.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer was waiting for Nick at the domestic terminal of Denpasar airport. The wavy designs of the neighboring international terminal evoked lapping waves and its sleekness promised a holiday unmarred by lack of modern conveniences. The domestic half of the airport was part pagoda, part strip-mall. A folksier expression of the same ideas. The airport was busy but unlike on the streets around it no one appeared to be in a murderous hurry. Jennifer let the relative calm wash over her, giving it every opportunity to find a way inside.

If asked to describe how she felt she would have said she felt in her right element. Waiting for Nick, her patience was inexhaustible. Her mind was in a state of meditative awareness of her own body and, she felt, Nick's and barely anything else. The hubbub of travelers and trolleys as well as the light and humidity around her was drowned out by simmering currents of expectation running up and down her limbs. She had feared that waiting for Nick's flight to arrive, without knowing which one would be his or even which day he would arrive on, would be torture, but she was barely noticing time passing. So close to him after weeks of uncertainty and doubt, a great clarity descended upon her. She was the king's sword in the rock, waiting for the hero to claim it, as prophesy promised.

Her eyes scanned the travelers and because few of them looked even remotely like Nick she barely needed to be aware of them to dismiss them. Only when a curl of unruly brown hair popped into her field of vision did Jennifer focus her attention long enough for the other details of the owner's appearance to disqualify him from being Nick.

If there was one thing she knew it was Nick, and Jennifer took a certain pride in eliminating other men from the running based on periphery details. Nick wouldn't wear shorts on a plane though he would fly in bare feet and sandals. He always had a tan but never a sunburn, he was vain and meticulous in just the right balance to ensure that. He would not use a luggage trolley, because he liked to tell himself he was travelling light even though had not left home in a long time without an entourage that knew how to pack well (once one of Jennifer's responsibilities). One man was too dowdy in his flying sweatpants, while another was trying too hard by wearing a tie. Nick liked to act a bit above it all, though Jennifer knew he was anything but. She knew he was self-conscious about his vanity and had always done her best not to tease him too much about it. She was vain on his behalf too.

But it was an idle game she was playing, from the table of arriving flights Jennifer could see that logistics alone disqualified all men presently in the airport from her attention. Nick would be flying in either directly from Makassar or he would have a stopover, almost certainly in Jakarta, and arrive from there. There were thirty minutes until the next relevant arrival and it had been more than an hour and a half since the last, so Jennifer let her guard down and that was how Trevor snuck up on her.

His voice speaking her full name, suddenly and deadpan, struck her like a bottle on the head.

Jennifer's blood froze, Trevor's voice ripped her out of her meditations. A year ago Trevor would have called her Jen like everyone else, not Jennifer. That was formal. It transported her back to school, to being reprimanded by a responsible adult. It was horrible that Trevor, Nick's hang-around friend, should be able to conjure up such a feeling in her. Trevor had practically been Nick and Jennifer's groupie, when their blog "Nick and Jen Around the World" was their child and labor of love. Jennifer had never understood why Nick had not grown tired of Trevor. They were old friends, and she had supposed Nick was just loyal that way. In either case, Trevor of all people had no right to tell Jennifer what to do.

"Does Nick know you're here?" She felt pathetic even as she said it but she had to ask. The abhorrent possibility that Nick might have told Trevor to come here, to chase Jennifer away, was slowly forming and working its way down her throat and she had to stop it before it got stuck.

"What do you think, Jen? What do you think made us take so long to get here if not that we knew you were waiting and we were tired of having the same welcome party everywhere we go."

The evil idea of Nick delegating the rejection of Jennifer to someone else crashed heavily down into her abdomen and knocked the wind out of her.

"I want to see Nick." She said.

"I know. But you can't." Trevor's smile mocked her. Jennifer realized he was enjoying this. She had never really liked him, and he had always known it, and now he had taken over Jennifer's old job of taking care of practical details and annoying problems, of which Jennifer herself was now one.

"Are you Nick's manager now, or his bodyguard?"

"Does Nick need a bodyguard?" His condescending smile was unbearable. He was so sure of his ability to take care of desperate, pathetic Jennifer. Probably proud and pleased to be delegated the responsibility too. But Jennifer knew Nick would not have approved of the way Trevor talked to her. She knew he would have told Trevor to be kind, because Nick was considerate. That was why he had not blocked Jennifer on social media yet, and was merely ignoring her messages. Nick knew having that door closed in her face would crush her. That he had not done it was proof he still cared.

"Whatever, Trevor. Please just let Nick know I want to see him. I only need to see him once, alone."

"I think Nick already knows you want to see him. You've been stalking him for months and bombarding him with messages. Seriously, Jennifer. You don't need to see Nick, you need to see a psychiatrist. You need help."

"I'm not crazy, I just need to talk to Nick once. Explain to him face to face."

Trevor grimaced. "Wow, Jennifer. Just wow. Do you actually think you can fix your life during the course of one conversation with Nick? You would have to be a wizard. No excuse me, a witch. But, my gosh, you really think you can swing it, don't you?"

Jennifer did not answer, she was concentrating on not betraying her emotions.

"I feel for you, Jennifer, I truly do. Of course you want your old life back, Nick and the business. That much I believe. Though I wonder which you miss the most. But it doesn't really matter, because you can't have either. Nick has moved on and you need a new life, and a new job."

Trevor punctuated his statement authoritatively, adding: "Consider this a courtesy call. The last friendly warning, if you will." He waved his hand dismissively in her direction. "This crazy behavior is worrying everyone, and not just on your behalf. So be advised: Next time I see you I'm going to get the cops involved, no matter what Nick says."

Trevor did not wait for a reply to this threat, he turned around and walked off, like a businessman having closed one and deal and moving on to the next.

Jennifer was trembling with humiliation and anger. And disappointment that she would not see Nick at the airport that day. She called after Trevor: "You think you're so superior, but you're just following Nick around too. You're no better than me you arrogant prick."

She realized with a sinking feeling how incredibly pathetic it was that her best comeback was to compare Trevor to herself.

"The difference is I'm invited." Trevor replied over his shoulder and by the time he had taken another couple of steps Jennifer was ready to sit down and cry. She knew she was an easy target for mockery, she even felt she partly deserved it. After all this time she barely had any defenses left to put up for herself. Still she could not stop. She did not even really want to. In a way she desperately did want to stop, of course, but that way belonged in a better world, one in which she did not have a Nick-shaped hole in her heart.

So she did not cry. She worked with what she had. Fate had denied her Nick, but delivered Trevor in his place. A poor replacement by any measure, but she was in no position be picky. Her position demanded resourcefulness, and yes, relentlessness too. And she was right about one thing. Trevor was indeed following Nick around just like she was. There was some satisfaction in the thought that Trevor had come to scare her off and humiliate her, but instead he would be the one to lead her back to Nick.
Chapter Eleven

Harper started the search for Jennifer in London. It was not a great feat of detective work to pin her down, and in the age of social media finding a person not actively trying to hide is straightforward. But finding a person only goes so far. It leads to a photograph and a dot on the map. A more difficult, and more interesting question is was what thoughts were in their head when the picture was taken, what schemes were cooked up on that dot on the map? It was these questions Harper was pondering in the café across from Bites, the sandwich shop in Marylebone where Jennifer had found employment after returning home from Indonesia.

Jennifer's days there were predictable. Each morning she would ooze out of the door to her parent's apartment and dribble her way to work with the enthusiasm of an amoebae in a nutrient starved petri dish. There she would fail to earn any tips for positive attitude from a steady stream of well-to-do customers and in the evenings she would dutifully return to her parents' apartment. She would stay there until the cycle repeated next morning.

Harper had much time to sit in cafés, drink copious amounts of tea and coffee and try the patience of old friends over the phone. The one closest to her heart was Lionel. "Of course I'm not breaking the law." She told him. And she was right. Harper was licensed for public surveillance, could still remember the small thrill she had gotten out of receiving it. The promise of secrets discovered, danger navigated and injustices brought to light. Now she was in the midst of it, on her third cup of tea in two hours.

"I was just contemplating the irony of stalking a woman who might be a stalker. Especially one who appears to do nothing but work and sleep."

Harper felt she could talk to Lionel because he was a cop. She had agreed with herself that discussing her mission without details - he did not need to know what she was doing - just a rough outline of the idea, was like a catholic confessing to a priest. She could pour out shameful private secrets and receive the benediction of someone in a position of authority. Of course, it was not really her own secrets she was pouring out but Jennifer's, and she was not sure she actually knew them. She was something of a mystery, the younger woman. Harper knew enough to feel bad for her, being all on her own, under accusation and close scrutiny. But maybe Harper just did not want to see Jennifer for what she was.

"I don't know, Lionel. I guess I needed to talk to someone. I just have this awkward feeling about the whole thing."

Lionel cleared his throat, she could almost hear a knowing smile in the cough and she knew roughly what he would say: "You don't really want to prove that this woman is a stalker, Harper. You want to look for lost girls and help them and this case is not letting you do that." He was getting right to the point, Harper thought. Maybe that was a sign he was busy?

"I'd like to think it's a little more complicated than that." She said to buy time, though she believed he was right. He liked that he knew her in a way only an ex-husband could, and she liked something about that too. There was comfort in being told things about yourself that you already knew.

"All I'm trying to say is that you're too much of an idealist." Lionel said. He sounded tired. "If she's stalking your client she deserves to be caught, if not she never needs to know. If I lost sleep over every person I have investigated who turned out to be innocent I'd be out of my mind. To catch the wolves you sometimes have to chase a few sheep. And if you stopped obsessing over which shades of grey your jobs fall under you'd probably be swimming in work now instead of alienating your clients."

"I'm only not swimming in work because word of mouth has not gotten around. And what do you mean, alienating my clients?"

"I mean word of mouth has gotten around. One of my colleagues gave me a heads up on you today. Some concerned parent called in a case of child battery and somehow your name came up during the investigation, along with allegations of muckraking and threats of libel suits. Turns out the father is in parliament. No formal steps have been taken yet as far as I know. I think the whole thing is a storm in a glass of water but I thought you should know."

"That's just great." Harper sighed. She had thought she had seen Jamie's Dad somewhere in the political sphere and perhaps she should have picked up on the signs that the parents were expecting the utmost discretion. But somehow it had never occurred to Harper that they had serious alternative concerns besides getting their daughter back. Maybe Lionel was right again and she was too idealistic. She would like to think so.

"This is off the record, by the way." Lionel said.

He was a stickler for the rules, which was another reason Harper appreciated it when she confessed and he gave her benediction. To have Lionel on your side was a sign that your side was right.

"For the record then, that girl was badly bruised." Harper said. "But thanks for letting me know that my reputation precedes me, and don't lose any sleep on my behalf. If they don't want to draw attention they are not going to take legal action."

"I might lose sleep in any case." Lionel said. "Winifred's teething these days so you never know. Or actually you do, you just wish you didn't. Then at least during the day you could enjoy the delusion that you'd get a good night's sleep at the end of the day. That's all I'm asking for now, the illusion that tonight is the night I get six hours of in a row. It does wonders for morale, that idea, when you can manage to believe in it."

"Oh, I'm sorry Lionel. I haven't even asked after Winifred. Is she well? Is she terribly bitey?"

"Please, I would savor the chance to forget about Winifred. Just for five minutes, mind you. Longer than that and I'd feel this roaring void inside. They do give purpose in life a whole new meaning, the little buggers. But yeah, Winifred's the happiest littlest creature on earth, when she's not the most miserable. So I suppose the family's doing alright on the whole. Mary still loves Winifred, despite all the attention the little one is getting." Mary, the older child. Harper had forgotten to ask about her too. She felt like a bad friend, or less paradoxically as a bad ex-wife.

She thought Lionel did sound happy, but also very tired. "Your schedule must be so pinched." She said. "I won't steal more of your time, then. Thanks for the chat, and give my best to Beth and Mary. And Winifred, of course."

"Sure thing, Harper. And you know you can call anytime, right? It's refreshing to hear from you. Someone our age, you know, just jumping into a new adventure and upending everyone's expectations."

Harper couldn't help laughing. "I suppose everyone expected me to give up on life once we were through?"

"Or join a monastery." Lionel suggested. "I guess I was trying to say I admire your gumption."

"You're too kind, Lionel, and a bit silly. But thanks anyway."

Harper had another cup of tea and made a note to ask Lionel a question or two about his daughters the next time they talked. It was a little painful to hear about his new family but it was also sweet and life affirming. More importantly, it was a diversion from Jennifer and her sandwiches. Harper supposed pain as a distraction was never far away - she could always order a piece of cake and prod herself with the fork that came with it. She was worried that might be a slippery slope, though. Better not get the taste for that. Plus, some places served you spoons instead and then the money would have been wasted. And Harper hated to waste money. It was an old habit she did not want to break now. Some things you should hold on to, even when starting over.

**Chapter Twelve  
**

Hard work may be the way to achieve extraordinary things, but it's basically the opposite of chilling the fuck out. Like sleep is the opposite of being awake. As in you kinda need both. Though be warned that this is how I lure you in. Because once you've had that first taste, you might realize that chilling out is the most extraordinary thing you can do in this life. That chill is the true awake.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

_  
_One thought kept Jennifer's morale hovering just above the abyss, she was sure she knew where Trevor was going: Back to report to Nick. So she waited until Trevor was nearly out of sight and then followed him out of the airport towards the motorbike parking area. He never looked back. He was confidently returning home after slaying the dragon. Or so he thought.

When she had made completely sure Trevor was indeed heading to the parking area, Jennifer hurried to the mall-like strip just outside the airport and found a group of young men with motorbike helmets in front of a poster of an oversized Whopper Meal. Jennifer walked up to them and flashed a hundred-thousand Indonesian Rupiah bill.

The men stirred. They would assume her to be a tourist who had not yet figured out the price range of services on the island. That bill was enough to rent a scooter for a whole day. "I want a fast ride, right now." She said. Several of the men smiled broadly. "Very fast, yes yes." One of them did not say anything but took two steps towards the parking area before turning around and pushing a helmet in Jennifer's direction. He was large enough that she would be hidden completely from sight behind him on the scooter.

"You speak English?" She asked.

"Yes." He did not elaborate. Apparently he was the quiet type. That was excellent news.

"Let's go." Jennifer She took the helmet and walked toward the parking area.

They walked in silence for a minute before the driver volunteered his name. "I am Ketut Widi."

"I am Jennifer. Listen, Ketut, I'm going to need you to follow a man. Is that a problem?"

"Follow a man?" He said uncertainly. "Like an American movie. Follow that car?" He allowed himself a smile.

"Yes, but he'll be on a scooter. Look!" Jennifer held out her arm to halt Ketut before they rounded the corner. "That's him there, pulling his bike out. You see?"

"Yes." Ketut said hesitantly. "Your boyfriend?"

"Something like that."

Hopefully Ketut was used to tourists acting strange and had given up trying to comprehend everything they did. He did not look like he was full of misgivings, but that might just have been due to his generally reticent persona. He did not speak while they waited. Once Trevor mounted his bike Jennifer turned to Ketut: "OK, now. Quickly."

She sped after Trevor. Ketut pulled her arm lightly. "Over here." He said, pointing in the other direction.

"Of course, you know where your bike is parked." Jennifer said, feeling silly and already afraid that Trevor would get away.

He did not. They caught him at the parking area exit and followed him North past the beachfront resorts of Legian and Seminyak. Jennifer kept her head hidden behind the base of Ketut's neck, only looking out to confirm that Trevor was still cruising along ahead of them.

A scooter was a cheap and convenient way of getting around on Bali. It could seem dangerous, especially in Kuta where traffic could be wild, and you regularly had to bribe the police for riding without a Balinese scooter license, but they could take you anywhere on Bali and could swerve past larger vehicle in response to any sudden maneuvers Trevor might undertake.

"Keep some distance." She instructed. "Not too much, though, don't lose sight of him." She had to yell to be heard over the traffic.

In Seminyak, Jennifer felt the scooter slow down as Ketut steered them towards the driveway of the Seminyak Grand Hotel. From behind Ketut's broad back Jennifer peered out and saw Trevor pulling into the hotel parking lot. Ketut was following him as Jennifer had requested. Traffic was rushing around them. She leaned closer to Ketut's ear and shouted:

"Don't stop here. Take me to the Bali Backpacker's Budget Inn."

Their scooter, which had almost entered the parking lot swerved back into the middle of the road and was welcomed by loud honks. It did not attract Trevor's attention, swerving scooters and honking went together in Kuta like heat and humidity. You could not escape either so you might as well get used to both. Most people did.

Back at the hostel, Jennifer slapped the hundred thousand Rupiah bill jubilantly into Ketut's hand and nearly skipped back to her room. On the way she beamed at the tiger-woman hostess who was watching from behind the reception desk with suspicious eyes. Their earlier altercation and the desolation Jennifer had felt afterwards were things of the past, of before she had learned that Nick was already on Bali and where he was staying. There was no doubt in Jennifer's mind that he was at the Grand Hotel with Trevor. Sending Trevor ahead to Bali alone would be unlike Nick. And after all, Trevor had asked why she thought 'we' had waited so long to go there, practically promising her that Nick was with him.

After the reception she had to pass through the common area to get to the bunks, and there the young girl who had eaten her pasta in the morning got up when Jennifer entered and waved her enthusiastically over.

"That pasta was really delicious. I just want to thank you again. The recipe is not some kind of ancient family secret is it?"

"No." Jennifer replied. "In fact, I will put it on my blog later today. 'Jen's travelling kitchen.' That's what it's called. The blog."

"You have a food blog? That's awesome. I'll definitely check it out." She apparently meant it, and started fiddling with her phone while Jennifer shifted her weight on her feet. "Oh yeah, food and beaches. Right on!" The girl said.

Jennifer smiled and proceeded to her room. She really ought to finish that article. Nick's update that he was coming to Bali, however misleading it had been since he must have already been there, with Trevor at the hotel, had made Jennifer drop everything. She was already far from where she wanted to be with the site. She could feel it in quiet moments, the visitor counter standing still, the subscription counter dropping down a notch every now and again.

The present was a good time to do something about it, because Jennifer had a surplus of energy coursing through her body after following Trevor to the hotel. He had been so sure of himself, but she had tricked him in the end without him even suspecting it. That thought was exhilarating.

In the hostel common room Jennifer booted up her computer, tried to force her energy into productivity by going through all the pictures she had taken in the morning and proofreading her article one last time before uploading it. She no longer expected very much from her efforts. Over the past few months she had accepted that building a new audience would take time, then far too quickly she had lost confidence that she even had it in her to make it happen. But it was still important to keep the blog alive. What little income it did provide was all she had. Money from her parents she considered loans despite all evidence to the contrary.

By the time her work was done, her heart had returned to its resting rate and her eyes needed a break. After barely eating a thing all day, her body was finally screaming for food. She would have regretted given her morning pasta away, if not for the young girl she gave it to turning out alright in the end. Still, now she could easily have eaten the leftovers herself, twice over.

Instead she went out and browsed the food vendors on the street. Dusk was casting its shadows into the alleys of Kuta and behind vehicles and food stalls, but the city was as alive as ever. And almost as noisy.

"Hey spice girl!" Someone yelled with an ingratiating smile. She smiled back.

"What UP!" In exaggerated hip-hop pronunciation with mildly comic Indonesian accent. She smiled back.

"Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi." In gleeful geographical misunderstanding. Still, Jennifer just smiled benevolently at them all, once, before forging on. She let the smell of smoke, strong spices and the sweat of a hectic tropical city mix in her nostrils.

From the first vendor she passed she bought a piece of grilled beef on a lemongrass stick. She considered herself a meat-minimal person rather than a vegetarian, and it was just the night to put the meat before minimal. A night for no concessions made to calorie or cholesterol content. She was celebrating. She had found Nick. All she had left to do now was to make her move.
Chapter Thirteen

While Jennifer in London was not up to much, let alone anything that justified her being followed, Jennifer online had left a long trail of interesting footprints for Harper to follow. Harper was particularly drawn to the defunct blog "Nick and Jen around the world" but she was not disregarding the shorter lived and more recently defunct "Jennifer's traveling kitchen."

Online Jennifer was attractive, helpful, informative, and seemed to possess those most desired of qualities: A happy temperament and a positive outlook on life. She went places and did things there. Things it had seemed appropriate to take pictures of and probably was. It looked like good times.

It was not just the old pictures, with Nick, that were appealing. The later ones were too, though they were taken after she had allegedly lost her mind. Harper saw Jennifer on beaches, in gardens, in sleek hotels, on dusty roads and on cramped bus-seats. In the later photos always eating something inspired by where she was. Often the food even looked delicious. But most of all, the pictures seemed to convey embarrassment at her good luck, at finding herself in that corner of the world, savoring those particular flavors. Harper became a fan of the grateful nomadic chef in those photos. Who wrote mostly about food but sprinkled liberally with diary entries and sometimes philosophical musings, whenever the mood appeared to strike her.

It could hardly have been very profitable, though, not relative to the operating costs of flight tickets and hostel bills and sometimes hotels. Hence Jennifer trudging to the sandwich shop every morning in London. Refinancing. Harper conjured up the weary facial expression of Jennifer in the morning and just by its memory became a little tired herself.

The life Jennifer had settled into at home was certainly different from her adventures online. She sat in the bus same as everyone in the morning and in the afternoon she walked home alone, strolling into Regent's park on the way to eat the sandwich she always brought from the shop. The last bit of work of the day to chew through.

