Andy cackled. “I’ll bet you one thing. If Bree hasn’t conquered the world, I’ll be the most successful.”
Bree slapped the mortarboard from Andy’s hand. “Dean Fulwood talked about not getting ahead of ourselves on the road of life, but to enjoy the journey.”
Eliza stared beyond the group, wistfulness softening her expression. “He could find a way to jam that marketing slogan into anything.”
Andy threw his arms wide, drawing them into the close circle they had become. “So I’ll see you in Australia in fifteen years. But that’s way off. Who’s up for a party?”
One
Present Day
With the gloss of their fifteen-year reunion fading, the buzz of excitement settled into the sharp ache of anxiety. One set of American thumbs twiddled on the cold gray table in the interview room of a police station parked in the red dust of the tiny town nestled in the heart of Australia. Fingernails of a second tourist beat an impatient tattoo, while another set of American nails was already halfway chewed away.
The ordeal started long before the police car ride back into civilization, the unexpected bookend to a reunion that had started days earlier. Their story—which they each thought to be unbelievable—turned out to be a variation of someone else’s. Except one, which went unspoken. That someone else should have been sitting in the empty chair, but the police had found no trace at all, save for a neat stack of rocks at their campsite.
There was no question they would stay around—the police were not keen on them leaving—but there was no way they could leave one of their group behind. Silence fell on the windowless, white-walled room, punctuated by drumming fingernails.
A hard swallow and a jerked thumb toward the closed door. “How can we explain it to them?”
The fingernails stopped in midtap. “It has to be the tour group. I can’t think of how else to explain it.”
A shake of the head and a lowering of bitten nails. “At least you two didn’t have to run for your life.”
A quiet voice, buried deep in thought, said, “Still, there’s a part of me that’s glad I did.”
Nodding, the three glanced at the chair where their missing friend should be sitting.
Distant footsteps grew louder in the corridor before they stopped outside their door.
Three heads pivoted. “Do you reckon that’s—?”
“It could be that detective. He looked like he doesn’t believe us for a second.”
Outside the interview room, Detective Green scratched his graying temples as he clutched to his chest a notepad filled with question marks and scrawled, angry arrows. And no answers.
“How do you want to play this?”
Detective Sergeant Winter thumbed through a transcript. “Their individual interviews came up with no red flags. Weird, definitely, but not suspicious.”
“Eddie says he’s got nothing to do with it, and I tend to believe him.”
“What do we do with what they said about their friend?”
The senior detective shook his head. “I don’t even know what to make of that or where else to start looking.” He turned the door handle.
Two
Five Days Earlier
Waves of passengers surged back and forth past Bree in an ebbing tide, half happier than her, half more relaxed. From her vantage point behind the tiny square of Laminex that passed for a table at the Rock & Brews café at LAX, it was easy to see who was flying out on their exciting vacation and who was returning to the every day, their expressions already recoiling under tension.
Bree’s fingers toyed with the apple she’d bought with reluctance. The money from Sam’s extra shifts at the nursing home would fly her to Australia, fulfilling a promise made in another time by another Bree, but their straining family budget hadn’t stretched to the pricier snacks on the menu. Overpriced fruit it had to be.
Another time. Before Sam and his belief in her—a salve for the wound to her self-esteem, opened around the kitchen table of her childhood. An easy target for a wounded sniper. Before the girls and their love of music. She was glad to have passed that on and hoped she could guide them to avoid the same mistakes she’d made.
Time ticked on, a slow drip after the flooding rush of a race to the airport and boarding a flight among family tears, most of them hers.
Bree stared at the musicians whose photographs paraded on the café’s signage. McCartney and Lennon. Jagger. Springsteen. Musicians she’d hoped to join in the future of her past, but they weren’t in her present. The bitter pang of disappointment bit down on her hard. Bree used to hope her music would make a big splash. But after floating for years, she felt like she’d never even made a ripple. And she was still paddling in her small pond.
She banished the creeping negativity with a practiced hand and summoned back the excitement that had warmed her the minute the plane had pushed back from the gate in Nashville, the space around her quiet, free from demands. A space of her own.
A chunky guitar riff drifted across her table, followed by an angel voice Bree knew had been crafted by a sound engineer in a cramped, smoky studio like the one in which she worked on the wrong side of the mixing desk. The TV screens filled with the latest sneering teen sensation, delivering a song written by someone with real talent. Someone like she used to be.
Bree checked her phone. They’d be boarding their flight to Sydney in just over an hour. Where were they all? She tried Eliza’s cell phone again with no success.
Bree turned over the apple in her fingers. Ten days in the heart of Australia with old friends. She smiled at the memory of Sam’s reassurance as she boarded her LA flight.
“Look, maybe you aren’t the person you used to be—who is?—so take some time away to rediscover that. Forget about the three of us and fulfill the promise you made to your friends. Once again, Breezy, you are completely overthinking it.”
She was lucky to have Sam, a man happy for her to reconnect with old friends while he guarded their princesses—in an age where some of her girlfriends seemed to use their weekly coffee date to moan about men making their lives a misery. Self-doubt threatened to engulf her without her white knight by her side.
This trip was more than fulfilling a promise. It was the reporting back of what they’d done and who they’d become. At graduation it was all about unfulfilled potential. Fifteen years down the track, it felt a lot like regret.
The outgoing crowd parted like the Red Sea for a tall, elegant woman, somehow separate from the crowd while immersed in it, wearing large sunglasses pinning down jet-black hair at her crown. Bree breathed easier as she waved. Recognition eased across Eliza’s face, and she nudged her way through the traffic, her smile on high beam.
Eliza hadn’t aged a day since graduation. Following her rise through the ranks of fashion glitterati from the comfortable sidelines of social media warmed Bree’s heart but had frozen her self-confidence. Her old friend had everything—the looks, the figure, the apartment, and the high-powered job.
Eliza enveloped Bree in an embrace, and the diamond eagle on Eliza’s jacket scratched her nose. “Breezy, it’s so good to see you.” As Eliza stood back and held her by the shoulders, Bree felt a foot smaller and thirty pounds heavier in her old friend’s shadow. Her own red hair had been her greatest asset in college. Now it wasn’t quite a liability, but it had slid down her balance sheet.