Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
“Legal blindness is a certainty.” The bald doctor whose name my brain refused to hold on to had taken off his glasses, his features soft and sympathetic. “But a more-than-negligible percentage of patients retain a measure of central vision. Saying that, I don’t want to lie to you or give you false hope. Such vision retention isn’t guaranteed—and where it is present, that vision is in no way clear.”
All I could think as he pronounced that sentence was that his own eyes were as blue as Bea’s had been before they stopped being anything at all. At least they hadn’t rotted. Darcie hadn’t given them the chance.
She’d burned her sister’s eyes, burned Bea.
4
Countless road photos—and twenty kilometers on a spine-adjusting gravel road later—we came to a halt in the stark beauty of an alpine world wholly apart from the primal forests and crashing waves of the coast. Calf-length golden grass waved as far as the eye could see, the jagged peaks of the Southern Alps soaring beyond, their caps encased in ice. No green anywhere. Just gold and white and granite.
An old Land Rover sat on the other side of a bridge that looked like it had been built in the early nineteenth century, all dark iron and rust. As for the vehicle, its side was dented and scratches marred most of its light brown finish, but the tires looked new.
“Luna!” Darcie’s voice rang out over the rush of the creek filled with pristine glacial melt. It was beautiful, frothing white at the top, crystalline blue-green below.
Nothing, however, could compare to Darcie’s luminous beauty.
Back before she’d ended up with Ash, we used to joke that if she and Kaea had kids, those kids would be the most infuriatingly beautiful people in the world. But if Kaea’d ever had thoughts in that vein about Darcie, he’d kept them to himself. Friendship mattered to Kaea.
Him and Ash, teammates on the rugby field. Fullback and halfback.
And Ash with a thing for—
Don’t go there, Luna. Only pain that way.
Darcie waved from the other side, all shining golden hair that rippled down her back and skin kissed by the sun, the gentle breeze ruffling the lacy white of her ankle-length sundress. I couldn’t see her eyes from this distance, but I knew they were as blue as the summer sky.
Bea’s had been a sharper, more penetrating hue, her hair a luscious chocolate.
“Is that thing even safe!” Phoenix’s voice as he poked his head out the driver’s side window and pointed to the bridge.
“We’re engineers, you asshole!” was Ash’s rejoinder.
He was tall and slender and as blond as Darcie; together, the two of them were the perfect magazine couple. Golden bookends. It would’ve been easy to say it was all a facade, but seeing them together three years after their gorgeous spectacle of a wedding, Ash’s hand lying against Darcie’s lower back, I realized it felt real.
“Let’s do this, boys and girls,” Phoenix said, then began to make his way across the old bridge.
It creaked ominously, the waters roaring around us.
“Wait! Wait!”
Phoenix came to an immediate halt at my cry. “What? Is the bridge falling apart?”
“No.” I pushed open my door. “I need to get shots of you driving across.”
“Jesus, Luna.” Vansi pressed a hand to her heart. “You idiot!” But she was laughing as she said it.
“Sorry! Artistic temperament and all that.”
I heard Kaea join in the laughter before I shut the door and scampered on ahead over the old wooden boards of the bridge. I wasn’t sure the boards should be wooden, but what did I know? From what I could tell, the struts and everything else had been formed of metal, so the wood was likely window dressing to help make it a smoother drive.
Once in position halfway across the bridge, I made a “come on” gesture and Phoenix crawled forward. Had it been Kaea in the driver’s seat, he’d have revved the engine and pretended he was about to race forward, but Phoenix had always been far more stolid and steady.
A calm foil to Vansi’s more tempestuous personality.
Now, my best friend poked her head out the window on one side, while Kaea and Phoenix did it on the other, and I snapped away. I kept on walking backward as I did so, image after image layering itself into my mind. My visual memory had always been acute, and it might yet save my sanity.
Lifting a palm in a motion for Phoenix to halt, I turned and grabbed multiple images of Darcie and Ash from my vantage point on the bridge. The wind tugged at her hair and dress. The sun made his eyes sparkle. Just like it had that day at the campsite when I’d photographed him with Bea, their laughing faces side by side as she rode his back across a large patch of mud.