It was possible Harper was not seeing the whole story. But then she thought of Jennifer watching her own reflection passively in the windows of the busses she often deliberately missed. Something in the way Jennifer carried herself, a lack of pride and purpose, suggested there was nothing more see, that this was it.

One day after finishing her sandwich Jennifer had sat in the park until dark. Just sat there. Perhaps she was trying to give her parents the impression she had a social life. Already ashamed to rely on them for accommodation, she might not want them to know she was not just broke but also alone and unhappy.

Jennifer's parents lived in Camden, not very far from Jamie's boyfriend's apartment. Harper caught herself looking around for Jamie once or twice, though she knew the odds of running in to her were astronomical. If Harper were on the lookout for a young woman to save, like Lionel thought, Jennifer would have to do. And she knew that a part of her was itching to see things from Jennifer's perspective, to excuse some of her past behavior or at least mitigate it. To make sense of certain uncomfortable circumstances such as Jennifer breaking in to Nick's hotel in Kuta and assaulting his friend Trevor in front of witnesses.

Harper had heard Nick's perspective, and tried to understand Jennifer through that as a desperado for Nick's love who might have to be held accountable by the honest sheriff. But Harper was not fully convinced. In fact, the more she thought about Jennifer the more she pitied her, and the more she pitied the more conflicted she felt.

Jennifer was in a slump, professionally and privately, but did that give a complete stranger any right or reason to think Jennifer's life was a disappointment? She was holding down a job and not bothering anyone at the moment, as far as Harper could see. There were times in her own life when Harper would not have wished for a nosy stranger to evaluate her existence based on that brief window of examination. And to imagine that stranger sharing her findings, like Harper would soon discuss the evidence of Jennifer's slump with her ex-boyfriend and former friends, was an exercise in visualizing social humiliation. Harper felt like she was kicking a woman who was already down.

But did Jennifer herself even have any right to sulk and consider her life a disappointment as she so clearly did? Should she not, despite whatever she was going through, just buckle up and make the best of it? It was hard to argue against that. But also hard not to feel for the woman doing nothing all day. You could almost, almost imagine how that woman would grasp for any way out, any kind at all. Harper thought Jennifer was a plausible candidate for running away to join a cult, and despite being skeptical of cults in general she could not say with certainty that it would be a total disaster in this case. At least a cult was _something_ , and Harper was sure all cults did not culminate in killing sprees or mass suicides, it was just that those that did got all the attention.
Chapter Fourteen

Better to be naive and assume everything will work out than to be cynical and try to manipulate events. In the latter case you will be frustrated by the ten million other people cynically trying to manipulate the same events as you, but in the first you will be endlessly fascinated at the ingenuity of the universe to do whatever the hell it wants and still provide you with everything you really need.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Two days after following Trevor from the airport, Jennifer was back at the Seminyak Grand Hotel. She was dressed professionally, just like the people with nametags milling about the lobby. They were participating in EXPLORE ONLINE: 'Marketing and customer engagement for the hospitality industry in the age of the internet' which was taking place at the Seminyak. Nick was scheduled to speak that day at one of the post-lunch sessions.

The conference had started the day before but the welcoming desk was still greeting newcomers with an array of unclaimed nametags. When Jennifer arrived the desk was unattended, and she helped herself to one of the tags for appearances sake, and flipped the name side of it towards her shirt, just in case someone would recognize the name but not her. Jennifer trailed a group of conference goers from the reception to the area where the seminars were held and when they turned into one of the rooms, Jennifer continued straight ahead and slipped into a bathroom near the other side of the hotel. She could see the pools outside, surrounded by palms, potted plants and deck chairs: An island bar lay in the middle of the largest of three separate pools.

Jennifer changed into her bathing suit and brought out a thriller by Patricia Highsmith she had found on the exchange shelf of her hostel. The book would help to pass the time and also hide her face. She wanted to observe, not be observed.

Her plan was to spot Nick and she had not thought much further ahead. She knew that left a very loose end but she hoped that uncertainty would crystallize into clarity when it met Nick's soft brown eyes. She was relying on it.

She still basically thought of their breakup as a tragic misunderstanding. They had not spoken once since that morning in Brazil when she had confessed with such intensity. That was her fault, she should have broken the news gently. Made sure he got the whole story. Now he refused to listen to anything she said but if she could only make him listen for just a little while his understanding might be changed. She was not sure exactly how it would be changed, that was the missing part of the plan, but she relied on the rights words to come to her when she saw him. Like words that powerful had to be born of the moment or they would lose their urgency before they could be spoken.

She was certain it would be possible to make Nick listen if she could get him alone. Neither Trevor nor Isadora would leave her with half a chance to explain herself if they saw her first, though. That had been a problem previously, when she had been waiting for Isadora and Trevor and sometimes even Jonas to leave Nick alone, if even for a moment. But she had bungled the job in those early days of stalking and was still paying the price. It had not taken long before they started to expect Jennifer's appearances on their horizon. Before they became wary when out in public. Kept their eyes open and their guards up.

Nick's only rebuff had been total silence, another reason she had hope for what might happen if she could force the first words out of him. She had at times interpreted his silence as a form of indecision or even, when she was feeling optimistic, as contrition. So when she had learned that Nick had snuck into Bali under the cover of blog posts from Sulawesi just to avoid her it had been a blow. But on the positive side, it indicated a level of paranoia about her that practically guaranteed that the gang was monitoring her online presence to keep abreast of her movements, just like she was monitoring theirs. There was advantage to be gained in that, and since she had precious few advantages left she had to exploit those she had to the fullest extent.

Accordingly, the day before she had posted an emotional farewell to Bali, a prematurely nostalgic post about leaving joys and difficulties of the past behind and moving on to new beginnings. She had almost believed it herself. Hopefully the gang would think that Trevor's intimidation tactics had worked in tandem with Jennifer's own better nature. That Jennifer was beaten. Driven off. It ought to relax them, let them breathe freely, let them lower their guards just enough for her to slip through. Nick always liked to spend time alone before public speaking, it calmed him down to go to the gym or relax in the water by himself, and now Trevor and Isadora might actually indulge him because they would feel safe.

Jennifer passed the whole morning at the pool with her book, figuring Nick had started the day in the gym. That was still according to plan. A few families with small children stopped by while she waited and a group of teenagers played lazily with a ball while they were eying each other in their bathing suits. They splashed about and hooted occasionally, then retreated poolside to stretch out in the sun with headphones in their ears. Jennifer observed it all from the deckchair she had pulled under the shade of a large plant that also served as soft cover. But even in the shade Jennifer's skin was starting to sizzle after waiting all morning.

She changed briefly back into her business-like outfit to help herself to some of the refreshments laid out for the conference guests. She did feel bad about stealing food but she could not afford the prices in the hotel restaurant and she could not leave to get lunch elsewhere and risk missing Nick.

He had walked out on her in a moment of passion, right after she had confessed her infidelity. That was one thing. Ignoring her messages for months was another thing altogether, but it was also impersonal enough that Jennifer was willing to believe it held no final significance. But once he looked her in the eyes, really looked, with no one around to distract him, he would see something just like she would. Of this she was sure. And he would tell her what he saw and that would help them both understand.

Chapter Fifteen

Make sandwiches, eat sandwiches, walk, sleep. Jennifer in London was excruciatingly dependable. She did not even go out for shopping; her parents handled the groceries. So When Jennifer finally did make a small break with routine, Harper thought it might be significant.

She also thought she saw a new determination of Jennifer's face, when instead of proceeding towards regent's park as usual, Jennifer crossed the street in the other direction. Directly towards one of the small café's Harper liked to sit in while contemplating Jennifer.

Harper briefly imagined a confrontation. Jennifer had become suspicious, she had noticed Harper one too many times to let it slide as a coincidence and now she would like to know what was going on. Harper felt unready for that conversation, was not sure Jennifer would ever be ready for it. _You are correct, I'm following you. Your friends think you are possibly deranged. They are considering reporting you to the police. Then your parents will certainly find out_. She was not sure it would take more than that to crush Jennifer's potentially fledgling spirit.

But of course Jennifer didn't stop to demand answers. She had only the faintest, subconscious awareness of Harper then, and Harper let Jennifer proceed up the street unmolested, to the bus stop thirty meters on. When the bus rounded the corner Harper quickly packed up her belongings and found a seat in the very back.

Soon they were off the bus again, and Harper was standing in front of a small store with artfully crafted wooden display cases and Japanese artefacts adorning the walls. Glass-lid cabinets on the floor were economically arranged to make the most of the limited space without crowding it. But because there was no room for discretion inside, no way for two people to browse the small store without running into each other, Harper stayed outside.

Through the windows she saw the shopkeeper presenting a long sleek knife to Jennifer, taken out of one of the floor cabinets. While his back was turned, looking something up, probably the price, Jennifer felt the weight of the blade in her hand, flicked her wrist in a quick slashing motion - or was it a stab? - chopping at the air. Jennifer was shown a smaller knife too, a less fearsome but more concealable weapon. She purchased them both.

The second time Jennifer broke her routine, Harper missed the bus. The red leviathan sighed with lofty indifference at her protests by its vast side. All was not lost, though, far from it, because there was a city bike parked nearby. A perfectly serviceable vehicle. Harper had long believed she could pedal circles around any old bus in central London, certainly during rush hours, but had never had occasion to put her confidence to the test.

When you were a passenger on a bus in busy traffic the journey seemed to creep along at a snail's pace, but all was relative and from the vantage point of her saddle Harper was surprised at the speed the bus managed. She had to put in quite an effort to keep up, and she had worked up a good sweat by the time they reached the gym, where Jennifer disappeared inside and gave Harper a chance to catch her breath. The facility had one of those injudicious, transparent façades that Harper would not like to work out behind herself. She could see the attraction of watching the pedestrians outside as a distraction from the boredom of the treadmill, but not the attraction of the pedestrians looking back at her struggles. Like she was there to study Jennifer's.

Not only the main area of the gym was visible from the street, but also some of the rooms for classes were too, one with a spinning session in frantic motion and another with mats on the floors and various martial arts equipment hanging on the walls. Jennifer belonged to the latter room, where she joined a group of people equipping themselves with boxing gloves and pads.

It was a beginner's or intermediate class. The instructor was carefully demonstrating the punches and sequences for the class and there was no sparring. But what Jennifer lacked in experience she made up for in intensity, ferociously attacking her training partner's pad and unflinchingly absorbing the punishment coming the other way. Her wild intensity was mildly disturbing.

One thing Harper could still not decide later on, even later when she was back in front of Jennifer's parents' place, having two more cups of tea with a cream cheese and ham bagel before she would head home to sleep herself, was whether Jennifer was merely losing extra calories in advance – in anticipation of all the sushi she would soon eat – or if the sharp Japanese knives and the martial arts were signs of something more sinister.
Chapter Sixteen

Some say work hard, party hard. And it makes sense: Life is hard, so live a hard life. Now, I won't tell you what to do, but here is an alternative that will give you less back pain and fewer hangovers: Just chill the fuck out. Maybe then life won't be so hard anymore.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

As the lunch hour too passed without signs of Nick, doubts began playing on Jennifer's mind. Maybe she did not know him as well as she thought. Maybe new habits had come along with his new girlfriend and new life and he would be a different person. Maybe he would no longer even be able to recognize that something in Jennifer's eyes that she was counting on him to see.

Jennifer became too agitated for reading, kept her gaze burning and ubiquitous on the pool area, like the sun. It found Nick the second before he even came outside, found him as he passed the window next to the doorway. He was alone, sweet mercy, in bathing shorts and his muscles were defined and alive in a that post-workout way. She did know him after all.

Nick was clean and glistening with water from the shower, had not bothered to dry himself thoroughly before coming down to the pool. He sat down on a deckchair and ran a hand thoughtfully through the wet hair just above his right ear, not to correct it but to feel the unusual wet smoothness. Just like she remembered him doing when they were together. She was relieved to find him the same Nick as always: Her Nick.

A few steps forward and Jennifer could touch him. Hope emanated from her chest to her fingers that were so close to him, but she had to take a moment to get herself ready. Her entrance had to be just right, astonishing but also reassuring, like a ghost from the past but a friendly and unthreatening one. She was not confident how to achieve that emergence, and in those few seconds while she suddenly wished she had practiced before a mirror in the morning Isadora appeared. Jennifer's replacement sat down next to Nick on his chair and tussled his hair.

Jennifer became numb with the thought that Nick did not like anyone to mess with his hair. Her second thought was almost worse: If Nick was not alone then, a few hours before his speech, he never would be. She felt the vacuum open inside her, sucking in and crushing the newborn slivers of hope.

With great and sudden clarity she saw herself cast in an unflattering light, on an island on the far side of the world with no friends, no money, and no further reason to live. And no way out. Even if she wanted to escape, which she did because her hope had turned to panic, she could not afford to move her departure flight forward. Not without more borrowing of money from her parents. The gang had not needed to worry so much about deterring her from following them to their next destination. It was never going to happen. She was bankrupt. Bali was her last shot, on which she had gambled everything because she knew precisely where Nick was going to be on at least one particular day. Now she could hardly even afford to flee the pool, for fear of being spotted. She had trapped herself in the hell of watching, up close, someone else receive everything she desired.

At least she had not rushed forward at the first sight of Nick and run straight into Isadora. Jennifer could just hear Isadora screaming in panic and maybe even fainting dramatically. Jennifer's moment of doubt had saved her from the crushing humiliation of Isadora forcing Nick to rescue her from Jennifer. As it was, Jennifer had one thing left. One thread of dignity. One faint hope: That they would never see her there, so she could pretend her prematurely nostalgic and completely counterfeit goodbye to Bali had been nothing but the truth.

And then, maybe all Nick needed was a little space to convince him that Jennifer was no longer crazy. Then he would no longer object to meeting her. He did need his space, she thought. He was also a kind, sensitive person. Someone who would want a proper goodbye. It seemed obvious all of a sudden, all he had needed was space. She had become obsessed with getting to him and her determination had driven him away. Once they all saw that she had moved on, a new chance would present itself. Somewhere else, anywhere else. He might come to her, even. That was the new plan. Discretion of the first order. Moving on with her life. If only she could get away unseen.

The plant she was hiding behind was close to another doorway, further away from Nick and Isadora. She would not even need to pass them to get out. A faintly rising hope gave Jennifer the courage to mount her escape.

With trembling hands, she picked up her bag in one hand and shielded her face behind the book with the other. She managed to stand up and turn her back to Nick and Isadora without attracting attention. In one emotional rollercoaster of a second she convinced herself she was as good as out of there, only to turn towards the exit and come face to face with Trevor. He must have been standing in place for several seconds, staring at her back, maybe recognizing the birthmark on her left shoulder but not yet completely sure what he was looking at until she turned around.

Jennifer gave a small start. Then in a sudden rush of panic and denial she tried to dash past him, but he moved lazily, arrogantly in front of her.

"Whoa Jennifer. Hold your horses. I think we have ourselves a situation here."

She tried pushing past him but he held on to her arms and she was helpless.

"But I was leaving!" Shame and the injustice of being caught right when she was backing out was thinning her voice, making it high and shrill. She struggled desperately to free herself, but Trevor was too strong. All she managed to accomplish was to turn them both around so she was facing the plant she had hidden behind, and on the other side of that, Nick and Isadora.

"I was leaving. Let go of me!"

His grip was hurting her, she grew more desperate. She could not face Nick like that. Anything but that. She kicked hard at Trevor's shins.

"Can I get some help here?" Trevor shouted. "Security! Nick! Look what I found."

With a primal scream, Jennifer stopped trying to pull free from Trevor and instead pushed into him. She shoved him with all her might and caught him off guard. He lost his balance, his grip slipped on her arms and he tumbled back into a plant by the deckchair that was still warm with Jennifer's hope and anxiety. Trevor knocked the potted plant over and fell on top of it, clearing the line of sight to where Nick and Isadora sat, the surprise on their faces giving way to incredulity and horror as it dawned on them what was happening.

Trevor touched his head and his hand came away bloody. It was too much to bear. Nick and Isadora looked so good together, even in that dramatic moment. Too beautiful to be part of such an ugly scene. Jennifer fled the pool despondently. Hotel employees and guests stared at her. She was a half-dressed flurry of grief with a lunatic shine in her eyes rushing past them. No one tried to stop her. Everyone steered well clear.

She continued running blindly when she got outside, crossing roads without looking, ignoring the protests of the cars and scooters that nearly ran her over. When she was finally so out of breath she felt another hundred meters would kill her she waved down a taxi. When an unsuspecting driver picked her up, she collapsed crying and shaking on the back seat.

The thought that came to her over and over was: "Never again." Never again would she subject herself to such humiliation. Never again would she be such an ineffectual disgrace and force Nick to look at her with such fear and _pity_ in his beautiful brown eyes. Next time had to be different. She did not know what she would have to change but she was willing to consider anything. Everything. It just had to be different, next time.
Chapter Seventeen

"No, man. It doesn't seem innocent enough. Have you forgotten that this unhinged woman pretended she was leaving Bali as a diversionary tactic before assaulting me? That's how crazy she is. My head hurt for days."

Trevor, friend of Nick and former almost-friend of Jennifer, whom Harper was now studying, was unnerved by the report of Jennifer's purchases and sporting pursuits. He was pacing up and down the plush, carpeted floors of Nick's Mom's apartment. Nick was more concerned that Jennifer was just going straight home to her parents' every day.

It was strangely symmetrical that Nick was staying at his Mom's. Harper thought living with her parents was weighing on Jennifer and that it would be fitting for Nick to have his own place, as the more successful survivor of their relationship. But Nick seemed in no way self-conscious about living in Mom's apartment. Seemed obliquely proud, even. Perhaps to him it was a sign of a fluid existence, a calendar so full of travel that a fixed abode would only be a chain around his neck. All three of them – Nick, Trevor and Nick's girlfriend Isadora who was also present – seemed to accept that living with a parent was a widely different prospect in Nick's case than in Jennifer's.

"Did she have any visitors at all?" Nick asked.

"Hard to be sure, but if I had to guess I would say the people coming and going from the building looked like they lived there. Several older people, a couple of families with young children and in one apartment, two female students cohabitating."

"Would Jennifer not meet her friends in the city instead of in her parent's place?" Isadora asked rhetorically. Nearly as tall as Nick and athletic but willowy, Isadora was wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt and sweatpants and her hair was wet from Nick's parent's shower. Harper felt bad on Jennifer's behalf, thinking that competing with Isadora was a tough prospect.

"I think she would." Nick agreed. "She is a very outgoing and fun-loving person. She used to make me feel set in my ways." He had a bemused smile on his face that both Trevor and Isadora obviously found completely unacceptable given the circumstances. "Sure, let's take a moment to reminisce about Jennifer's positive qualities." Trevor said. "Then we can worry about how she plans to kill us all later."

"She can be too outgoing can she not?" Asked Isadora.

"Yes, exactly." Trevor agreed. "Should've just kept her knickers on, shouldn't she? Fun-loving indeed."

Nick glared at him.

"Sorry, mate. Just calling 'em like I see 'em. "

Harper did not want this to turn into some kind of argument between old friends, she felt she had formed a good idea of the group dynamic when it came to discussions of Jennifer. She said: "As I mentioned, Jennifer appears to be laying low for the moment, apart from a few outings that would not normally be considered suspicious."

Isadora gave a start. "But Jennifer's not normal. I'm afraid she will even follow us to Thailand. That would such a nightmare."

"We're planning to go to Thailand for our anniversary." Nick explained. Harper remembered that this was also a special date for him and Jennifer, a year since their breakup. Isadora and Nick had not waited long to get together, Harper thought. Or perhaps they had, or maybe just one of them had been waiting, plotting.

Nick was smiling at Isadora, possibly in wonder at how eager his girlfriends past and present were to risk their sanity and safety to go to Thailand with him. He did not seem overly worried himself. Harper had the sense Nick had led an unreasonably comfortable life and, based on his own experiences, had every reason to believe the best of the world and the people in it. That he would not really believe anything truly bad would ever come from Jennifer's direction. Harper felt a surge of affection for him for that. She too wanted to trust in Jennifer's fundamental goodness.

Isadora frowned. "That woman is haunting me like a ghost. I just know she thinks I'm the one in her way."

"Dora, she's not after you." Nick laid a comforting arm around Isadora's shoulder that she lightly but firmly brushed off.

"How can you not understand? She sees me as her rival. She would do anything to get rid of me. I know it! And you still act like Jennifer is just a wonderful girl you used to know, not a dangerous psychopath at all."

"A grave miscalculation to make about Jennifer." Trevor agreed.

"Guys, Jennifer doesn't even know we're going to Thailand." Nick said. "We haven't told anyone, there is no way she could've found out. Dora, we will have all of Southeast Asia to ourselves."

"But we shouldn't have to hide at all!" Isadora said. "I'm sick of having to watch what I say and what I write. I'm tired of looking over my shoulder." She turned to Harper. "Everything I post online I have to censor for material that could trigger Jennifer. Like I'm in the Soviet Union hiding from comrade Stalin. I can't sleep and I'm losing weight. It's no way to live! And him." She gestured at Nick. "He's having a good time! I had to make him promise to block messages from Jennifer. Otherwise he would probably be talking with her right now, discussing the fun times we all had together in Bali."

Nick merely shrugged. Isadora crossed her arms: "You're way too relaxed about what's happening to me." She said.

"I just don't see Jennifer as a dangerous person. I don't know what's gotten into her but we have already taken precautions." He indicated Harper. "We can relax now, and enjoy ourselves."

"Jennifer's wily, though." Trevor said. Nick shot him a warning look accompanied by a nod towards Isadora's head, now on his shoulder, less cross with him already. Trevor scoffed and Isadora looked up, from one to the other.

"Don't use me as an excuse not to listen to Trevor's warning." She said. "The truth about her is not even what upsets me the most. It's how you refuse to accept it. If she doesn't know about Thailand she will just turn up some other time."

"Tomorrow." Trevor suggested helpfully. "At UCL."

"Yes." Isadora agreed. "Or in Egypt."

Harper looked at Nick and Trevor caught her glance and saw she did not know what they talking about.

"I thought she was supposed to be a detective." Trevor said.

"But she's hired to keep an eye on Jennifer, not me." Nick said, and turning to Harper: "I'm sorry about that, Trevor is a rude buy today."

Harper waved the issue away.

"I'm giving a talk at UCL tomorrow." Nick explained. "Which is advertised publicly, of course, because we want there to be people to hear it." He hesitated before adding, with a glance at Isadora: "Egypt is a sponsored trip I've arranged with a tour operator I met at the conference in Bali, after the whole scene with Jennifer had blown over." At the mention of the scene blowing over, Isadora grimaced. "We're keeping that trip between ourselves and our photographer, Jonas, until we're home again." Nick said.

Harper nodded. Egypt was none of her concern for the moment, but at UCL Jennifer would know exactly where and when to find Nick.

"If it will give you peace of mind, I can update you regularly about Jennifer's whereabouts during your talk." Harper offered. She felt she ought to add the disclaimer: "But as I've said before, I'm not a bodyguard. All I can do is let you know if she's coming your way."

"It's better than nothing." Isadora said. "The talk is at four."

"Jennifer will be at work." Harper said. She was not sure if she was trying to put them at ease or to impress upon them Jennifer's standing as a good citizen and contributing member of society. She somehow felt that her responsibilities ran deeper than just observing and reporting. Almost like she was a character witness for the defense.

"Let us know if she leaves early." Trevor said. Harper nodded curtly. She preferred dealing with Nick but she supposed there would be no way around dealing with Trevor as well. He was part of this, there was no denying that.

At the door, when she was leaving, Nick thanked her again.

"This is a very nice place." Harper said. "Hope your mom is not too worried about this business with Jennifer."

"Oh no." Nick said. "Mother is spending the summer in the cottage in Devon, in blissful ignorance. Isadora and I have this place to ourselves."

"That's nice."

Nick smiled. "This is actually my Mom's secret apartment. We never lived here, but I suspect that on some of the nights of my childhood when grandma came over to watch me, Mom may have enjoyed a little getaway here, and not necessarily by herself. She was a single mother for a time, I guess that can be lonely."

Harper nodded. Nick cleared his throat.

"You think Jennifer is OK?" He said.

Harper hesitated. "Hard to say."

"You have seen her in person, though. What's your impression?"

"She seems very sad." Harper said, before thinking it through. "That's my impression. Maybe even severely depressed." She thought of Jennifer in Regent's Park, shuffling to a deserted bench and slowly eating her sandwich. Not as if to savor it, but just to pass the time by mastication. Never meeting the eyes of the other visitors, but watching their backs as they walked away. Especially the couples.

"She broke my heart." Nick said. "I don't really agree with Isadora that it is necessary to cut off Jennifer completely to make her understand that I have moved on, but she did betray me. Feelings are still raw, I have to admit that." He fell silent and seemed embarrassed at his confession. "Anyway, thank you again Harper." He said. "Keep us posted tomorrow."

A few minutes later Harper realized she was still standing outside the door, wondering if this to some extent validated what Jennifer was going through. Nick was genuinely missing her, he had not completely moved on himself. No wonder the mere mention of Jennifer's name upset Isadora.

Later, observing Jennifer behind the counter, the loneliest sandwich maker in London, Harper experienced a strong urge to burst through the doors of the little shop, buy the biggest and most expensive sandwich – or at least two smaller ones in case the shop carried no luxury line – and tell Jennifer that Nick still loved her.
Chapter Eighteen

Anxiety builds gradually. By the time you realize you need to chill the fuck out it's probably too late. Your troubles are too great, your struggles too real. Except it never is too late, that's just the anxiety talking. And the impatience, the demanding of immediate results from yourself. Basically, all the things that made you anxious in the first place. They will conspire to keep you troubled.

Relax. You don't go from red hot to chill just like that. Let it happen at its own pace. Start small. Take an evening off. Or a weekend just wandering in the woods like a crazy person. Whatever tickles your fancy. Practice not giving a fuck. Like anxiety, chill builds up over time.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer spent the next seven weeks in bed. First in a lousy hostel bunk and then in her parents' apartment back in London, in the room where she had grown up. It did not take many days under the covers before Jennifer gave up planning for 'next time.' In the hostel she was tired all day and ashamed of her inactivity, expending her thoughts wondering what the other guests were thinking about this woman never leaving her bunk. She cringed in agonizing embarrassment the few times someone asked if she was alright. Later, in her own room back in London, she obsessively reflected on what a mess she had made of things since leaving home nearly a decade earlier. Especially during the past year.

Since their breakup Nick had thrived and Jennifer had floundered. That was fact. It was true across all aspects of their lives. Nick had a new gorgeous girlfriend and an entourage, Jennifer had no-one. Nick's book of surfer wisdom kept growing in popularity while Jennifer's blog was dead in the water. Jennifer had always considered his book a lighthearted joke - somewhat juvenile, even - he was not even twenty-five, so despite all his positive qualities how much wisdom could he possibly have acquired? She was shocked at how seriously it was taken. It made her wonder if she perhaps understood people a lot less than she thought, and if the relative success of "Nick and Jen Around the World" had also been mostly thanks to Nick, that she had been riding the coattails of his appeal all along.

Not that their shared blog ever approached the pinnacle Nick was now climbing as a laid-back, self-help guru, but it had paid for their travelling in some kind of style. It had been something to be proud of. It was a further humiliation of her post-Nick decline that it threated to rewrite the best part of her past, to cast her as a supporting character in the story of her own life.

The good years? Nick made those happen. You didn't actually think it was your accomplishment, silly girl? You were a charming sideshow but it was Nick who brought in the audience and you should have held on to him. He was all you had. How could you have let him go? How could you have driven him away like you did, dumb cow?

She would hold entire conversations with figments of her imagination. Imagining Trevor booking a bunk in her dorm room, just to sit by her bed and mock her in her abject defeat. Or Isadora showing up at Jennifer's parents' apartment, delivering the news in person that their daughter was a lunatic and would be reported to the police. In her imaginings, Jennifer would barricade herself in her room, refuse to see Isadora and through the door listen to her mother sobbing. She did not dare imagine meeting Nick, she was afraid what he would say.

These conversations, or evil daydreams, drew her in as mercilessly as they ground her spirit down and she could have spent the rest of her days in their company. But as lenient as her parents could be, in not asking for rent or help around the house and in giving her time, not pressing her for more information than she wanted to give out and letting her spend ridiculous hours in bed, they had made it clear that they expected her to work or study while she was staying under their roof and eating at their table. Which she only nominally did, as more often than not she would eat cereal or toast in bed several times a day, or fruits if she had the energy to peel them.

Her Mom had found the notice for the job at the sandwich shop and made sure Jennifer applied. Jennifer was not sure how she had nailed the interview in her depressed state, but as part of her application she had linked her food blog, and maybe that had given a good first impression, one that meeting her in person had not been able to erase entirely in the mind of her new boss. Perhaps there had even been some hope that Jennifer would volunteer to do online marketing for the shop. Either way she did the best she could out of respect for her parents, and with an effort that felt herculean and which it was torture to mount on a daily basis she was able to provide barely passable service to the customers at Bites. Just enough to keep herself employed.

From time to time she weighed the advantages and disadvantages of ending it all and found that the main disadvantage was the energy required. It did not feel like a terrible thing to think about. It felt needed. Not necessarily as in a thing that needed to be done but as in an idea that needed to be indulged in. A lonely idea in need of a friend to hold its hand. After each such indulgence, once she let the idea go for yet another time, sleep cuddled Jennifer like a mother tucking in a child that has passed out after a wild playdate.

When she came back from work in the evenings she was too tired to keep up with Nick and Isadora's doings online and she stumbled straight back to bed, which was the one saving grace of her situation. Without those fresh needles in her mind and with work and sleep and evil daydreams as distractions, Jennifer actually started feeling better. Not well enough to get out of bed, but well enough that evil daydreams gave way to reminiscences from girlhood and young womanhood, usually accompanied by spells of self-pity and self-recrimination at how she had led herself go so wrong.

In that way, Jennifer slowly progressed towards yet again considering what would come next. She was vaguely aware that this moment was looming and, having lost a considerable amount of faith in her own judgement she was afraid of what it might lead to.
Chapter Nineteen

The day Nick was scheduled to speak at UCL was one of the rare days when all the good weather in the world was to be had right there at home. A day when there was no need to scramble for the other side of the world like a lizard shifting its place on the rocks as the sun crawled overhead. The city was basking in it. Across from Harper's café, a rotund middle-aged woman closed her eyes behind pear-shaped glasses and tilted her face into the light. Her pleasure in this simple act seemed almost deranged.

Jennifer had gone to work as usual that day, and things were looking innocuous until around three o'clock, when Jennifer emerged from Bites with a rucksack on her back and a brown cap on her head with the visor pulled down in front of her face, hunched over like a backpacker defying a stomachache.

Harper followed Jennifer to Bedford Way. Outside the university building it was quiet, but inside a crowd of students were milling about, participating in some conference or summer school. Harper could not tell, but they seemed to know what they were doing, which was more than she could say for herself with any certainty. She could see Trevor there, waiting for Jennifer, but she could no longer see Jennifer herself. She had blended in with the crowd.

Trevor was pushing through the throng now, having seen Harper and eager to apprehend Jennifer, but he did not find her either.

Harper went to the ladies room, Jennifer was not hiding there, then entered the lecture hall where Nick's speech was due to begin. Where Jennifer had known he would be and therefore had been attracted to. But really, what could she hope to achieve in such a public venue? With a turnout quite respectable for four o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon. Jennifer had not thought this through at all, Harper was sure of that.

Harper turned to the stage, letting her eyes glide across the seats nearest the stage. When Nick appeared he seemed unconcerned by the prospect of Jennifer loose among the audience. He was taking his time, apparently very much at ease.

"Hi, I'm Nick and I relax for a living." He began. "But today I want to talk about chilling out from the hobbyist's perspective. Not that relaxing isn't the best job in the world. If you can get it I recommend you go for it. But it might not be for you. I've talked to a few you outside so I know some of you are ambitious and determined. But even if you're going to change the world over the next forty to fifty years of your working lives– and who knows, you just might – I would still recommend taking up chilling out as a hobby."

Harper walked up the aisle to where she had a clear view of the whole room.

"During this talk I will show you soothing pictures of natural beauty and man-made wonders. They will have two things in common. First, they will all be right here in London. You could visit some of them during lunch-break. Second, and most important to me personally, they are all places I found when I was a child, looking for my father."

The students were all so young and beautiful. One of them Asked Harper if she was looking for someone, Harper smiled and shook her head.

Nick spoke softly: "Growing up, I had two biological fathers: The one who left when I was seven and the one I went out looking for since then. This magician, who had performed a stunning vanishing act on us. All I knew of his whereabouts was that he wasn't in our house, so I looked elsewhere. My mother became wary of bringing me on trips to friends or even to the library because I would escape to see if Dad was hiding around those parts. I never did find him, until I got older and looked him up on Facebook - everything had come online by then, even runaway fathers. It was an anti-climax in more ways than one, but during my years of looking around I did discover some magical places that I think little by little helped settle down something inside me that had been disturbed when he left."

Harper had wanted to see Nick speak in person and now she had. She caught a last impression of him as she made her way to the door.

"Beautiful places are magical, I'm not very religious but I guess I believe in churches. That the right space just by surrounding you can draw bad feelings out into the light and disappear them."

Harper closed the door quietly behind her and Nick's calming baritone stopped there. Outside, Trevor was looking around with his hands in his pockets and an angry frown.

"Jennifer appears to have vanished at the last second." Harper said.

Trevor nodded, but he looked cross. "That has happened before."

"I'll check outside." Harper told him.

Bedford way was sleepy in the sunshine, all grey and brown sheer surfaces on both sides. But at the end of the street the trees of Russel Square were reflecting the sunlight playfully. A small spot of green beckoning in the midst of the brick and mortar. A humble magical place, perhaps, Harper thought. More importantly, in a pinch it could be a passable stand-in for Regent's Park.

Harper made way there, through the park gates and onto softer ground, though one had to step off the paved path to feel that. The square was open and sparsely populated by trees standing at polite distances from each other. Civilized trees.

She found Jennifer there, sitting by one of the large stems, the rucksack discarded at her side and one hand supporting her head. The other hand held a sandwich. She was obviously demoralized, but she had remembered to bring lunch.

Harper let the gang know that Jennifer had apparently yielded the filed. Then she leaned against a tree of her own, studying Jennifer at a safe distance. It was a little heartbreaking, but she made herself look anyway. Jennifer appeared to grow smaller and smaller over time, as if the shade of the oak had weight that was slowly grinding her down.

When Jennifer did get up it was clear she had no appetite to confront anyone. She had suffered some kind of moral crisis outside that auditorium. Or maybe she had just seen Trevor and panicked. Either way, the beautiful day ended like any other as far as Jennifer was concerned, in a park avoiding eye contact with strangers. The conclusion Harper was drawn towards was that Jennifer had probably never been dangerous to anyone but herself. She was fighting some battle that was largely in her own head, and though she appeared to be losing, it seemed the crazier she got the more she withdrew.

Harper had to acknowledge that she had harbored significant doubts about Jennifer, because she could feel those doubts starting to settle now. But not everyone was sanguine. Nick called her up in the evening, he must have had a row with Isadora: _Need to debrief, ASAP. Isadora in tatters. May need you to come abroad soon._
Chapter Twenty

Droopy Mr. Past and alluring Miss Future are both fickle friends and the less time you spend with them the better. Forget about the past and let the future come in its own good time. You are here, now, where you belong.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

There were two soft knocks on Jennifer's door and then the door did not open. That meant it was her father outside. Her Mother had long since refined her entries into continuous motions, knocking and coming through the door at the same time.

"May I come in darling?"

"Yes." She pulled the covers up to her chin. It felt pathetic but also safe, in a way, to lie tucked in while he father was coming to check on her.

He stopped in the middle of the room and looked around uncertainly. "I'm not disturbing anything am I?"

"No." In fact not at all.

"Good, good. Mind if I sit down?"

"No."

He pulled a chair over next to her by the bed. Then he reached out and cupped a hand around the back of her head and stroked her hair gently. "I remember when you used to live here." He said. She did not know how to reply.

"You were such a good little girl."

That was true. She _had_ been such a good little girl and that made everything all the more sad and confusing. In school she had been good and quiet too. Shy and very unobtrusive. She might have been voted least likely to become a stalker. Or if not the very least then one of the less likely candidates. A model student. If she finished her problems early she would not disrupt the class but only stare silently at the beech tree standing in the inner court of the school complex.

No one had ever noticed or even suspected the intense longing that simmered between her blonde elephant-ear pigtails then, while she stared at the tree. She would disappear into elaborate daydreams that were like a second life she led in between what free minutes she was able to claim out of the school schedule. She had noticed no hints of any corresponding private worlds in her classmates, but maybe that was because it was the first sign of something inside steering her off the good path. Maybe the beech tree had been her first obsession and she had never really outgrown it.

"You're still a good girl. I mean, young woman."

If only he knew. "Dad I'm twenty-seven. I think it's just woman now."

"Oh. It feels like only yesterday you were a child. You've grown fast. I'm not sure I want to think of where this is heading." He smiled weakly.

"Me neither, Dad."

Her second obsession had been Frederick, born in Germany and moved with his parents to the UK. He was quiet and mysterious, probably because he didn't quite speak the language yet. But he had never learned of her fixation on him any more than the tree had. In fact, getting noticed by teachers and classmates had been both Jennifer's greatest fear and her most earnest desire. She felt she was a discovery waiting for someone to make it, and while a tree could embark on no such enterprise, possibly Frederick could. An adventure full of surprises in uncharted lands. She had wanted someone to find her worthy of careful study and be able to explain to her what exactly was so fascinating about her, and do it convincingly enough to assure her it was true.

This journey of discovery was not to be finished by, say, the planting of a flag or the establishment of a permanent settlement. It was to be a continuous exploration of a vast and rewarding terrain. It was to be her mission in life, because she had already developed a clear sense that the life of her parents, minor functionaries in some incomprehensible and distant organ of human enterprise, was not for her.

For a long time she had not been sure what her parents actually did, though she had visited them both at work, but she knew it involved sitting at desks with papers and that reports had to be handed in on a regular basis. It seemed to her so seamlessly a continuation of what she was doing at school that it hardly occurred to her that their work might differ significantly from hers. It was more like they were just in a higher grade. She got the impression people spent their whole lives in school until they retired. She assumed that after retirement you would teach in the adult school, just like the adults taught in the children's school. She sometimes worried someone would expect her to look after the babies.

"My Dad will start in the forty-first grade next year." She had once told an uncle when he asked if she knew how old her Dad was. "Let's see if he passes his exams first, shall we?" The uncle had replied and everyone had laughed. But Jennifer had been horrified. It had never occurred to her that her Dad might be a bad student. That it was possible for adults to fail their classes too. Later she would be embarrassed at how silly she had been, but now she knew only too well that she had been right. Adults failed their classes too. Got kicked out of their lives. They also might be present in the flesh but really just staring at the trees and waiting for something to happen though they could not say what.

Her father withdrew his hand from her head and put it on his own knee. He cleared his throat. "Jennifer, is everything OK?"

"Yes."

"You've been spending an awful lot of time in bed. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. But there is a whole world out there waiting for you."

"Yes, Dad. I know."

"Well then." He stood up laboriously. He was getting older too. "I really came in to see about your laundry situation. Do you need any washing done?"

"No. Mom comes in every morning and takes care of that."

"I see. Very good. Will you be coming out for dinner tonight?"

"I'm not feeling too good actually." She hated herself for saying that. For being so selfish and weak.

Her Dad looked disappointed. It was obvious he had hoped to reach through to her with his visit, at least in that small regard. "Maybe tomorrow then." He had probably been contemplating coming to see her for a father-daughter chat for a few days. He was shy too, unlike her mother, and did not intrude behind closed doors on the spur of the moment.

"Actually I think it's not as bad as I thought and I may come out for dinner after all."

That cheered him up. He left smiling and even looking proud, though she could not tell if he was most proud of her or himself or both of them in equal measure on account of this progress. Dinner would be hard work for her then. She would have to fight the gloom at every lift of the fork not to disappoint, and every filling of the plate would be a steep mountain to climb before she could return to the comfort of bed and the discomfort of her thoughts. And she felt she had much thinking to get through.
Chapter Twenty-One

Why would Jennifer follow them to Egypt when she had changed her mind at the last second so much closer to home, at UCL? Why go all the way across Europe to do that again? But then, there were things about Jennifer that Harper did not understand. And Nick was eager to have support staff for Isadora along for the journey. He thought it would do her state of mind a lot of good to have Harper around.

"Jennifer is not really dangerous." He repeated, to Harper's satisfaction. "She can be a little intense but she wouldn't hurt a fly. Isadora just doesn't see that."

In fact, the mere mention of Jennifer made Isadora wince and fidget so much Harper wondered if Isadora checked for Jennifer under the bed before turning the lights off at night.

"She feels better knowing that we have a plan. Even Trevor has relaxed a little since I hired you."

"Yes, about the plan. It will not be easy getting a restraining order. Even if she does show up in Egypt. It's a popular destination."

"I know. I know." Nick shrugged. "But, you see, everyone feels better already. So as far as I'm concerned you're doing a great job as it is. All you have to do is be around. So come sail with us, see the sights and get some sun." He smiled his most charming smile.

"Wouldn't it be easier to just discuss this openly with Isadora? Get to the bottom of her anxiety and then find out why Trevor is so angry at Jennifer?"

Nick shrugged. He did that from time to time, Harper had noticed. "They won't listen. I've tried."

Harper was not convinced. But it was probably true that they had pestered Nick until it became hard for even him to stay as chill as he would like to be. So he became like a politician giving the appearance of being committed to solving the problems of his constituents but in reality just wanting them to stop complaining. It made Harper think of Jamie's Dad again, emptying the second expensive bottle of wine of the evening while Jamie was nursing the bad side of her face. But that was a thought for another time. She had to keep focus on the task at hand.

"Can't you teach them to chill out?" Harper asked.

"One of the key tenets of chilloutism is not to be evangelical about it. You can't force peace of mind on anyone. You will only lose your own."

"But you can trick it on them, I guess."

"Touché." Said Nick, and his smile turned a little conspiratorial around the corners of his mouth. Like the two of them were coming to a mutual understanding of human psychology. "I just don't want Dora to worry. She is so incredibly high-strung about Jennifer. And this will all blow over in time anyway. Once the anniversary has passed without incident everyone will settle down. No harm will have been done by you keeping us company in the meantime. Unless you will find us odious?"

"Oh, no." Harper said. She found them all very interesting, and it was not like she was missing out on anything by going along with this.

"Wonderful." Nick said. "Dora will be so pleased."

Of course it was not Isadora but Jennifer, so lost and alone, that Harper wanted to study. Isadora had Nick, while Jennifer had no friend in the world to look after her but Harper. But to get to know Jennifer better Harper would have to dig beyond the somber sandwiches in Regent's Park. She would have to get to know Jennifer's former friends too.
Chapter Twenty-Two

Treat new relationships like investments that might fail due to factors outside of your control: Don't commit more emotional capital than you can afford to lose. And don't worry too much if it crashes. Stay calm and remember the trend over time is upwards for those who keep calm and carry on.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

It was the same problem every Sunday morning. When she had pulled the curtain Saturday night she always managed to leave a sliver open for a ray of morning light to pass through and fall onto her bed. The consequence was that as she lay thinking she would now and again turn her head into the beam and be jarred out of her thoughts. But to fix the problem she would have to get out of bed and that was more than she felt she could manage. She turned her back to the light, faced the wall on her side and closed her eyes. She was trying to think.

"Good morning dear." The knocks on the door more or less served as punctuation for her entrance, as her mother made her way inside with the laundry basket.

"Rise and shine." Her mother tore the window open and Jennifer pulled the bedcover over her face.

"Mom, please." She was twenty-seven years old and could not really believe this was how her life had turned out. She had in fact been trying to think of where it had all gone wrong. How had she become this failure of a human being?

"It's a beautiful day darling!" Her Mother's favorite strategy was to pretend that everything was always just as it should be. Just as good as it could be.

"Dear, whatever are you doing in this cave on such a fine morning?"

"I'm resting. And thinking. And you don't have to worry about being neat. Just upend the basked over the drawer, it's fine."

Her mother was meticulously folding pairs of socks and arranging them in the drawer. She had to be meticulous because she did not have many socks to work with and would soon have nothing more to do if she were efficient. Another of her mother's favored stratagems was to wash very small amounts of clothes at a time. "So the dirt doesn't have time to settle in."

Her mother kept folding. She had a way of being extremely frustrating and unreasonably helpful at the same time, which made any objections against her seem petty and selfish. Jennifer tried to ignore her and just keep thinking.

If she could find the missing link between the person she had thought she was and the person she was turning out to be perhaps she could find a way back and go in another direction instead.

She had to find her own fatal flaw, in other words, so she could fix it. So far she had listed several of her own worst qualities: Obsessive, pathetic, selfish, uneducated, unqualified, desperate, despairing, broke, parasitic, and ungrateful. She probably lacked a fundamentally positive outlook on life too. All of these qualities had been revealed post breakup, but they did not in unison point back to a shared origin. Why had the breakup released this motley gang of personality crimes on her? Had they been there all along? Had she always had a hidden talent for failure and bad behavior that only now had been revealed?"

"Mom would you say I was a normal and happy child?"

Her mother paused with a half-folded sock in her hands. "Why, I should say you were perhaps a little preoccupied with your own thoughts. I often had to wonder what went on in your head and it was not easy imagine. But you certainly never said you were unhappy."

No. And it really did not seem to her that there had been early signs of a malfunctioning mind. The more she thought about it the more she felt that her father had been right the other day. She _had_ been a good girl. With an ordinary childhood. Far too normal to explain anything. No dark omens.

"So you never worried about me turning out badly, right?"

"Oh darling, all the time."

"Really?"

"Of course. That's what being a parent is like. But you were so independent, you had no time for a silly old goose."

"Oh Mom."

Perhaps she had been too independent? Traveling by herself she had not gathered a long list of friends to lean on in times of trouble, and traveling with Nick it seemed she had only gathered enemies. Perhaps other people had help from their friends in times like these and lacking that was her problem?

Her Mom finished folding the last sock. "You know what darling. I'm glad we had this talk. I know you're not having an easy time, but it will get better. A mother knows these things." She winked and left the room.

Jennifer wondered whether her mother might be right. She was indeed feeling a little better already. If all she needed was friends there was a whole world outside waiting for her to befriend it, just like her father had said. And she was not as bad as all that. And why had she hoped for Nick to guide her out of her misery, when she used to be his guide and not the other way around?

He had not had much of clue what to do after university, when he took time off 'to see planet earth and its people.' He had wandered along the quays and beaches of Sydney with a fully loaded credit card and no plans for how to spend his time, staying in a five-star hotel and considering applying for work on a sheep farm somewhere inland, just for the experience. It seemed the sort of thing the backpackers he met did and he told himself he had nothing against sheep or against getting his hands dirty. Though he had little to no experience with either.

But Jennifer had the experience. She had been traveling for years and was sunbathing on the beaches Nick wandered around on. She was enjoying some genuine vacation time before taking on another job, and when they met and hit it off she had invited him along to the farm.

He had been so endearingly clueless and fascinated by the experience that Jennifer had taken it upon herself to become his mentor. She wrote him a manual for backpacking survival in Australia: "The Posh Person's Guide to the Outback." It was a joke, writing down every obvious, common sense tip she could think of to make fun of Nick's upper class background. He loved it. She had uploaded it to the blog she was keeping as a hobby with a hope of one day making actual money. Her fondly needling tips quickly became the most popular articles she had. Nick joked he would surely have perished in the outback without her guidance.

And she had thought she needed his help to get by. No! She jumped out of bed. She was a grown woman. She was angry. She put clothes on. She was furious, actually. At many things and people, but mostly herself. She was going to do something about it, starting now, by making her parents breakfast.
Chapter Twenty-Three

They met Jonas, the photographer, at the airport before departing for Egypt. They were all in the picture business one way or another, but none so overtly as him, and as if to prove the point he had a professional looking camera slung around his neck. He made the occasional cameo appearance on "Nick and Jen Around the World" and his face was familiar. It had a natural friendliness that it was now trying to withhold. Harper could feel it going sour in front of her like milk kept in the fridge too long.

Harper did not like airports that well to begin with but they were familiar scenes, especially this one. Harper could recall the terminal plans and layouts of shops in them and through it all she remembered the feeling of teetering on the border between technological supremacy and human folly.

She was ashamed to know so much about Jonas when he knew so little of her. It made her feel superior, and perhaps he sensed this, because following the mumbled introduction he withdrew to the periphery of the group and fiddled with his camera, though the nature of his engagement with the instrument was apparently idle. He seemed impatient with it, disappointed that it was not laying a more legitimate claim to his attentions now that he needed something to fiddle with.

He knew Harper was there to spy on Jennifer and Harper gad the feeling he did not approve. Everyone had strong opinions about Jennifer, it seemed, but Jonas' were perhaps more favorable than the average in the group. That would be interesting.

Trevor was clearly Jennifer's most irreconcilable detractor. He seemed impatient with Harper and a little angry at everyone but Nick. "Let's just get the cat out of the bag, shall we?" He said. "Anyone seen Jennifer yet?"

All eyes turned to Harper. Trevor's were challenging, Isadora's half fearful and half hopeful, Jonas's resentful and Nick's pleasantly blank. He was leaving this one to Harper. She cleared her throat.

"As a matter of fact I followed Jennifer to work this morning, as usual. She stayed there at least until I left. Not much more to say than that." It was the story of Jennifer's life these days.

"Well done." Nick nodded approvingly. "Let's get this sucker off the ground then, shall we?"

The plane was only three quarters full. Harper was sitting by herself while Nick and Isadora were sitting together, as were Trevor and Jonas. After takeoff, when the fasten seatbelts sign switched off and Nick moved to take the empty seat next to Trevor to chat, Harper made her way up to Isadora. She asked if she might sit down.

Harper had been unwilling to think much about Isadora yet so she had not formed as firm an impression of her as she might have, beside what anyone could see at first glance: Her obvious beauty and present sulk.

Isadora likewise seemed uncertain what to make of Harper, but she soon warmed up to her and let loose her natural charm and sociability. Helped along by polite inquiries about her hometown and family, she was only too happy to share her story. Of her father in the postal service in a small Brazilian town in the vast and often overlooked inland part of the country where Copacabana was in some respects as far away as Copenhagen. Of growing up not exactly poor but with both daughters of the family knowing there was a better life out there, almost anywhere else. Her older sister was now operating her own pharmacy in Santos and was planning to open another.

Isadora had dreamed of another line of business, one of internet beauty queens. She had founded an online fitness and wellness portal, with her own good looks as its mascot. She took this as seriously as her sister had her studies and got eagerly drunk on inspirational messaging and good looks wherever she could find them digitalized. That was how she met Nick and Jennifer. She had learned by chance that they were visiting her hometown and were moderately successful denizens of the web. Several people in town knew this though nobody seemed to know very much else about them. Probably they had arrived, shown someone their site and that someone had immediately embellished the story to mean celebrities in town. Either way, they had hit it off right away, in particular Isadora and Jennifer. When Isadora, with her heart high in her chest but not showing it, joked that she was going to leave home and join their band of merry friends, they had not turned awkwardly silent. Out of good nature and good spirits they had even encouraged her. That was the trip when so much went right for Isadora and her dreams began to appear closer than ever, but it was also the beginning of so much going wrong. And of Jennifer returning to haunt her as the ghost of a girlfriend past.

At any mention of Jennifer Isadora flinched or bit her lip. Even when she willed herself not to, she would move on to the next sentence and her face would quickly twitch before moving with her. It made her look small and frail in her seat. With her hair let out and falling down her arms, she looked like a cinnamon colored willow tree, lightly quivering on a whisper. She too was momentarily alone, Nick off talking with Trevor, and all her friends and family were across the pacific. Harper felt some of the sympathy she had not been able to summon for Isadora before. She lightly touched her hand.

"Is it OK if I call you Dora?"

Isadora laughed. "Sure. It's Nick's silly pet name for me. Dora the explorer. But I like it."

Harper smiled. "Dora, what do you think happened in Rio?"

Isadora withdrew her hand softly but quickly. Her face became serious. Harper could tell she was reluctant to talk but also that a part of her wished very much to do just that. Harper kept quiet and waited.

"We were celebrating. We sometimes did for no real reason. But that night Nick never showed up."

Harper nodded.

"We were having drinks and waiting for him. Jennifer, Trevor, Jonas and me, just like now. Well except for you and Nick being here. We got quite drunk, especially me and Jennifer. We were passing time with cocktails and we had a lot of time to pass." She sounded embarrassed.

"Do you know where Nick was?"

"He sometimes takes off by himself and when he comes back says he's just been rambling a bit. Up and down the street. Out and about."

Harper looked back at Nick and Trevor, they were both laughing at some private joke. Jonas was sitting on the other side of Trevor, watching the in-flight entertainment. Was he still sulking about Harper coming along?

"So Nick was off on his own and you were drunk?"

"We were getting impatient. But then all of a sudden Jennifer was dancing with another man. And then she was gone." Isadora was whispering now. "Nick's father left when he was young, you know, and Nick does not like being abandoned. Next morning when Jennifer was hungover and looking horrible, she confessed everything and that was that. She begged him not to leave her."

Harper nodded. That was one version of the night in Rio. "That's all you remember?"

Isadora nodded back with a guilty glance towards Nick. She perhaps felt she ought not to talk about this, but Harper felt she might still have a few more things to say.

"Have you spoken with Jennifer since that night?"

"I spent the afternoon of that day with her. She was crying and saying how she couldn't believe what had happened. She kept trying to call Nick. The next day I sought out Nick on her behalf." She blushed. "I didn't see her after that."

Harper nodded.

"I know what you're thinking." Isadora said. "But Nick was hurt and lonely and vulnerable. And once we'd slept together how could I go back to Jennifer? I couldn't look her in the eyes and tell her I was in love with Nick too."

"It was easier to leave her behind?"

"We tried. But she kept calling and texting, and that's when I realized I had actually saved Nick. I think Nick realized it too. The harder she pushed the more Nick took care of me. But we didn't know the half of how crazy she was. When we left for Uruguay we still believed she would move on. But that was the first time she followed us.

Nick for some reason still wanted to see everything they had planned to see together. I felt a little weird on the rest of that trip, almost like I was supposed to pretend they had not broken up and that I was Jennifer. Anyway, she knew every stop. She showed up pretending she was also just on her own vacation. We booked new rooms for ourselves at new hotels, but she hung around at every destination she knew we would visit. Trying to talk to Nick, getting into fights with Trevor, and giving me the evil eyes. That was the worst trip of my life, you know, because she was everywhere. At least later on she had to rely on our posts and her intuition to find us."

"Why do you think she is acting like this Isadora?"

"She's crazy! That's what's so scary. There's no telling what she'll do because she's not normal anymore."

Frustration welled up in Isadora and stopped her talking for a second. "She lives in a fantasy world where she and Nick are just on a break. First she texted that she wanted to apologize, but as time passed she became completely delusional. She texted that she wanted to explain, as if it was all some tragic misunderstanding. Then she claimed she had not really been unfaithful after all. She said she had just been confused and she wanted Nick to make her less confused. But he's not her psychiatrist, you know?"

Harper frowned. She looked back to see Nick still talking with Trevor, still smiling. Not a care in the world. "Confused about what?"

"She was very mysterious about that. I don't think she even knew. But now she actually claims she wants to help Nick understand too, like we are the crazy ones, not her." Isadora laughed bitterly. "Though I may actually lose my mind if this goes on."

"And you really have no idea what she meant by those texts?"

"I know exactly what she meant. She meant that Nick will love her again when I'm out of the way."

Harper nodded. "Nick doesn't think Jennifer is dangerous."

Isadora frowned. "But she is. She attacked Trevor. And I heard her threaten Nick."

"She threatened Nick?" Harper was surprised. "This was recently?"

"No, before they even broke up." Isadora hesitated. "On account of the prostitutes. It was only a couple of weeks before they broke up. We had just met, I did not know them so well yet."

Harper leaned closer to Isadora. "Are you sure she was threatening Nick, though?"

"Hey how are things up here?" Nick was standing next to his seat, smiling encouragingly. He must have assumed that Harper was having a woman-to-woman chat with Isadora to ease her state of mind. Maybe he had sensed them talking about him. He liked people to do that, but best of all while he was there to bask in the attention.

"I was just telling Harper about Brazil."

"Yes, thank you Isadora." Harper said. "It was an interesting chat, but I should get back to my seat. Those in-flight magazines won't read themselves."

Harper smiled politely as she got up. There was nothing terribly shocking about prostitution, as far as she was concerned. She did not see Nick as the type, though perhaps Isadora did. There was of course much Harper still did not know or understand about Nick. She studied the back of his head next to Isadora's a few rows up, wondering what was really going on in there. He was in some ways an obstinately private person. There might well be important things he was keeping entirely to himself on his late, lone walks in the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Four

We admire perseverance in the face of adversity but it does have a dark side: Stubbornness. Banging your head against the wall every day. But what if you don't need to overcome adversity? What if you don't need to break down that wall? What if it's all propaganda disseminated by the cannibals living on the other side?

Ask yourself why you try so hard. Then make damn sure you either have a good reason or start chilling the fuck out instead.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer's determination and elevated spirits lasted about a week. She cooked for her parents, started exercising, and as a reward for her improvements she bought herself a gift: Two exquisite sushi knives that she employed to give her father no excuse for keeping raw fish out of his life. As reluctant as he was to eat fish that had not been fried and did not come accompanied by chips, he had little choice when the fish was prepared under his own roof by his own daughter. Jennifer and her mother had both laughed at him. He had laughed too and told them he was cooking the next day, something with four legs and large muscles.

During those elevated weeks she only thought of Nick once, when she took a moment to congratulate herself on not thinking about him. Then at the precise endpoint of the good times, she thought of him again. One night she went to bed, it was eleven o'clock at the end of a fine day, and suffered an anxiety attack with aftershocks lasting until three at night.

During those hours the only think she could think of that might possibly had eased her mind was Nick. If Jennifer's characteristic contribution to their relationship had been helpful jokes at Nick's expense, Nick's had been to laugh along with them, which had a soothing effect on Jennifer. She was not used to his easy living, his way of brushing things off. She caught things and carried them around for mulling over later, but Nick could pick them off her shoulder and toss them aside for her.

Nick had recognized Jennifer's tendency to turn things over endlessly, to fret and doubt, and considered it his chance to laugh fondly back at her, to have her need him. Just like Jennifer had done with her tips for him, he wrote his tips for her down, and Jennifer decided they would be a fun addition to her blog. That was how the Jennifer in "Jennifer Around the World" began its evolution into "Nick and Jen" and how the germ of Nick's book of chill wisdom was sown: As fragmentary advice and conceits that he tried to spin around whatever Jennifer was worrying about at the time.

The blog became a relationship blog as much as anything. Unawares, they had come upon a winning formula, inspiring both admiration and a little envy. That pushed monthly visitors into another digit and suddenly they were making money. It was Jennifer's vocational dream come true, and Nick decided it beat going back home to join with the bank or the law firm as some kind of junior go-getter. Wearing a suit every day to work and a different colored suit to charity dinners and dignitary birthdays on the weekends? Become friends with the children of his mother's friends? He had seen a better way and he was taking it.

At times he seemed a little too perfect. A little too much like an essentially finished portrait of a human being, which made her feel the best she could hope for was to be hung on the wall next to him.

But there were other times when he had held her tight and heat from their bodies had melted together and filled out whatever space existed between them. Those times she felt that they did belong in the same picture frame. It was those times she missed when the anxiety took hold and only released her very, very slowly and reluctantly.

Of course, after that honeymoon period, when it became clear to everyone back hone that Nick was not coming back, some of them started coming to him instead. Jennifer and Nick were no longer very often alone, but it was fine and eventually Nick's friends went home to their families and careers. They had to. Everyone except Trevor. It was understood he had little in the way of family or career to go back to, and it was also understood that he was Nick's oldest friend and could not be cast aside. It was not understood that he would not leave them again, ever. That was just how it turned out.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Harper sought out Jonas by the pool the morning after they landed in Aswan. She had figured him for the digital nomad type. Never just working or just traveling, always a little bit of both. And there he was, doing his work under the shade of a yellow and orange parasol. Like he had sat there the whole night through.

The whole gang, as Jennifer would have thought of them, had gone to the pool the evening before. They had mixed business and pleasure. Going over the itinerary while puffing on water pipes they had brought to the pool from the hotel restaurant. The pool had been closed on arrival, but Nick's contact had managed to get it opened and Nick and Isadora had torn off their clothes and jumped into swimming suits like superheroes donning disguises.

It had actually looked like no one was thinking of Jennifer at all. They were talking and laughing quietly, blowing smoke in each other's faces and doing headstands in the water. Like kids. Even Trevor seemed to be enjoying himself, stealing tokes on everyone else's pipes. Jonas had seen an attractive backdrop with the Nile and the city lights of Aswan visible behind them and gone to work.

Now he did not see Harper coming, he was wholly engrossed in his pictures. But it was not Nick and Isadora Harper saw on the screen as she approached. It was Nick and Jennifer, her hair falling into a bowl she was holding up to her chin and both of them comically pretending to eat it. Next to it another photo of Jennifer smiling sweetly into the camera, no pasta bowls, golden locks of hair, or Nick in that one.

Harper remembered a photo of Nick soon after the breakup, of him sitting alone on a Brazilian beach, watching the sunset and a few dedicated surfers making good use of the last hour of daylight. He was shot from the back, the setting sun like a halo around his head, and the empty beach looking desolate, like behind the camera was miles and miles of desert. He would of course not actually have been alone since someone had taken the picture, presumably Jonas. Harper was sure Isadora and Trevor would have been around too. Everyone but Jennifer.

The caption had read: _Everyone falls off the board when the wave ends. But there's always another wave coming in. Keep paddling!_

Less than a week later, the first pictures of Nick and Isadora embracing photogenically had appeared online, and Harper had to admit they looked good together. There was something wholly adorable about the way Isadora fit into the nook of Nick's shoulder and something empty and abandoned about it when he was alone. Nick and Dora around the world, Jennifer a ghost.

Jonas gave a start when he noticed Harper and half-closed the laptop. "I don't know if you were trying to sneak up on me, but it worked." He said, with a nervous laugh that was a not so very different from a nervous tic.

Harper smiled. "Spirited away by work from the early morning?"

He nodded. "Work, work, work. Then you die. That's life." He cleared his throat. "I was just going through some old photos I did for Nick and Jennifer. Sorting out some old stuff."

"Jonas, I hope you won't mind me being direct." She said and he turned very nervous like he did mind. Harper hurried on before he had time to say so. "I get the impression you don't really think I should be here."

Finding that was all she meant, Jonas quipped weakly: "At the pool?"

"Here, looking for Jennifer. That maybe you think it's unnecessary?"

He put the laptop carefully on a small table by his side but could not keep the anger out of his movements, or the sarcasm out of his voice: "You mean the total hysteria about her? Unnecessary? No, I think it's a great way to treat someone you used to share your life with."

Harper sat down on the chair next to him. "If you know anything about Jennifer that makes you convinced this is so I'd love to know about it."

"Studying the enemy?"

"Jennifer is not my enemy. I'm trying to understand her."

"Then maybe you're asking the wrong questions to the wrong person. Maybe you should ask Isadora why she is so uptight about Jennifer."

"Why do _you_ think Isadora is so uptight?"

"Apart from insinuating herself with Nick while pretending to be Jennifer's friend? Apart from driving a wedge between them, getting Jennifer drunk and promising to look after her like a sister. And when Jennifer needed looking after, pushing her into the arms of the first Brazilian hunk of a man she could find, and snagging up Nick for herself. Apart from that I don't know why she would feel guilty. I'm not even sure she has a functioning conscience."

"She seems nice."

"Oh yes she's great. As long as you're not in her way."

Isadora was a determined person, like Jennifer was in her way. Harper had been too soft on her perhaps, but it was not like she could have learned much more on the plane anyway. There was a time and a place for everything. Isadora would say more before the trip was over. The heat would do it. It would make them all talk.
Chapter Twenty-Six

_

Maybe this is the darkest moment before the dawn. Maybe your destiny is waiting on the other side of the next obstacle, although that was probably what you told yourself last time. But maybe this is really it. So go for it. But do yourself this favor when you cross over and find yet another obstacle in your way: Take a moment to consider if this is not the time for you to chill the fuck out for a change._

In fact I hereby grant you permission, nay I charge you with the responsibility, to chill the fuck out from the moment you read this and at least until you wake up from your next genuinely restful and refreshing eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer became afraid of her bed as much as she was drawn to it. When she lay down she did not find rest but more anxiety and when she closed her eyes the darkness was not oblivion but claustrophobia.

Falling asleep became an ordeal that took hours, always the worst of the day. A feeling of diffuse and general wrongness descended on her nightly and pushed her around in a morbid dance of tossing and turning that only very slowly exhausted her far enough out of her mind to fall asleep. She always felt better in the morning, but every night was a new battle against this same faceless and invincible enemy.

Because what sleep she did find was not restful, she got tired too early in the day. Something as light as sleep became the heaviest thing in her life. But no matter how submissively she surrendered to its gravity there was no truce with sleep. The earlier she went to bed the longer she had to struggles.

She did not understand what was happening and started spending even more hours in Regent's park, afraid to go home because then her bed would be too close to resist. But in the park she had little else to do than stalk Nick on her phone. And once he had come back into her life she found it hard to dismiss him again. She felt like she could not go on this way much longer, and he was the only one she could think of who might help her.

She had been a poor, cold creature searching for warmth when she went to hear him speak at UCL. She had not planned to attack him or even try to talk to him. She was desperate enough to hope that just seeing him and hearing him talk, not even specifically to her, just sitting in his audience would be enough. But they had been expecting her, she knew that as soon as she came through the door and saw Trevor scanning the faces of the group of students she was entering with. She had been lucky another group was leaving at the same time and she had been able to switch groups unobtrusively and escape unseen. But it had been a close call. The thought that she had nearly been caught by Trevor again, had nearly repeated the disaster in Bali, brought some of the same emotions back. Overwhelmed by this discomfort she had thrown herself on the ground in the little park nearby until she had gathered the energy she needed to make her way home, one more defeat under her belt. And the whole time she had felt like someone was watching her, though when she looked around there was no-one. On top of everything else she now had to suspect herself of being paranoid.

So when the resignation to pursue Nick again crept over her it came with an uneasy feeling of committing some kind of critical error. Of missing important information and arriving at a wrong result. But she had to be doing something right, because as soon as she knew that her new plan would be the same as her old, desperate plan that had failed her so often before, her nightly troubles abated. She could sleep again.

What was more, she had a new advantage on her side: She knew where the gang was going. She was familiar with the whole itinerary of their trip to Egypt and she knew they had no reason to suspect that she knew it.

It would be like the old days of following Nick around, except now she was more experienced and more desperate. If she managed to find the money to go, and somehow she would, she would know this might be her last chance. If she failed again what would she have left? No money for another try, no extra lives, and no doubt a new round of the night terrors to welcome her when she came back. She was keeping them at bay for the moment but she knew that was only because a part of her really believed her that this time she had a genuine chance to get through to Nick.

If she ever lost that conviction, the hope for genuine progress and a return to better times, she knew she would be delivered right back at the mercy of whatever demon toyed with the sleepless.
Chapter Twenty-Seven

Harper was a little repulsed by the way Isadaora wound herself around Nick's arm at Abu Simbel temple. Their guide was explaining that thousands of years ago people had worshipped these idols, but they had done it somewhere else. The temple had been meticulously moved, piece by piece, because of the construction of the Aswan High Dam. A side effect of taming the Nile was that the temple's original home had been submerged beneath the surface of the resulting Lake Nasser. So they had moved the temple to dry land to preserve it for the consideration of future generations. The modern Egyptians had recreated history, or at least adapted it to new specifications. Harper was impressed by the ancient Egyptians, but not by Isadora.

Was there not also something artificial about the way she clung to Nick? An exaggerated helplessness? Harper did not doubt there were genuine feelings between the two of them, but she wondered what exactly those feelings were. Attraction, dependence, convenience?

They were all traveling up the Nile in one Felucca, a small open boat out of time, doing its best to bridge the gap between past and present by ferrying tourists up and down the river in the style of the ancient times. Before they returned on board after Abu Simbel, Nick, Isadora, and Jonas arranged to take a few photographs around the temple. For a moment, Harper thus had Trevor alone. Neither of them were eager for more sightseeing and Trevor was hung over from the night before. He had explored the nightlife in Aswan, to his own detriment that morning, when every hour in the heat must have felt like the sun was pouring molten lead into his skull, possibly a kind of divine punishment.

Trevor was sitting with his head in his hands, on a stone, turned halfway away from everyone. He looked to be in a foul mood and probably still a little drunk. Not in a mood to talk, but possibly liable to keep going if someone got him started. Harper cleared her throat twice before he looked up.

"I had a chat with Jonas this morning." She began.

"Holy mother of Christ." He mumbled. "I suppose that was inevitable. And I don't suppose Nick told you anything about that whole situation, so I guess it's up to me to set you straight."

Harper indicated for him to do his best in that regard.

"Let's just say that if there were one person who would not be horrified if Jennifer showed up, it would be Jonas."

"He likes her?"

"You might put it like that, if you're perversely fond of understatements."

"What would someone with a healthy relationship with understatements say?"

"That he's a bloody fool. You would think he had sense enough to support Nick in convincing Jennifer to move on. Take the opportunity to make his own move. But the guy's a sucker. He won't hear a bad word about the crazy bitch."

Harper tried not to look annoyed but did not need worry, Trevor was not paying her any attention. "Some men just don't know what to do with women." He said philosophically and shook his head, then grimaced in pain at the effort. Sometimes divine justice worked swiftly.

"That's been my experience too." Harper said. She wasn't sure he heard, he looked to be in pain.

"Shit." He moaned. "Do you have some water? I forgot to stock up at the hotel."

Harper handed him a bottle of mineral water from her bag. He breathed a sigh of relief, threw the cap directly into the bin and emptied the bottle straight down his throat.

"Shit. Fucking sparkles." He said after the last swallow. "Now still water, there's a poor beggar at the banquet and a king of liquids the morning after."

Harper agreed, thinking it an odd expression for him to make. It was something she should have said. If she had sparkling water it was only because she picked it up by mistake. Trevor had expressed her feelings about the subject completely, which annoyed her, but it was too late to do anything about it.

"Trevor, if you don't mind me changing the subject. What is it you do here, exactly?"

He looked up, wondering if he was being insulted.

"Me? I'm the brain behind this whole fucking operation."

"I thought Nick arranged everything with the travel company?"

"Yeah, sure he arranged it. I, um, make sure everything runs smoothly."

Harper was under the impression it was a packaged trip they were doing as a promotional activity.

Perhaps thinking the same thing and struck by a moment's uncertainty and doubt, Trevor added: "You might say, generally, I'm Nick's manager. And oldest friend. Private school, can you believe it? We wore the uniform together, we did."

"You must have known Jennifer quite well too?"

"Yeah, though she wasn't too keen on me. And the feeling was mutual, I might add. She liked getting between Nick and his mates. Clingy and smothering, even then. But I guess Nick likes them that way." He sighed, glanced quickly around. "Still, even if I can't say I miss her it's a real tragedy what's become of her."

"You don't think she deserves it?"

"Oh, she deserves it for going batshit crazy. It's her own fault, but it's a tragedy all the same. I'm just glad she revealed her true face before she snapped. So we didn't have to see the unraveling up close and personal."

"You mean when she slept with another man Rio?"

"Yeah, and since you've talked with Jonas, let me disabuse you of idea that alcohol was an excuse. Isadora may have handed her the drinks, but Jennifer drank them. She is one of those women who can't hold their liquor so she should have known better. If you ask me, she got nothing she didn't ask for."

"Why do you think she got into trouble that night in particular, though?"

Trevor stood up. Harper could tell he thought he had already made his position on Jennifer perfectly clear. "Listen, Harper." He said. "Jennifer was a controlling woman. She had a hard time understanding that sometimes a man needs space to do his own thing."

Harper smiled politely. "One more thing: Isadora mentioned that they'd had a fight? Concerning prostitutes?"

Trevor nodded sagely. "Me and Nick, we are outgoing guys. We have a few chats with some ladies and Jennifer gets it into her head that they were in it for the money."

"You _and_ Nick?"

"Yeah, we go out. Now Jennifer makes a fuss about these 'prostitutes' which feeds the idea to Isadora, who has now fed it to you. It's all in the imagination. Christ, my head hurts from all this shit you're making me think of!"

"Just one last thing, Trevor. Isadora hadn't been with you very long prior to that night, had she? Did the two of you hit if off?"

"Christ. OK first of all she wasn't _with us_. She had come to Rio to show us around, that's all. She was a pretty face, I liked looking at her but we were leaving after that night and I thought she was staying behind. Boy was I wrong." Trevor laughed. "But on the bright side at least he didn't keep both of them."

They spent the rest of the day on the felucca, in the pleasantly cool shade provided by the carpet strung out over the boat. Once 'the kids,' as Harper sometimes thought of them, were confined to the same boat and given pretty much no other option than to sprawl out, relax and take selfies, they had a good time. Even Trevor, who was sobering up admirably out of direct sunlight.

On the second day some tensions started to show. Trevor was recovering his health and good spirits and Isadora was bringing Jennifer up in conversation more frequently and thereby annoying everyone. Nick managed to appear quite relaxed, though Harper imagined he sometimes got a wistful look on his face when he stared out at the passing Egyptian countryside. He did look like a man craving his own space, as Trevor had put it.

They left the felucca in Daraw and went temple hopping by bus the rest of the way to Luxor. It was a welcome change of pace. As charming as the felucca had been, it was slow and bereft of no air-condition. There were many temples to visit and they were all very impressive if you stopped to think about it. But Harper did not. Obelisks towering over hieroglyphed sandstone walls, statues and grand columns to please this and that god, she skipped mentally over them all. Her thoughts were hovering around Nick. She could not find a private conversation with him now. It was like he drifted off on his aloof cloud whenever she was about to talk to him. There was always someone else, usually Isadora, tugging on his arm.

Then in Luxor, at the final temple, between the grand columns that did look solid enough to support a whole religion, she found Nick alone. Shielded by the column wall, they even had a measure of privacy. Harper sighed, she came to the moment with some trepidation. When she looked past Nick to the last column of the row ahead of him, a face peeked curiously out and for the first time, Harper looked Jennifer square in the eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Eight

Desire is the root cause of all suffering, according the Buddha. But the worst is to desire one thing above all others. When you get stuck pursuing any one thing in particular you miss out on the awesomeness of everything else. Variety is spice of life and remembering this is a great source of chill.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Her parents had lent her the money for the trip to Egypt on the understanding that she would try to relax and not exhaust herself again. Exhaustion was the explanation she had given them for the state of financial and emotional collapse she had presented in on their doorstep two months earlier. Creative age burnout. To be recovered from in the comfort of her childhood home, where she would in due time come up with a new plan.

But as the days became weeks and then months without lifting Jennifer's spirits, her parents had started wondering why she was not returning to her old self. They were quietly dismayed when she assured them she was fine and then spent another evening in bed. They assured her they were right there whatever she needed to talk about. But she would not even openly acknowledge that she had a problem. She was afraid she could not explain it without giving the impression that she was obsessed about her ex-boyfriend. Which was true, but too embarrassing to acknowledge. So all she was willing to say was that she missed traveling.

By the time Jennifer learned that Nick was going to Egypt she had sensed her parents were ready to be squeezed for the means she needed to follow him. That concern had softened them up and loosened their wallets. If what she needed to get better was one more journey without the pressure of trying to make a living out of it, if what she needed was to experience the joys of travelling once more, then they would help her. Looking back on it later she felt more ashamed than she did at the time. At the time she was just surviving.

It made a lot of sense to follow Nick to Egypt, in Jennifer's mind. They had met abroad and he had abandoned her abroad so it was appropriate that he would also find her there again. If she sought him out in London, between shifts at the sandwich shop, she would feel like a beggar. Like she had fallen on her ass and slid all the way home while his success had only grown. But abroad she could meet him on equal terms. Two citizens of the world proving that earth was not large enough to keep them apart. Not that her success or failure ought to be important in matters of love, but she could not shake the suspicion that she would be easier to love if she were successful. Or could at least give a credible impression of still being able to manage her own life. The trip to Egypt would give her a chance to put on that show.

In the days before the journey, when her tiredness abated and her parents felt validated in their generosity because she actually seemed to be returning to life again, Jennifer tried often to think of exactly what she would do when she had finally cornered Nick. Her old nemesis was a lack of details in planning, a tendency to go in the general direction of her problem and hope for the best. She was aware of this, but as eager as her mind was to go reach for Nick it would simply refuse to grapple with the implications of success in this regard. Whenever she tried she became lost in a fog of white noise, baffled before the prospect of putting to the test her theory that an answer somehow awaited her wherever Nick was. Once again she was left to gamble on the moment of their meeting to reveal a way out.

She came close in Aswan. Nick, Trevor, Jonas, and Isadora had been drinking in the lobby of their hotel, but then Nick had gone outside for a moment of fresh air. With her parents' money Jennifer had booked herself into that same hotel as soon as she learned they were staying there. It was pricey but worth it. Meeting Nick came first while running out of money was a secondary concern. Just like the old days.

But that night she had seen Nick approaching the door leading out to where she was observing them through the window, and she had taken one look inside at Jonas, Isadora, and Trevor, and again she had panicked and fled. At the prospect of everything she had been working towards coming true she had made sure it would not.

Next day the gang had boarded the felucca. Her best bet had then been to wait until they reached Luxor. There would be more sights to distract them there, another hotel to stay in, and perhaps one more chance for Jennifer. She was not going to give up. She had set one goal for herself and despite all evidence to the contrary she still believed she could reach it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine

Harper tried to work out what had gone through Jennifer's mind in the temple. Not that her basic motivations were difficult to comprehend. They were embarrassingly obvious. But how did it feel when Jennifer realized that the model of the world she kept in her mind did not correspond with reality? When her gut feelings could not be relied on because they was not properly calibrated?

Desperate, for starters. Helpless, because it would require some trusted reference point to in the outside world to recalibrate, a guiding star as a new point of origin of her inner coordinate system. Jennifer thought that had to be Nick. She was wrong. And she could somehow feel it then. Had felt it to some extent every time she fled in panic, but this time more strongly. This time the feeling had definite shape and form.

Jennifer had followed Nick all the way to Egypt, only to evaporate at the last second, possibly just at the line between a chance for future sanity and a lifetime in the emotional gutter. Jennifer had gingerly put a toe on the wrong side but then she had pulled back. Maybe Harper had jolted her, like an electric fence. That might not seem like much of an accomplishment, being a fence, but if it had saved Jennifer from herself it was good enough.

They were all going home soon, were nearly done with Egypt, but not quite. Harper went slowly to the hotel lobby, situated one floor above the breakfast buffet, where a voice was yelling harsh Egyptian curses. Well it sounded like harsh curses and it would have to be Egyptian.

A well-dressed and theatrically agitated Egyptian man at the reception was laying siege to the counter. He fired another volley of curses at a baby-faced receptionist while an older hotel employee was looking on with weary patience and the occasional half-hearted protest or threat to call the police. Harper got the impression the well-dressed man was a well-known nuisance, but one with enough standing around the hotel that he could not simply be dismissed.

Harper continued down to the breakfast buffet where conversation was so subdued she could still hear the occasional outburst from upstairs as she joined the gang for breakfast.

Trevor was obviously nursing another hangover and there was an icy atmosphere around him and Nick. They were sitting at one table while Jonas and Isadora sat at a neighboring but separate one. Harper could tell from the way Isadora was not looking at anyone and how neither Nick nor Trevor were talking that something was wrong.

A particularly loud curse from upstairs made one of the waiters around the buffet wince. Trevor shook his head in disbelief. Nick stood up.

"OK, then. Let's do this."

Trevor's smile faltered as seconds passed in silence. "You can't be serious."

Nick just looked at him. Trevor swallowed a big piece of chocolate croissant he had not finished chewing. "You go if you must, mate."

But eventually Trevor downed a glass of water and shook his head resignedly at this regrettable course of events.

"Well if you insist."

"We'll be right down. Don't worry." Nick said to Isadora, who did not meet his eyes.

Harper turned to Jonas and Isadora. Jonas looked up and Harper raised an eyebrow. Jonas shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. Isadora stared at her tea.

"What's going on?" Harper asked.

"Much drama." Jonas said. "This vacation is just not as chill one might have hoped for."

Isadora hissed: "Don't joke. It's not Nick's fault!"

"Didn't say it was."

"It's Trevor again." Isadora said sullenly.

Harper caught her eyes and fixed them. "Again? What do you mean?"

Isadora blinked at her coffee for a few split seconds. "I mean, it's always Trevor, isn't it?"

Upstairs a new round of cursing was exploding. Harper guessed Nick and Trevor had introduced themselves.

Harper sat down across from Isadora. "I don't know, Isadora, can you help me understand?"

Isadora remained quiet.

"He doesn't have the best record with women." Jonas explained. "Has been known to be a little rough around the edges."

"He abuses women." Isadora spat. "But Nick won't believe it."

"How do you know?" Harper asked.

She flinched. "I've seen his prostitutes. One time after he was done with her. She was crying when he kicked her out of the hotel."

"Is that all you have seen?"

Isadora sobbed and got up from the table. She rushed upstairs.

"Much drama." Said Jonas and Harper agreed.

Harper went upstairs too. Not following Isadora, but retuning to the lobby where things had quietened down. Nick was handing over money to the well-dressed man whose mood had clearly improved since Harper saw him a few minutes earlier. The man still huffed and puffed, for show, maintaining the air of a man so grievously wronged he has no choice but to demand satisfaction. Harper saw relief, embarrassment, amusement and contempt in the faces of the hotel staff. There were five of them needlessly dusting off their already spotless red and brown uniforms.

"What was that about?" Harper asked.

Nick sighed unhappily. "The man says the honor of his niece has been violated. And that, um, Trevor was somehow to blame. Like an honor thing, you know. Different customs down here when it comes to romance."

"His Niece?"

"His older sister's daughter, I think."

"I know what a niece is. You mean to say Trevor hired one of the prostitutes from the hotel lobby and her pimp is now extorting you? Because Trevor damaged the merchandise?"

It was well known prostitution was rife around tourist hotspots in Egypt. Despised perhaps, but not for how it helped part foreigners from their money. And not enough to deter the unwanted daughters of poor families from selling the only asset they had.

Nick gave her Harper an unhappy look that seemed to say "I don't like this either but what can you do?"

"I see." Harper said.

"He was my best mate in school."

"I see." She could not say more than that. Could not summon the moral strength for it. Trevor she could judge, but somehow not Nick. She was just disappointed. And hurt.

Trevor, meanwhile, had decided to take the attitude that the well-dressed man was a hustler and Nick had been too soft with him.

"That's not how you handle the locals." He attempted, with a sort of brotherly concern as he slapped Nick on the back. A look from Nick ended the argument. Trevor knew what he had done. Of course he did.

At the stairway leading from the buffet up past the reception to their rooms, Jonas had ascended in time to observe the transaction. He gave Harper the tiniest of sly smiles. A complicit smile. "This is what we're dealing with here," it seemed to say. "This is what we're part of."

Like they were complicit, which in a way they were. But Harper was still offended. She waited until Nick and Trevor were out of earshot, leaned closer to Jonas, and softly said: "I know you've been writing to Jennifer. I know you've betrayed our schedule to her."

The sly smile disappeared. Harper let Jonas chew his lips for a moment before adding: "I won't tell anyone." Of course not. Jonas smiled sheepishly and Harper left him alone in the lobby with his confusion. "How do you like that for complicity?" She thought.

**Chapter Thirty**

A major milestone to chilling the fuck out is putting your inner demon on ice. You know, the one that sits on one shoulder and shouts at the goody-two-shoes angel on the other. Its voice is loud and the self-doubt it inspires is hard to ignore because what it's telling you is that everything you fear about yourself is true. That you are your worst self. You must ignore it. This is the one part of chilling the fuck out that takes a lot of trying hard to do. Ignore that demon.

Don't pay too much attention to the angel either, though, as that will only lead to another kind of aggravation and trying too hard. Let the angel bask in the sun and prattle away as you focus on keeping the devil in cold storage.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Her chance had come in Luxor temple, and for a few panicky moments it had been the most horrifying experience of her life, a pre-eminence of desolation all the more remarkable for how horrendously bad her last few vacations had been. But that was the first installment of the price she had to pay for the changes beginning to take hold.

Jennifer had come so close, again, that she could practically feel the pressure of Nick's arm against her back, the smell of his hair in her nostrils, and his voice in her ears. Nick had wandered off, if only for a brief spell, away from the clutches of Isadora and the leering camaraderie of Trevor. Jennifer had waited behind a large stone column in Nick's path and had shaken with more than just excitement. She had dared to peek out to prove to herself that she was not just imagining him.

But out of nowhere, from some strange dimension of space and time, a middle-aged and vaguely librarian-looking woman had appeared at Nick's side. She looked harmless enough, a slight and blonde woman hidden inside practical and anonymous clothing. Her only distinguishing feature was that she was looking right at Jennifer, and that her eyes seemed to stare directly through her and lay her bare before them.

Their eyes met and Jennifer was stunned to realize that she recognized the woman, and that the woman recognized her. The moments flashed before Jennifer's eyes, when the woman had entered her life without her consciously noticing. But on each such occasion her subconscious had filed another sheet quietly away in some secret mental dossier, growing into a whole catalogue of appearances in cafés and parks, outside the sandwich shop and on city busses when she sat lost in what she had imagined were private thoughts. The paperwork had been duly archived and now the files were retrieved and cross referenced with the woman's appearance In Egypt at Nick's side. The conclusion was unacceptable but also impossible to dismiss. The woman was a hired goon out to destroy her. Her eyes were Nick's judging gaze by proxy. And everyone else's.

Reflected in those eyes, Jennifer felt completely exposed. More so than in Rio, where she had been mostly shocked and uncomprehending, and more so than in Kuta, where she had been caught in Nick's hotel, gotten into an altercation with Trevor and given Isadora the fright of her life, all right before Nick's disappointed eyes. But at those times she had fundamentally felt betrayed by circumstances. She had even felt events were conspiring to put her in a more unfavorable light than she deserved. Now she was plunged into a dark storm illuminated only by the woman's ex-rays eyes that revealed not an unfair judgement, but the morbid anatomy of her own confusion.

This sensation, as if of seeing herself for the first time, grabbed hold of Jennifer's stomach and clutched it tight. A terrible mix-up of responsibilities this was. Her digestive system had taken over the job of coming up with an appropriate emotion to go with the situation. Her brain had quit the task in despair.

Jennifer felt faint and reached for the thick stone column for support but did not find it. She lost balance and as she fell she was released from the woman's gaze. Ordinary feelings flooded her again. Feelings she was used to, like shame and panic. She responded in a similarly familiar way and fled as fast as her legs would carry her.

No-one pursued her and it took her less than two minutes to exit the temple, pass the post office, and slip onto a side street leading to the train station, effectively vanishing into the crowds of Luxor city, the greatest open-air museum in the world. Still she discerned no signs of pursuit. She drew a few stares from tourists and locals alike, but in all likelihood they were barely interested in her, only wondering what would drive a person to run like that in such heat.

As soon as she had space between their bodies, Jennifer's thought returned immediately to the woman. She started to wonder. She considered that although the terrible woman's eyes had seemed to censure Jennifer, had they not also questioned her? In fact, with the safety of distance, Jennifer thought the woman's look signaled curiosity more than anything else. As if Jennifer were some kind of rare and timid desert bird and the woman had just been waiting for this opportunity to study her?

Even stranger, the more she thought about it the more it seemed the woman had tried to warn Jennifer, to conspire with her to keep Nick in the dark about Jennifer's presence? But why? It was obvious why it was a good idea for Jennifer to stay out of sight, of course, clearly her whole Egyptian scheme was the conception of a madwoman. Jennifer knew that even as she could not help nearly going through with it. But what was that to this older woman?

Jennifer walked briskly back to her hostel, put bedsheets around her dormitory bunk, and crawled inside.
Chapter Thirty-One

The hotel foyer on the way home. Jonas looking a bit lost, by himself with only his bags for company and staring at his feet. When Harper joined him, he looked up and around, nervously making sure they would not be overheard.

"How did you know I was in touch with Jennifer?" He whispered like he had been thinking about it all night. "And what is she doing? I thought... I thought she would be here."

"Jennifer has cut her hair."

Jonas blinked.

"In one of the pictures you were editing at the pool, Jennifer had pixie hair. When she was with Nick she wore it long."

Jonas smiled sheepishly. Unnerved. Perhaps a little impressed too.

Harper nodded. "Yes, I know her hairstyle history. When I saw Jennifer at the temple yesterday I figured someone must have kept her informed. Then I remembered how you seemed like a child caught with your hands in the cookie jar that morning and I remembered there was something odd about one of those images. The hair did not match your claim that the photos were from old assignments."

"You saw her yesterday, at the temple? But no one else did. Why didn't you say something? Why didn't she do anything?"

"I take it she is not sharing information as generously as you are?" Harper said.

He blushed.

"She is very much here, Jonas. But she's got cold feet. She's a woman with very cold feet." Harper cleared her throat: "And if I were you I would not hope to see her any time soon."

Jonas looked away but not before Harper had seen the hurt in his eyes.

Trying to soften the blow, she said: "I mean, you really should hope she comes to her senses. And if she has she will want to leave all this behind her. All of it, including you."

"I have only been trying to help."

Harper raised her eyebrows. "Out of the goodness of your heart?"

"I'm her friend."

"I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But, just out of curiosity, how do you imagine you are helping her by enabling this behavior?"

He seemed to think the answer might be written on the top of his shoes. After a while he said:

"I thought I could help her get closure. That all she needed to move on was to talk to Nick. He's just as crazy as she is, you know, and if she actually talks to him now, after pining for him so long, she would see that he is not this great dream she has made him out to be. He's just a guy."

"I think I know what you mean." Harper said. "But I'm not sure you're right. And I'm certain she will not appreciate how much you've tried to do for her. She might even be angry with you one day."

She was not trying to be mean. She wanted him to understand.

"I mean, has she even thanked you for the pro bono work you've been doing?"

He blushed again, just when he had been starting to go pale.

"Jennifer can't afford your services, so if she's been sending you photos of herself you must have offered to help out for old times' sake."

Jonas nodded. "I did offer to help. She has not had an easy time."

"No." Harper agreed. "She's a troubled person, Jonas. So I hope you are considering the possibility that she's just been using you for your proximity to Nick, and that once she does move on she will not want to hold on to you either."

"In other words you think I'm a fool." He said.

Harper wanted to shake her head but it came off as a shrug. "Really, I think I want to ask you to forgive Jennifer when she lets you down."

"Why do you care, though?"

"Because she is allowed to let you down."

He laughed with an expulsion of air like someone taking a light punch in the gut.

"That's life sometimes. Funny, isn't it?"

"It sometimes is." Harper agreed, happy to be done with the conversation. It wasn't that she really disliked Jonas, more that she found it hard to really like him.

In a moment of splendidly arranged choreography, only a brief silence passed before the lobby elevator emitted a gentle ring and Isadora pushed her two trolleys out of it. The doors closed behind her and she smiled demurely before joining them in waiting for Trevor and Nick. Now Trevor, there was someone Harper actively disliked. And Nick, well if she were honest with herself she would miss him once this job was over, which would not be long now.

"You are incorrigible." Sal bore down on Harper's desk with her usual swagger. Her loose purple dress wafted around her legs like an entourage of paparazzi at a premiere. Papers belonging to one of her young coworkers scattered to the floor behind her in silent awe. Sal was generally understood in the office to be a benevolent force of nature. Like a refreshing breeze rattling the windows and blowing leaves onto the floor. "You probably have your phone on silent too." Sal said, like she was talking to a younger sister.

"What? No I don't."

"Prove it." Sal put her hand on her hips. Harper reluctantly did as she was asked and found three missed calls from Sal. Missed because she had given her phone the day off. She had not been expecting calls from Sal, of all people. They worked right next to each other.

"OK, but it's only because I'm finishing some leftover accounting and needed the peace and quiet." It was plausible enough. It really was disturbing how much time she had spent on paperwork since becoming a small business owner.

"Mmhmm." Sal hummed skeptically. "I think you're daydreaming again. What's up? I'll bet you've ignored a few clients too."

She had. It was one of the benefits of being her own boss, that slow days at work could be arranged as needed.

"Sal, do you ever wonder how you got here?" Harper asked.

"Like if I might have gone in a different direction and joined the Spice Girls, as Saucy spice or Nice Spice?"

"I think those were already taken and called Scary Spice and Baby Spice. But no, I mean the sequence of events that led you here. Do you ever stop to wonder..."

But Sal interrupted helplessly, like she did when she became impatient: "Do I think of sequences of events that have happened to me? Like memories? Are you asking if I have memories? Good god, you're even worse off than I thought. I think we may need to resort to heavy drinking, and soon." She looked Harper over appraisingly. She frowned. "I think preferably tonight."

"I can't." Harper made a sad face, trying to keep up a little bit with Sal's theatrics. "I'm so sorry, I truly miss having drinks with you. It's been too long."

"You mean you miss watching me get drunk while you laugh at the increasingly clever things I say." Sal said. "Like we did Friday."

"You do say such clever things when you're drunk."

"True." Sal nodded solemnly. "Very true what you're saying here. I must never forget that at heart you really are a very sensible girl."

"But tonight I have a date."

Sal acknowledged the occasion by three seconds of respectful silence. "Say no more. We will discuss this later. Now go get 'em, tiger."

Harper promised she would. And almost wished she was going on the kind of date both parties were aware of. She doubted Sal would approve of the one she had actually planned.
Chapter Thirty-two

Shame is an illusion you make for yourself. But so is pride, which is nothing but the other side of shame. You want to get rid of shame, wave goodbye to pride. You give pride another chance and shame will tag along for the ride. So quit both, you need neither to be happy.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Hostel life bustled around Jennifer's bunk while she hid in her cave. Tired and excited female voices penetrated the thin sheets, shadows on the fabric suggested the forms of the speakers _. The most important thing is meeting people you would never have met at home_ , someone explained. Jennifer felt no sympathy for this idea, all she had wanted was to meet people she already knew. But she had met someone else regardless, or at least been stared down by her.

She was convinced the woman's stare had conveyed an important message, and that figuring out what that was took precedence over wallowing in defeat. This was interesting and encouraging. Interesting because it was unusual for anything had taken precedence over wallowing in defeat – Jennifer had been helplessly dedicated to wallowing for some time – and encouraging because unlike the aftermaths of previous failures this time she did not feel like killing anyone, not even herself.

She could not say why. Certainly her circumstances were no better than before. If anything they were worse. When she had first started failing all she had lost was Nick. Now, in trying to get him back she had lost her money, career, dignity, and self-respect too.

But that was not the message. She was facing up to those loses every day, trying to imagine a return to better times. A solution. To stop herself feeling guilty and unworthy. But the solution was not the message either. Jennifer felt it was probably the opposite of that. It was the absence of a solution. It was hopelessness. A problem without end, because it had already happened and would never not have happened. A basic problem with chronology, in other words. Not a very profound message, really. Just that this will always have happened. The stranger in Rio will always have happened, no matter what else she does. Nick leaving her will always have happened. And almost as bad as those things, the changes those things had wrought upon her will always have happened. Even if she changed now she will always have been, if only for several months, Nick's psycho ex-girlfriend.

Jennifer went back to that night, to her other man, who was many things but first among them not Nick. Though she had felt sure he was. Or she had later convinced herself that she thought so, to excuse her behavior? No, she knew it was true because the morning after when she woke up in the stranger's apartment her first reaction had been an incredulous giggle through the fog of her hangover. As in _Nick, what are we doing here?_ The condo was sleek and impersonal, like it was decorated and kept by someone who did not live there. Like a hotel. The only human touches were the clothes, mostly hers, in heaps on the floor.

When she saw the stranger next to her, sleeping the sweet sleep that the wicked were supposedly forbidden \- maybe that was why Jennifer had woken up first? - she had decided it was all a mistake before she had even decided what it was. She had noticed she was naked. Another unfortunate mistake, taking all her clothes off in this stranger's apartment. Then she saw his boxers on the floor: He was naked too. But since that was also just another mistake she simply had to get out of there as fast as possible and then it would be like it had never happened. He would never have seen her naked, she told herself, and she would pretend she had never seen him at all.

Because she had already worked it all out in her mind she did not wake him up to demand an explanation. There was no need for a second opinion, it was that simple and straightforward: A mistake. She never even spoke to the man in the bed. She gathered up her belongings and fled, with no idea of who he was or, once she had hailed a cab and given the name of her and Nick's hotel, of how to find him again. Only later did she think of how convenient she had made it for him. Making herself disappear with the morning light. The vanished princess, leaving nothing behind but memories for lonely nights to come: I wonder where she is now, my wild one-time lover. If he would even think of her again. He would never realize she had turned into a frog after he kissed her, a fairytale in reverse. To this day, whenever she thought of his face it was Nick's face that came to her. She was sure he had looked like Nick that night, but darker and sleeker, rounder cheeks and oilier, shinier hair. Nick's evil twin.

Considering the tenacity with which she would delude herself later, it was remarkable how difficult she soon found it that morning, when delusion might actually have helped her, or at the very least bought her some time. She did not actually remember the night before, but she was not an idiot. It may all have been a terrible misunderstanding, but that man had been as naked next to her as she was. A mistake, but not an innocent one she could simply sneak out on. She had been careless, wanton, and treacherous and the only way she could think of to make it better was to confess everything to Nick as soon as possible. Get it into the open and out of the way.

She feared his reaction but mostly in the abstract. She did not stop to take into account the abandonment issues his biological father had saddled him with or Nick's preference for old, loyal friends. His desperate need for equanimity. Running down dirty streets until she managed to hail down a taxi, sitting tremulously in the back of the taxi, running up the hotel stairs to meet him, she thought of Nick as a kind of priest who would take her confession and forgive her sins. After all, she had not wanted to do it and fifteen minutes earlier she had honestly thought it _was_ Nick she was waking up next to.

She had still been panting when she confessed. She had not even given him time to ask where she had been before she blurted it out. He had clearly not slept well, and his concern and relief at seeing her had told her everything was going to be alright. When he moved to give her a hug she held him at bay and everything spilled out of her mouth. Like she was vomiting up her guilty conscience and did not want him to get it all over his shirt.

They had not talked since. Not as much as a brief reply to any of her many texts, e-mails or letters. She had sent him long handwritten letters, and he had not even written back to tell her to leave him alone. This silence had been awful, but not as awful as the way he had seemed to shrink before her that night, to dry out like a grape left in the sun. He had grabbed his bag, left whatever of his possessions were not already in it in the hotel and never come back. That was one time when he really did travel light.
Chapter Thirty-Three

Harper had before her a photo of Jennifer hanging on for dear life to a man about Nick's size, and perhaps vaguely resembling him. Jonas had taken the picture that night, and now Harper possessed a glimpse into one moment of the night in Rio. He had handed it over along with his account of that night, both from his own point of view and whatever Isadora had told him from hers. He had pieced that together piecemeal from hints and offhand statements, usually dropped without preamble, so unexpected that Jonas had hardly realized what they were talking about before it was over. Or so he had said to explain why he had never pushed Isadora to say more.

Trevor had bought the drinks. He had bought them for Isadora, and Jennifer had gotten drunk out of camaraderie, maybe because it was supposed to have been Isadora's last night with them, and Jennifer wanted to send her off in style. But Isadora had still hoped it would not be a farewell party, but more of an initiation rite before she was welcomed into the gang as a permanent member. So for once Isadora had drunk everything put in front of her and Jennifer had gamely shared in the cocktails to give Isadora a night to remember them by. She should perhaps have recognized that for a bad idea, considering how intent Trevor seemed on filling Isadora up, but she could not have known just how terrible an idea it was. That it would basically ruin her life.

But according to Jonas, Jennifer had not actually become drunk. She had not had the time. What had happened to her was more like a stroke or a sudden disorienting knock on the head. Jennifer had dragged Isadora away from Trevor and out to dance, sweating out the alcohol, while Trevor sourly minded their drinks. Only after they came back and resumed drinking did Jonas notice how slurred Jennifer's speech was, how uncoordinated her movements. A few minutes earlier she had danced like she had no care in the world.

Isadora had told Jonas she had been grateful to dance with Jennifer, to get a break from Trevor. She admired Nick, who to her dismay was nowhere around, but she found Trevor obnoxious and sensed him looking at her in all the wrong ways. She had returned to the table with Jennifer, both laughing and panting. Jennifer had grabbed the glass Trevor was handing to Isadora and taken a deep swig while Isadora escaped his clutches and slid around to Jonas' side of the table. Trevor, who was not so sober himself, had become furious with both of them, called them dancing cows and drunk drink-stealing sluts.

Jennifer had not taken that sitting down and had dragged Isadora back to dance. But the mood had soured and they quickly came back. Jennifer and Trevor argued loudly and then it hit Jennifer, the stroke or whatever it was Trevor had put in Isadora's drink. Though that was Jonas' conjecture, which he had only recently arrived at, he said. In any case, Jennifer's speech became slurred, by alcohol and emotion they all assumed at the time, and when she tried to stand up to go to the bathroom she had trouble keeping her balance. She grabbed Trevor for support because he was nearest, but he thought she had stood up to attack him and had pushed her off more roughly than she could handle in her precarious state. Jennifer tumbled down and it may well have appeared to an outsider like Trevor was abusing her. In any case that was all the reason the stranger had needed to come to Jennifer's rescue. The knight in shining armor, about whom all Isadora knew was that he had helped Jennifer to her feet and settled Trevor down.

Trevor must have briefly panicked, seen a catastrophe in the making when it was not the beautiful disposable hang-around, Isadora, but his best friend's girlfriend who took ill from his medication. What a relief for him when the knight in shining armor rescued the distressed lady and carried her off to his apartment. How frustrating it would have been on any other night to have a woman pulled out of his grasp like that, and what a godsend on that occasion.

None of them had fully realized how far gone Jennifer was, though looking back, Isadora admitted Jennifer had looked bad. She had thought it was shock at being pushed, so at the time she had not seen a problem with the stranger helping Jennifer outside for fresh air. And when she had promised to keep an eye on Jennifer all she had meant was that she would check up on her occasionally, not that she would be her chaperone. Isadora had been thinking more about when Nick would arrive than about how Jennifer was doing. Because it only really felt safe for her to be around Trevor when Nick was there too.

Jennifer disappeared into the crowd with her new man and Jonas had photographed the whole thing with his phone, like he was at a concert or some other kind of performance, while Isadora decided to give Nick a call and inquire when he would arrive. Neither of them saw Jennifer again until the morning after, though Isadora might have heard something, a car or a slurred voice. Jonas had never gotten this part straight because Isadora had been particularly vague and evasive about it. Yet she had alluded to it more than once when they had been out drinking late.

Trevor had been rattled by the encounter with the stranger, he had seemed nervous and sour before going home unusually early, soon after Isadora came back inside and said she was not feeling too well herself. Jonas had been the only one left when Nick did arrive and had helped him search for Jennifer. Eventually, Jonas had shown Nick the picture of Jennifer clutching the stranger.

That was the account of two drunk witnesses who had not seen reason to come forward until half a year after the fact, who had in that time travelled and celebrated and drunk with the man they were now more or less condemning. But Harper believed their story. It was more than enough reason for her to sit in her car, with Trevor's apartment in view, and wait for him to come out.
Chapter Thirty-Four

_

Letting go is the hardest lesson I've had to learn. Not of money and possessions, that's a walk in the park compared to the real thing: Letting go of someone you love. Because no matter how much you choose them, sometimes they won't choose you back. That's their choice, yours is how to deal with it. By now it should be no surprise that I recommend chilling the fuck out and letting them go their own way._

But you have invested so much yourself in this person and you are afraid of losing all that. Unfortunately this is what you must overcome first. You must learn to let go of yourself. That's how you achieve the power to chill out.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Everyone, including Nick, had accepted Jennifer's confession with such alacrity that she had not had time to qualify or explain or hardly even catch her breath before they were gone. It was like she had lit the fuse of a cartoon bomb, the way they practically jumped out the windows. The only one not ready to believe what she had told them was Jennifer herself.

She had never denied the sordid details. Only the moral truth. She remembered waking up next to the stranger but not having had anything to do with him before that. It had seemed to her she had been dumped into that situation through no fault of her own. That infidelity had been thrust upon her while she was looking the other way.

She had been drunk that night. Perhaps even very drunk. On the photograph Jonas had sent her later, she was clinging to the man whose bed she was destined for. She had looked far gone. So why had no one done anything? Taken her home. Thrown water in her face. Dipped her head in the toilet and flushed. Anything but what they did, which was nothing at all.

They were supposed to have been her friends. She knew Trevor had been happy to let her embarrass herself and the worse the better. Now she also knew that Isadora had harbored an agenda of her own, to which she, Jennifer, was an obstruction. But Jonas? Was he just hurt that when she had finally thrown herself at another man it had not been him? Had he stared at her through the lens of his camera like usual, thinking she had something coming to her for spurning his affections even when Nick was seemingly forgotten? Angry he was not even her second choice?

It was plausible. She had misjudged her limits and her so-called friends had left her to choke on the consequences. But even accounting for alcohol and bad friends she had a hard time seeing herself going home with a strange man. She had been drunk before. Very drunk too. But never with such consequences.

But maybe she did not know herself as well as she had thought. What had the last months of her life proved if not that she was capable of things she would never have imagined or wanted to imagine doing. Considering how low she had sunk since then, how could she keep denying that she had been capable of the original betrayal all along? She had wanted Nick to understand that she had not meant to betray him, that she was not that kind of person, but was that not a moot point by now? Now that she had become someone worse.

So it was no longer about Nick or what had happened that night in Rio, it was about every night since then, and every night that would follow when she would have to live with who she had become.

In the dormitory bunk she had paid for with the last of the money from her parents, Jennifer accepted that she was wrong and that deep down she had known this all along. That was why she had kept turning away at the last second. She had always known what the answer Nick had for her was: That she had made her own mistake, then compounded it by turning herself into someone she did not want to be. There was no cure, and it would be up to her and her alone to become a better person again. Someone new. Someone whose primary characteristic would be that she was not Jennifer, who had gone so wrong.
Chapter Thirty-Five

Harper supposed Jonas had put her on Trevor's track out of a sense of loyalty. Or maybe just to get it off his chest. Not to be saddled with the responsibility of being the only one to suspect that something vile had been piggybacking its way on their journey.

He might have felt guilty for a long time and maybe that was the real reason why he had helped Jennifer, hoping she would find out without him having to admit his suspicions and by that reveal his own complicit cowardice. He might also not have been absolutely sure, and felt it to be Isadora's responsibility to come forward, and only when the last hope of her doing anything like that had vanished was he pushed to say something himself.

It must have been gnawing at Isadora for some time too. Haunting her. She had seemed haunted. It was not unreasonable, Harper supposed, for Jonas to have hoped that at some point Isadora would crack and when she did it would all spill out. But she had held tight. She left Nick quietly when they returned from Egypt, seemingly still on good terms with him. He had probably worked his soothing magic on her, unknowingly making it impossible for her to yell at him and thereby find the courage to voice the recriminations. Instead she had told him peaceably enough it was time for her to go home.

Maybe her guilt had been too hard to ignore the more brazen Trevor's offenses became. As far as Harper knew, Isadora had not said anything at all to Nick about what she had seen. She had dropped hints to Jonas after they got back from Egypt, and he had thought those hints were the first cracks but they had only been whatever she did not want to take with her when she fled, almost Jennifer-like, from the whole thing.

Harper did not trust Isadora, but she believed in whatever truth had made Isadora flee. Her vague suggestions were exactly what Harper had been waiting for since the morning Jennifer first trudged out of her parents' apartment and into Harper's vision, so forlorn and alone. It had been almost satisfying to hear Jonas tell her about it. So welcome, in fact, that she had almost entirely neglected to make him suffer for his own part. But Trevor would suffer instead.

Harper rented a car, then. Her dates with Trevor were bound to be seedy, late-night affairs. The kind where a car to wait and to store your biscuits and water bottles in would be a blessing. And since Trevor liked to move around town spewing fumes of exhaust, a motor vehicle of her own was really the only way to follow him.

And follow him Harper must. She thought of Jennifer asking herself night after night what had happened and what she might have done or do to make it right. Harper knew how, when you returned to the same memory over the years you started to question certain details. Wondered if they were real or blanks filled in by your mind. Harper would follow Trevor and see for herself where the truth lay. It was not the first time she wondered if some kind of voyeuristic perversity had played a role in her vocational choices: First reporter, then private detective. Different excuses to pry into other people's lives.

She followed Trevor in the small hours of the morning, to his apartment off Sloane Avenue. This, she had learned, was also headquarters for the various businesses Trevor claimed he operated, though Harper was convinced these were mostly imaginary, invented to cover up the fact that his parents had bestowed upon him a central London apartment he could not otherwise have afforded. She made only weak efforts to dig deeper in his life and get to know him. He was the one member of the gang she did not really want to know better. She just followed him and let him lead her towards the validation of Jonas' story.

They arrived there, outside the nightclub, with Trevor stumbling out of the club with a woman on his arm. They walked awkwardly, like two people having only one pair of sober legs between them.

Harper was only a little disturbed to find herself smiling grimly as she fiddled with the key in the ignition.
Chapter Thirty-Six

_

The point of all this is not to make you wiser but to make you truer to yourself. You probably already know who you are but just can't see it for all the bullshit you've been told over the years, about who you ought to be._

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

In her hostel pillow-fort, surveying the wreck of her life, Jennifer saw on the positive side of things that she still had her good health, emotional and possibly mental health excluded, and that though she had been lying in her dormitory bunk for a long time already, hiding away behind her bedsheets, she was not really very hungry. And if she did get hungry she had in her possession a greasy falafel leftover from yesterday, wrapped in paper tissue and stored in the hostel fridge. Unless someone had eaten it by then or thrown it out, which other guests would sometimes do despite her initials in black permanent marker on the wrappings clearly identifying the falafel as her property.

On the negative side of things she was the wrong person. She was also broke, unemployed and alone at an age where a younger version of herself would have expected something more. But the worst thing was to be the wrong person, and to have become so through her own doing. Through her own poor responses to the challenges life had thrown in her way.

She thought of the woman she had been with Nick. A more bubbly, outgoing and proudly online woman. Someone with nothing to hide. Someone she could no longer be. She imagined what her blog would have looked like today:

Five unforgettable things I did in Egypt. 1) Wandered aimlessly around town, waiting for my ex-boyfriend. 2) Wasted chance to ambush him in Aswan, over the next twenty-four hours chastised myself for weakness. 3) Overdosed on street falafels, eating alone because if anyone spoke to me I would have broken down in tears. 4) Hot-air ballooned it over the Valley of Kings for something to show parents in return for their money, but was glued to phone because I just then learned of Nick's arrival. Kept asking pilot how much longer before landing, got ugly looks from other passengers. 5) Gave up and wallowed in self-pity in a dormitory pillow-fort.

She knew this kind of thinking was a mental loop that served no useful purpose, but she accepted that loopy mentality was a part of who she was now. And she knew this was just for starters. That leaving Jennifer behind and becoming another person would take time. A long time.

She was descending into the pit for the long haul, to wrest some new identity out of the throes of misery, and finding only little comfort in the hope that she might succeed, when she received a new communication from Jonas. It was another photograph of the worst night of her life, of herself being escorted out of the bar by a man who really did not look much like Nick at all. But more importantly, in this picture it did not look so much like she was clinging to him like a drunken baby koala, it looked like he was carrying her out. Like she was not able to walk herself. Why would Jonas send that now? Why had he not send it before when she had pressed him for anything he could remember of that night? Then she read the accompanying text, a vague story to be sure, but awful enough to go along with the picture. Isadora had left Nick, but that was the least of it. Jennifer read the whole thing a second time and a third, growing more and more numb at each reading.

Just as she had accepted responsibility, just as she was getting ready to endure an extended period of the next best thing to suicide, a complete remaking of herself, this doubt was thrown to her. More confusion, after she gone through so much of it already. Well, the words read like doubt and confusion. But that was not the effect they had on Jennifer. Rather the opposite.

Rather, the words just erased feelings, and left only an empty clarity and determination in their place. Jennifer had accepted that she had gone crazy, and though this new light on things suggested she might have been sane all along she found she was not willing to let crazy go just yet. Because then what would she do?

It would have been hard enough to come forward with such a thing the day after it happened, but now? After six month of manifest mental instability? She would sound as crazy as she had thought she was.

The reasonable thing to do would be to move on with her life. No one would know just how sane she had been the whole time except herself, but at least she would know and could find some personal sense of peace. But then there was Trevor going scot free and, according to Jonas' message, still going strong. And Nick having Trevor's back in Egypt. Seeing the things the Trevor did and choosing to not see what that meant. To let them slide. Choosing Trevor.

Jennifer made a choice of her own then. She chose remain crazy a little while longer, to see where that might take her.
Chapter Thirty-Seven

On the other side of that wall, across the pavement from Harper's car, dancing and drinking would be indulged in wildly and recklessly, on floors sprinkled with sweat and soda-tinged liquor. The fierce attack of dance music from inside was muffled on this side of the wall and in the car it sounded very distant, as if the whole night was taking place somewhere far away. But the laughter heard around the entrance was hysterical and right now.

Harper shuddered lightly. She could practically smell the chemicals from where she sat, and she loathed the smell of minds being altered, expanded, depressed, or otherwise tampered with. It was not a matter of principles, but of visceral repulsion. Harper sensed tiny piranhas in the veins, nibbling at sanity.

Trevor had entered alone and sober earlier that night, and now he was neither. Harper shivered again. Trevor leaned against the woman he was clutching and tried to stroke her chin. She brushed his arm off and it flopped limply at his side for a minute or so before he made another weak attempt and was similarly rebuffed. He would barely have been able to stand, would probably never have found his own way out of the club, had not Jennifer been there next to him, kindly helping him along.

It was difficult to recognize the resigned woman from Regent's Park in Trevor's determined companion, and harder still to reconcile the image with how Harper would like to think of Jennifer, but there was no use denying that was Harper saw was indeed Jennifer abducting Trevor.

The pair wobbled ahead on a laborious journey undertaken with meticulous patience and unwavering resolve on Jennifer's part. She was not hurrying Trevor along. She was not looking nervously around. It was almost as if she were in a kind of trance, though not as deep and distant a trance as the one Trevor was trapped in.

They were nearly at the corner when a woman came running after them out of the club. She was carrying three coats, one of which she had halfway put on herself, and was quite frantic until she spotted Jennifer and Trevor down the road and made a beeline for them. The new arrival glanced nervously around as she ran, though Harper could not tell if she was looking out for enemies or for help. Jennifer did not accept her own coat, or Trevor's. She forged on, carrying Trevor to the parked car she had waiting to take him away. The woman followed uncomfortably. Harper let them carry on a good distance, then she rolled her own car past and stopped with them in her rear-view mirror. She contemplated getting out of the car, but decided against it.

The trio reached their own car, and the women loaded Trevor into it. It was unclear how much, if at all, he was resisting. That is to say if he was being deliberately limp and floppy as a last resort of obstruction or if he was just unconscious. His front half was on the back seat and Jennifer was having trouble getting the rest of him in far enough to get the door closed. At some point her vigorous attempt became too much for the other woman. She placed Jennifer and Trevor's coats on the front seat and scampered off, more than a little drunk, uncertain what exactly she was witnessing and how much of it was her fault, but most of all terribly relieved to find she was not yet in too deep to escape.

Harper stared at her hands on the steering wheel. She imagined the scene: Jennifer following Trevor, like Harper but closer and more personal, watching him until she caught him doing to someone else what he had once done to her. And then turning the tables on him, with the help of this woman who might have been all about the derring-do and adventure when she was switching the drinks around but then had sobered up quickly when she realized how much it was not a game - and when she could no longer figure out to which extent she was the victim and to which extent the perpetrator. Doubts that Jennifer did not seem plagued by at the moment, though Harper could not tell into which camp Jennifer's certainty had settled.

Harper wondered if Trevor had even realized what was happening before it became too late to realize anything. She guessed not. He was not the careful type. Cunning, maybe, but not careful. He would have been drinking himself, impairing his own judgement, and he would have been expectant. Too focused on getting drinks into his victim to suspect that his was not the only foul play afield.

It was not standard operating procedure for date rapists, Harper knew, to engage with their victims before slipping them drugs. They usually preyed on open bottles and half empty drinks, setting their trap in the most craven and opportunistic manner and waiting to see who fell in it. Then they swooped in, once the prey was already caught. But Harper guessed Trevor enjoyed the personal touch of looking into his victims' eyes as they started to glaze over. Savoring the rush of superiority it no doubt gave to have the power to send someone to another world. Or spare them, if he felt like it. Relishing that nothing was decided yet - was that not the meaning of life? - That the hunt was still on. He was not a dog fetching quail too heavy with lead to fly, he was a wolf chasing a live, frisky fox. Except he would enjoy thinking himself too clever for the fox, who would never even know she was being chased down, even as it happened! Just, Harper thought, as Trevor would not have known he was being hunted himself. Would not have seen it coming, his own abduction and delivery into Jennifer's clutches.

Harper supposed Jennifer believed she was enacting some kind of poetic justice. She had been raped by proxy, and though the proxy had escaped in the mist of time, the mastermind had not. He was right there. Living in Jennifer's city, going to the same clubs as she would have had she not withdrawn to a more or less reclusive existence of sorrow and sandwiches after returning home from her travels. She would never find the Brazilian. But Trevor, she had known just where to find him.
Chapter Thirty-Eight

Don't overreact. Whatever has happened will not seem as important tomorrow, or in an hour, as it does now. Always make decisions in a chill state of mind. You want to pick the right door, not slam the nearest one just to make some noise.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer was speeding down the sparsely trafficked road. She told herself to take it easy. An intersection appeared closer than she had realized and the lights were red so she slammed down the brakes. From behind she heard the bump of Trevor tumbling from the back seat to the floor. She was glad the other woman had already washed her hands of the affair and fled, because that one would really have freaked when Jennifer deliberately sped up through the intersection and braked precipitously once more, just for sport. The moaning from the back was highly satisfying.

Jennifer knew she had expected too much to come from winning Nick back and had overestimated the awfulness of being without him. She had looked for the wrong answers in nearly the right place. She had blinded herself to the truth with poignant dreams of Nick. She had spun crazy daydreams around him instead of realizing the truth. Perhaps finally coming to the truth had not make her any less crazy, probably not, but it had made her a different kind of crazy.

Trevor's intended victim had begun to suspect as much. Jennifer had never asked her name or given her own, but she could tell the woman had not liked where things were going when they got to stowing Trevor into the car. Jennifer had been going to let her ride along. But this stranger, who had done her part so well until then, must have begun to nurse misgivings because at the car she started voicing them. Should they not call the police or an ambulance? Her eyes had darted around for the help that was nowhere in sight and Jennifer had felt which way the wind blew, so she had explained that they were hardly dealing with a life-threatening emergency and she would drive Trevor to the hospital and make the report to the police from there.

Trevor was halfway into the car at that point, lying face down on the seat with his butt just over the edge of the seat. Jennifer had restrained herself from kicking it and only jammed his legs into the car, at an angle that looked uncomfortable. She had pushed Trevor the final distance inside with the door and closed shut. The woman had excused herself from getting inside. She had lost her nerve but it was OK, she had done her part and Jennifer was prepared to do the rest.

Jennifer had comforted her accomplice, made her feel better about her complicity. Without interest, she took the phone number the woman gave her and promised she would call as soon as Trevor was in the custody of the proper authorities. The woman was at least tipsy and that probably helped her to see that everything was well in hand, that Jennifer knew what she was doing and was a responsible adult. Always nice to have one of those around. The woman might even sleep well that night.

Jennifer would not sleep at all. She had found the person with the answer, and the answer was very simple. It was the golden rule. Do to others as you want them to do to you. She liked that rule. The simplicity of it was bliss after so much confusion. Trevor had asked for this.

He would wake up in his own apartment. He would not have to find his way home the morning after, like she had. And certain circumstances could not be replicated, Trevor had no relationship to lose, for instance, but the confusion and the hazy unawareness of some violation that lay behind it, that could be arranged. The feeling that something was very wrong but not knowing exactly what that was.

Jennifer was just the agent of balance. Fixing herself would be a long and arduous journey, but fixing Trevor was an easy way to start. At least it was easy in the car. It was impersonal, giving Trevor a rough ride home. Jennifer did not really want the ride to end, particularly as she was not sure how well her new vengeful fury persona would hold up with Trevor's unconscious body before her, waiting to be beaten. She was aware of the irony that on her night of triumphant revenge she was more anxious about what was to come than her blissfully ignorant victim.
**Chapter Thirty-Nine**

Just a block from the club down the road the music was gone and the car was quiet. The neat polyester perfume of the seats floated above the sound of Harper's breath rising and falling in the hermetic bubble of the car. Faint traffic noises popped up now and again, people passing in bubbles of their own, while Jennifer was arguing with the other woman, who was apparently getting cold feet.

The car was attractively sterile. Like a hotel room. Neat but not exactly wholesome. All signs of life had been scoured, like a warning that she did not belong there. But she had personalized the space by spilling crumbs from the biscuits she was eating. They lay on the floor and were lodged in the cracks of the seat. A path of crumbs she could follow nowhere.

When Jennifer drove off alone, so did Harper. Trevor's intended victim had been smarter than Harper, in way, by getting out in time. If she was drunk enough perhaps she would even forget what she had contributed to. Lucky woman.

Beneath Trevor's Place, Jennifer got out of the car and slapped Trevor awake enough for him to help drag himself half-way out of the car. She fished the keys out of his pockets to unlock the front door to his building. Then she made him help her push him inside and up the stairs. Harper imagined getting out of the car and talking some sense into Jennifer.

"It is not as simple as it seems." She might say. "Revenge might not work for you. It might hurt you more than it hurts him." Or perhaps Harper could just yell at her until a neighbor came out into the hallway to let them know people were trying to sleep, and that would put an end to it. At this point Jennifer had already received whatever satisfaction she would get out of her revenge anyway, what followed would just make her question her own sanity further.

But Harper stayed in the car. She knew Trevor would not respond the way Jennifer hoped for. Jennifer had been plunged into a downward spiral of self-doubt and anxiety after her ordeal, but Trevor would just become angrier after his. If he woke up battered and confused he would act his insecurity out on someone else. Harper knew this, which in a way made her responsible, which she also knew. Which was why Harper would not let him out of her sight once Jennifer was done with him. She would be there when to stop cycle of vengeance then and let justice triumph in the end.

Sort of. Not for what Trevor had done in Brazil, though, and not for Jennifer's old-testament, eye-for-an-eye vengeance that you needed to be holy or sufficiently wronged to see the wisdom in. It would be a qualified triumph of justice.

Things were getting hairy in the car. Hard to navigate with a moral compass that had somehow lost its bearing. Harper felt they were not the most reliable of instruments, moral compasses, and she was very much on edge when her phone buzzed in her pocket and shook her out of her morality dreams. Into the practical world.

The voice on the other end was tentative and hoarse. "Harper Gill?"

"Yes."

"You gave me your card. Told me I could call."

"Who is this?"

"Jamie. Jamie Dalton. You said I could call anytime."

"Of course, of course." She had nearly forgotten about Jamie. Jennifer had made her forget. Pushed all of that out of her mind. "How may I help you, Jamie?"

"I'm on my way to your place."

Harper paused. Then remembered she had given the girl her card, with her office address on it. She made a snap decision.

"You know what, so am I. See you there."

She drove past the scene of the crime, the spot where Jennifer had parked the car. It was Trevor's own car, which was a neat touch in its way. He would wake up in his own apartment, his car parked out front and he was not likely to remember how it had got there or remained in such a pristine state relative to himself. He might call around and when nobody had seen him last night he might start to wonder. He might find a new dark presence in his life that would not go away.

Jennifer would leave it at that. She would know Trevor would only call an ambulance if that was the only way he could think of to get to the toilet. And she wanted him to suffer like she had, which required a particular kind of pain. The kind that comes from a broken mind not a broken leg. Jennifer was a believer in punishment that fit the crime, even if Harper knew Jennifer misjudged how Trevor would respond.

Harper found some comfort in the thought that while Jennifer was being criminally irresponsible, perhaps Harper might help young Jamie. Add some weight to the positive side of the scale. A counterweight to absconding her responsibilities the way she in some sense, the conventional one, had with Jennifer. Harper had learned not to rely on instincts to be consistent from day to day or on feelings to be a good guide to how she actually felt but she had found that doing small, good things impulsively hardly ever needed to be regretted. It was perhaps not much in the way of life-wisdom but it was what she had.

Jamie was sitting on the curb outside the office. Her face looked better, that was obvious even from a distance. Harper parked next to her and got out of the car.

"You can't park here." Jamie said.

Harper was surprised that Jamie cared for traffic regulations. Then again, Jamie was properly raised prim and proper when her parents were not beating her up. "It's just for a few minutes. What going on with you, Jamie?"

Jamie toyed with the fabric of her pants. Old beige jeans that were too large for her and looked borrowed.

"Have you been home yet?"

"I have a new home." She replied. "I just can't stay there tonight." She tried to sound like it was no big deal. "So I need somewhere else to stay."

"Is that why you called me?"

"Duh." Jamie said, but looked away. "You acted real concerned, like you wanted to help. But no big deal." She got up as if to leave yet lingered in front of the car.

"You can stay with me for one night. Get in the car."

When they were on the road Harper asked: "Did you have a fight with Leslie?"

"I don't want him to think I'm, like, his kept woman. That he can talk to me however he likes as if I need him so badly I'll have to put up with anything." Jamie swallowed. "Just because I'm homeless."

"Have your parents denounced and disowned you then?"

"Dunno. Haven't asked."

"It's not easy being independent." Harper said.

Jamie looked to see if she was being mocked. Finally she just said "no."

"You came here quickly enough." Jamie said. "You're just driving around at night or what?"

"Pretty much." Harper said. "Seeing the sights."

"Typical adults. Growing up is completely wasted on you people. You have all the freedom in the world and then you just drive around London wasting gas."

"Good thing I did."

"I would've survived another five minutes." Jamie said. "I mean, I appreciate what you're doing, but I can take care of myself."

"Didn't say you couldn't."

"It's just one night anyway." Jamie adopted a regal expression. "Tomorrow Leslie will beg for forgiveness and I'll consider moving in with him again."

Jamie sniggered and Harper smiled too.

"Sounds like you've got it all figured out." Harper said. Jamie nodded and the mood in the car was OK after that.

"Nice place you got here." Jamie said, when Harper invited her in.

"Don't mean to pry, but you, um, live here alone?"

"Yes."

"Cool. I mean the place is big enough for two people, that's all."

"Depends on the people." Harper replied. "But I guess that if I don't ask too many questions and wait until tomorrow to give you some sensible advice you may not want to hear, then it will be big enough for the two of us."

"Oh, sure." Jamie said, looking grateful but a little concerned about what she was in for in the morning.
Chapter Forty

Chilling the fuck out is the best revenge. It removes those who have hurt you and the hurt they have done from your life more efficiently than murder. It's easier and more legal too.

\- Nick Wade, author of Chill Wisdom: How Chilling the Fuck Out Will Save Your Life

Jennifer got off the bus two stops from Trevor's apartment and walked to the corner where she had a clear view of the main entrance. No ambulances or police officers were in sight. She thought that was a good sign, then changed her mind because they would have had no reason to cordon off the area or park an ambulance outside if they had been there earlier.

But surely he would not have told anybody. Would not even remember what had happened or who had done it. Waiting to catch a glimpse of him was still both necessary and impossible, though. She was too close to the scene of the crime but also not close enough. She could not make herself stay more than half an hour.

Following another night where she hardly slept she was back watching Trevor's door and stayed a little longer this time. She kept it up. Kept sleeping poorly and returning to stand guard at the corner. She had to know how bad it was. How bad she had been. It was a compulsion, but at least she was not stalking Nick anymore. Was not even really stalking Trevor. She was stalking the consequences of her actions, stalking herself in a way.

When she finally did see Trevor he did not look like a broken shell of a man at all. He was not even limping. From a distance she could not tell if she had done any damage at all. Probably not much, then. She had been too weak. To meek. She had terrified herself over what she had done, and for the rest of her life she would probably wonder just how egregious she was capable of being. What she might have done or might do to someone else. She had willingly gone to a very scary place, but apparently that was all she had done, gone there. Been there, seen that, run away.

Somehow she had managed to convince herself she had nearly killed him. She had imagined she had at least gone overboard. That surely he was maimed for life, just for starters, by her ferocious and cowardly assault on a helpless fellow human. She had felt dangerous. Not in a good way but in a way that frightened her. Existentially. Frightened her for what she had become. That worry again, but in a new form this time. She kept remaking herself into someone she did not want to be.

So there was actually some relief in watching Trevor buy groceries, though not much satisfaction. He did deserve punishment and she had probably not even knocked a single tooth out. There was as much disappointment as relief in that. She could have lived with one tooth on the casualty list. Maybe even two.

She had felt like she had let all hell loose. That she was soon to be discussed in hushed voices at office water coolers, after the mangled body of her victim was discovered and the forensic evidence pinned her to the crime. Her nails stuck in lacerated bones, skin cells torn from knuckles by blunt impacts but still treacherously revealing her DNA. For a few hours she had been praying Trevor would at least survive so she would get off with aggravated assault, and now it turned out he would not even have to go to the dentist before he showed his face in public. Weak. But probably for the best.

Whatever wicked saint watched over the stalkers of this world had pulled through for her one last time. But his reward would be one less follower, one less member of his cult of lone wolves. Jennifer was aware that over the last year she had made many promises to herself she had not been able to keep, but she felt she could keep this one.

This time really was different. This was the time to realize the fantasies she had hatched during her long incubations in the hostel dormitories of the world: To emerge from her cocoon as a new person. A person unencumbered by ever having been Jennifer.
Chapter Forty-One

Harper took over where Jennifer had left off because she had to. She knew that taking care of Trevor was a job for her and not for the younger woman. Harper was more calm and sensible. Jennifer was young, overwrought and in need of rest. What Jennifer really needed was early retirement and love. But really, who did not? Failing that, Jennifer needed a new life. An education, a job, and new relationships. She needed to stop looking back until she was balanced enough to keep herself from falling into the same muddy well of misery she had nearly drowned in the first time around.

It was important that Jennifer forget about Trevor, and that would be easier for her once Harper had handled him properly. Harper was patient and if she sometimes erred on the side of caution she nonetheless shared Jennifer's tenacity. Where Jennifer would rush in, Harper would wait. She would wait for a long time. She had no faith in Trevor. She did not know how long it would take for him to screw up again, but she was sure that he would, and then she would be there to catch him. Then he would not get away. All anyone would have to do was to observe and report. Which were things Harper could do. In that way, Trevor was right up her alley.

But Trevor was a nocturnal animal, he was night work. So Harper returned to her office, had coffee and lunch with Sal and admired the drive and techno-mania that had everyone in the building in its thrall. She returned unanswered calls from prospective clients. A few of them were still in the market for a private investigator so she set up meetings and had more lunches. Sometimes she lunched with Sal's colleagues and found they were very nice people. Enthusiastic and welcoming and more than willing to explain the intricacies of their work.

After dark she was back in the rental car, this time certain of the righteousness of her mission. Trevor would not learn from his mistakes. But Jennifer finally would. Harper kept her eyes open for any signs of her, but Jennifer was nowhere around. Even a dull dog can learn a trick or two in time, and Jennifer had learned to keep her head down and stay in.

Harper took on more work, which made it easy to forget about old cases. She heard no more from Jamie's parents but she kept in touch with Jamie, or rather Jamie kept in touch with her. Harper liked Jamie and had decided she would be there if ever Jamie needed to talk, which she sometimes did. At the same time Harper was careful not to become overly involved, not to try to fill the shoes of a parent but only the less tightly fitting ones of an older friend.

Her only real problem was lack of sleep, besides the feeling that no matter what happened next she would never get Jennifer entirely out of her mind. That though Jennifer was not following Nick or Trevor around anymore, she was never many steps behind Harper.
Chapter Forty-Two

Harper eventually followed them home, which in that case meant to the woman's apartment. Trevor was wearing gloves, which looked out of place but he probably thought he was being clever by not leaving forensic evidence. He fished out his victim's keys and helped himself to the contents of her wallet because why not when he had come so far. He induced the woman to help him drag her inside. Harper walked as casually as she could towards the building Trevor half-carried the woman inside.

Trevor had the door open and was walking inside backwards, pulling the woman after him. The operation demanded his full attention. He was not aware of his surroundings. His victim was not resisting. She seemed confused and embarrassed at her own helplessness to the extent she was aware of it. She was trying to be helpful without any idea what she was being helpful with. She was trying not to be such a burden to the nice man helping her home.

When both of them were inside, she ran to catch the door before it swung shut. She got a few toes in the way in time. The lock did not click into place, but from the inside, the door would appear closed. Through the crack she could hear echoes of the laborious ascent, feet on stairs and feet half-lifted and bumping clumsily, helplessly against the steps.

She wanted to slip in unseen and waited until she heard keys scraping against a metal lock, then the ominous swing of a door, and at that she peeked inside.

They had reached the first floor landing. Trevor was holding the door open, the woman looked like she had livened up a little. Maybe she recognized the comfort and safety of her apartment. Trevor swung his arm inside, his first intrusion, gesturing like he was the host and she was the guest. The woman stumbled in and he followed masterfully.

She slipped inside the building and took two silent steps up the stairs before she heard the apartment door close and the key turn again. A few seconds later she was staring at the blank and indifferent face of the closed door to the woman's apartment. Her name, the sign said, was Gemma.

She put her ear to the door but it was quiet. Trevor and Gemma must have moved deeper inside. She checked that she had a signal on her phone and dialed nine three times.

"I want to report something suspicious. A young man helped a woman into her apartment. I know he's not her boyfriend because I've been following his activities very closely. No, she was not resisting. She actually seemed happy to be home, but that's because he has drugged her. I did not actually see him put anything in the drink, no, but it's the sort of thing he's liable to do."

She sighed and pushed the call button. The call went through and the operator on the other end identified himself. He sounded middle-aged and weary.

"I heard screams and fighting from my neighbor's and she's not answering the door." She said. "I'm concerned because she lives alone and this is a good neighborhood, we never had trouble like this before." The operator wearily promised to send someone to have a look. From his tone of voice she might have been calling about a broken pipe under the sink, but the important thing was that the law was on its way.

The hall was eerily quiet once she put the phone away. She knew the average response time for emergency services in London was roughly thirty minutes. A lot can happen in that time and that was the average. What if they were having a bad day? She might have time to watch a full episode of The Bill on her phone before the actual cops showed up. The plan that had seemed so clear-cut at a distance, turning Trevor in on the occasion of his next misdeed and let justice take its course, suddenly seemed woefully insufficient. It had failed to take Gemma's wellbeing properly into account.

She carefully turned the doorknob but it was locked. She looked in vain under the doormat for a spare key. That was a long shot anyway. She could ring the bell, like the police would eventually do. That would disturb whatever was going on inside. And it would give Trevor the time he needed to clean himself up and concoct a story. He could claim he had been fixing the woman a cup a chamomile tea. It would not sound convincing, but it might sound just plausible enough for the benefit of the doubt.

But not if she could get inside and catch him in the act. Then he was done for. He would go straight from Gemma's apartment to prison. Of course, she would have to find a way to break in quietly for that to work. Did Gemma have a key stowed away in her mailbox? She had looked like the distracted type, although she had also been drugged out of her mind.

But she was overthinking things. A piece of advice came to her, not to worry about the right course of action but just do it. Was that something Nick had said? No, she did not think so, even if it sounded glib enough. Glib but maybe true.

She pushed the bell and held it. Nothing happened. She released but still no sound was heard. She tried again. And again. The bell was not working. At that point her anxiety for Gemma had grown palpable and she began knocking on the door like she was trying to break it down. The knocks were loud, and the silence following was even louder.

She ran down the stairs and tried the mailbox. Her fingers groped until, with amazement at the cold smooth touch, they came upon something key shaped. She fished the key out of the box and ran back upstairs, panting, only to find the door already open and Trevor standing in the doorway. He was alone and his face was flushed. He was fully clothed and he had his shoes and jacket on, ready to leave. He was trying very hard to look late for an appointment. When he saw who had disturbed him he froze. His air of having somewhere else to be evaporated. His face twisted into an angry grimace.
Chapter Forty-Three

Trevor was shaking his head with disgust.

"What have you done, Trevor?"

He had recovered from his initial shock and started moving towards the stairs and her.

"What do _you_ think you're doing here?"

"What have you done to her?"

"Get out of my way."

"Was this what you had planned in Rio for Isadora? It was, wasn't it?"

Trevor was shouldering past her but when she said this he turned around and pushed her against the wall.

"You don't know what you're talking about, crazy bitch."

His breath was in her face. She could smell alcohol on it. Not much, but enough. Enough to impair his judgement without impairing his movements much. Just the right amount to make him more dangerous.

She pushed him off her as hard as she could. Taken off guard, he stumbled down the stairs, losing his balance but managing to catch a grip on the railing. He righted himself, a few steps below her with nothing between him and the exit. He took his sweet time brushing down his jacket. His breathing was agitated and he had the air of a cornered animal, but at the same time he was smiling to himself and shaking his head incredulously. He took one slow and threatening step, then another so their feet were level. He was a head taller than she was. She met his gaze right before he struck her hard on the side of her head.

She cried out. A short and shrill cry after which she clenched her jaws shut, determined not to make another sound. Then she punched Trevor in the stomach, twisting her body with the blow to give it more power. He had not expected resistance and the force of it caught him off guard. He doubled over and gasped for air, but as he stumbled he grabbed hold of her jeans and pulled her off balance, too. His hands had caught both fabric and skin. It felt like he was trying to tear skin off her legs. He weighed her down so she could not lift her feet off the ground, but she was pushing against his shoulder as hard as she could, punching it to no avail. When he caught his breath and both his feet found purchase on the stairs he flung her violently down the stairs.

She landed with a crunch on her left shoulder and felt something she was sure would register as pain later on radiate down her arm and up her neck. It was a sickening feeling. She had to use her other arm to stop herself sliding down another step. She managed to scramble up to all fours just in time to see Trevor bearing down on her. This felt serious. There was no possibility of this being some spur of the moment aggression that would die down on its own. He was coming to hurt her.

She kicked hard at Trevor's shin as soon as he came within reach. He swore loudly and stepped heavily down on her ankle. She could not help it, she cried out again. She tried to ignore the pain and used every limb to crawl a bit away from him and get to her feet. He kicked her in the side, down the remaining stairs. She hit her head against the wall where she landed, tears of pain forcing their way out. She felt her eyes were betraying her. She was clenching her jaw as hard as she could but it did not help with either the pain or the tears.

She fought her way up again, stumbling to her feet. Prepared to fight for her life. To bite off a finger or an ear or anything else. Trevor came at her, but then he continued past her and out the door. Then she saw an elderly man standing in the doorway to the ground floor apartment, wearing pants and an old t-shirt and nothing on his feet. They must have woken him up. The man was bent over and arthritic and quiet, but Trevor had seen him and that had been enough to make Trevor hesitate and reevaluate his situation. The door closed quietly behind Trevor after he had flung it open and run away.

The elderly man helped her inside his apartment and into a chair before calling an ambulance. She told him as calmly as she could about the woman upstairs, who might need attention first.

The police arrived twenty-five minutes after the first call, better than average. At that point she was in considerable pain, in particular around the shoulder, but the pain was tempered by pride and for the first time in a while a feeling that she had nothing to hide, which was of course only partly true. But she had saved Gemma. And the old man had seen Trevor kick her down the stairs.

He kept fussing about her, the old man, apologizing for what had happened as if it was his fault or like he felt guilty for letting Trevor escape and wanted to make sure he was providing her some kind of assistance. She kept reassuring him she was profoundly grateful to him just for opening the door.
Chapter Forty-Four

At the trial the gang was briefly reunited and even to some extent reconciled. Not Trevor, of course, but everyone else. Even Isadora was there, though not to stay. Just for the occasion. They had wished each other good luck, and Harper had promised herself to put Jennifer behind her. The rest of them too, but especially Jennifer. Not to look her up online, not to return to her in thoughts so often. Of course, thoughts sometimes go their own way but then she would turn them around and march them in another direction.

But it was irresistibly fascinating to test the limits of just how much you could learn about a person with the right social media access. And it was hard to look away from the rather heartwarming pictures of Jennifer and Nick after the trial. Together again but not together, and Jennifer looking happy enough even though she was not exactly well.

That she was not well had been clear at court, where Trevor's lawyers had taken full advantage and painted a garish picture of Jennifer's mental state, to present her as the ultimate source of the unprovable charges against their client's actions and character. Ultimately, their efforts had been in vain, except to the extent they had publicly humiliated Jennifer. Which had perhaps been something of a relief in the final analysis, to have her own thoughts voiced out to her and then countered by eloquent counsel. And it had compounded Nick's feelings of guilt. But it had not a pleasant experience as it took place.

Jennifer and Nick had been responsible for most of the reconciliation within the gang, and most of that was between themselves. There were pictures of them together in Regent's Park eating sandwiches, and of a weekend trip to Cornwall.

Jennifer had finally had Nick to herself, and Nick had staved off being alone for a little while longer. He would adapt readily enough when the time came, but he would never really have to. He would not lack for companionship because the universe seemed socially balanced around him. When one person left him someone else showed up. That was not Jennifer this time. But though they were not reunited in a romantic relationship, it appeared they both had much to talk about regardless. A lot of healing to help each other with.

And not just Nick helping Jennifer. It was confusing, and also a little absurd, but it appeared to help Jennifer most of all to help Nick recover from the loss of his oldest friend and from the realization that his oldest friend had been something of a monster in his private nightlife. So they had both had some use for each other for a while, until Nick went traveling again while Jennifer stayed home to mull over her future.

There the online trail sort of petered out, and despite her promises to herself, it was difficult for Harper not to get lost in thoughts of Jennifer planning her future. Even though she ought to be planning her own future instead. Or rather to jump into it. The plan was clear, as work was steadily picking up. It demanded attention much more urgently than Jennifer and was getting it, but still needed more.

Harper was in the middle of regretting her priorities when the doorbell rang, and Jamie's voice chimed out of the speakers.
Chapter Forty-Five

Jamie cast off her shoes in the hallway. It was only her second visit to Harper's apartment but she appeared to feel quite at home. She was in a good mood, her face had recovered its natural soft contours and the discoloration had faded so much that you might not notice it at all, if that side of her face was in the shadows.

"Sorry for dropping by unannounced. And don't worry, I'm not going to move in. I just wanted to thank you for everything you've done."

"Happy to help."

"I've brought you some Belgian chocolate as a token of my gratitude." Jamie smiled, elated and a little embarrassed. Being chirpy fit Jamie like someone else's jacket, but a nice one, and she appeared genuinely moved by some uplifting spirit.

"Thanks, Jamie. That's very considerate of you." Harper opened the box and ate a piece, she had a hard time resisting chocolates of any kind. "Continentally delicious. Here, you have one too. And a cup of tea, maybe? I was just about to make some for myself."

Jamie took a chocolate with a caramel hieroglyph on top, and declined the tea. "I won't stay long." But having said this she moved cheerfully further inside. Light on her feet, almost dancing.

"How are things with you, Jamie?" Harper asked, containing a smile. She had the impression Jamie had come in part to be asked that question.

"Oh, I'm alright. In fact, Leslie got me the job at the restaurant like he promised. Now I can pay my share of the rent and I won't ever have to depend on anyone again. I can finally be myself." She beamed at Harper, and followed her into the kitchen.

"That's great, Jamie. You're excited and you're going to make your own way. That's wonderful. Good that Leslie kept his promise. And how is he these days?"

"He's good. We had a small fight as you know, before I stayed here. Nothing serious. I was just sensitive about being his dependent. Like he would think he owned me or something. But we're good now."

"And may I ask how things are with your parents?"

"Tsk." Jamie said. "You mean you haven't heard from them?"

"Afraid not. I don't know if there were entirely happy with my services last time."

"Or maybe they're just happy to have me off their hands."

Jamie wandered into the living room.

"Ooh, is this you when you were younger?" She called.

"Yes, that's me." Harper said as she entered the room carrying the tea.

"Where are you in this picture? It looks exotic."

"Cornwall. Are you sure you don't want a cup?"

"Alright, I'll take a small one." Jamie picked out a bag of the little wooden container on the tray and dropped it into the steaming water Harper poured.

"Did you travel a lot when you were young?" Jamie asked. "With your boyfriend? Was he your main guy, the one in the picture?"

"Yes." Harper smiled. "We traveled quite a bit. Now, here's the cup and let me just put this aside." She closed the lid on the laptop and put it away down the drawer of her desk.

"Where did you go?"

"Where did we go? Where didn't we go?" Harper took a sip of the tea but it was too hot and she burned her tongue. Rookie mistake. "We must have visited every continent at least once."

"Even Antarctica."

"That's the once."

"Cool. I've always wanted to go on adventures. What was it like?

"Chilly. And empty, except for the occasional horde of penguins or birds."

"Penguins are birds too."

"Ah, you see we were not exactly polar explorers, just happy amateurs. We had a guide who would have known all about penguins being birds."

"But it didn't last?"

"No." Harper shook her head agreeably.

"I married someone else instead. We lived in London for five years of English romance. But that didn't last either."

"Good! I don't mean to be rude, but English romance... come on! A relief to get that over with. And then you settled down here on your own and became a detective and get paid for spying on people?"

"Pretty much."

"Cool. Maybe that's what I should do with my life. Travel the world and solve crime."

"When you say it like that it sounds more interesting than it is. I don't actually solve crime as much as I watch it unfold. Sometimes the evidence I gather is used in the prosecution of crime. But me, I'm just a private eye, exactly what it sounds like."

Jamie nodded solemnly. She appeared to lose herself in the possibilities of life.

A little while later, Harper felt an obligation of sorts and cleared her throat: "So, Jamie, what are your feelings on the possibility for a reconciliation with your parents?"

Jamie's attention returned to the room. She looked straight at Harper without looking her in the eyes. Instead she appeared to focus somewhere on Harper's forehead. "I don't need one. That's my feeling."

"Yes, certainly. And maybe it's none of my business. I mean it hardly is, but I can't help thinking that seeing as you're almost all grown up and independent, perhaps you could establish your relationship with them on a new footing."

"You think I need their help?"

"I mean because later on time might have created more of a gap between you. And they won't be around forever, you know."

"I believe you are right about both those things."

Harper did think of the possibility that Jamie might not want to wash dishes in her boyfriend's restaurant for the rest of her life and that her parents would almost certainly be thrilled to pay for her education if she decided to go down that route. At the very least, it would give them a story to tell about their daughter at parties and fundraisers. A reason why she was never around.

"You probably miss each other more than you let on."

"But shouldn't it be, like, their responsibility to let it on?"

"Yes, of course. And please forgive me for bringing it up at all. I felt I owed them that, given our history."

Jamie did not give a response to this and Harper decided to let the subject drop. Jamie was a smart girl, smarter than Harper had been at her age.

"I knew a man once who would say I should just chill out." Harper offered, after a moment of silence.

"Wise words."

"I don't know, actually. Thinking back, I wonder if he wasn't kind of an affable idiot."

Jamie laughed a little. Harper smiled and shrugged apologetically.

"Did it work for him, at least, his advice?"

Harper thought it over. "I guess it did."

"Cool." Jamie nodded, and started to get up from the couch.

Harper smiled at her and got up too. "You know, I think I've figured out the secret to it. Which is that this kind of advice works best if you don't take it too seriously."

Jamie frowned. "Well, duh."

They looked at each other and Harper smiled again, then cleared her throat and straightened her pants and said: "You're right. I'm probably overthinking things. That's a habit of mine."

