Jim shook his head. “You’re not getting it! If he put down the nails before we landed, that means he wanted me—well, you, really—stuck here from the beginning. See?”
She frowned. “I don’t know. . . . I mean, you don’t know it was him who sabotaged the plane. Maybe he just meant to keep you here after you’d landed. Why would he sabotage his chance of escape?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t trust him.”
“Well.” She was getting angrier with him by the moment. First he didn’t want to go back for Lux, and now he wanted to leave Nicholas behind too? “Why don’t we ask him, then?”
“Ask him?”
“If it was him who sabotaged the plane.”
“As if he’d admit to it!”
She looked at Nicholas. He was scuffing the sand with his shoe and watching them, his hands in his pockets. He didn’t look dangerous or untrustworthy. He looked . . . lost. Alone. Desperate.
“Just . . .” Jim stopped, ruffled his hair, started over. “Come with me. Just you.”
“Jim! I have to help them!”
“And you can help them, I promise! But after we leave this place.”
She ran her teeth over her lower lip as she stared at him, his eyes wild and imploring, then nodded slowly, swayed by his intensity.
He looked relieved. “Thank you. You tell him. I’ll get the plane ready.”
When she walked back to Nicholas and told him, her eyes downcast, that she and Jim were going without him, he went very still and his eyes flickered to Jim. “Oh?” he said simply, his hand tightening on his backpack.
“I’m sorry. I am. But I’ll come back soon, I swear, with help.”
“And who will help us?” he asked. “Who will care?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’ll find someone.”
He shook his head and lowered his backpack to the ground, looking for all the world like a little boy who’s was promised a trip to Disney World and then told the trip was canceled. Her heart ached. She didn’t think he was the kind2 24
of person Jim thought he was. Even if his friends had roughed Jim up, that didn’t mean it was Nicholas’s fault. He hadn’t been there. Whatever Mary’s problem was—she’s a psychopath, after all—they couldn’t blame Nicholas for it.
“Don’t go,” said Nicholas suddenly. He grabbed her hand. “Stay with me. We’ll take the chopper. You and me and Lux. We’ll go back and get her and fly out of here.”
“Nicholas . . .” She watched Jim, who was prepping the plane for takeoff.
“Sophie, please.” He shifted so that he interrupted her view of Jim, his eyes wide and his brows drawn together. “Please help me. I need you. All these years, it was you who kept me going. It was the thought of you, out there, that made me believe escape was possible. That another life was possible. You came all this way to what? Just leave? Just walk out on us?”
She wanted to yell in frustration. Decisions warred one another in her mind, the voices of Jim and Nicholas and Moira all clashing together, pulling her in different directions, until she felt she would snap into three separate pieces.
“I . . .”
“Sophie!” Jim called. He was wading ashore, the spray of the surf drenching him and plastering his hair to his forehead. “We’re ready!”
She turned to Nicholas, biting her lip. “I have to . . . I just . . .”
She turned and ran, clutching her arm painfully, toward Jim. A wave of dizziness swept over her and she nearly fell headfirst into the sand, but he caught her and steadied her.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Plane’s waiting.”
The Cessna bobbed on the surf, tethered by a long cord to a nearly horizontal palm. The beach bowed inward, creating a small, shallow bay; Sophie could see bright yellow and blue schools of fish darting in complex patterns over the white sand, and further out, a cluster of pink and white coral formed a kind of underwater city, bristling with anemones and long, stringy seaweed. The water cast pale, undulating reflections on the trunks of the palms and across her and Jim’s skin, giving the impression that they too were underwater.
“We’ll have to swim out,” he said apologetically. “I checked her over, ran the engines. She should fly, but there’s no guarantee.”
“Right.”
He looked at her sharply, his amber eyes filled with concern. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah? Because you lost a lot of blood.”
“I’m okay!”
“Geez. All right.” He backed away.
Sophie felt bad for snapping at him after all the trouble he’d gone to in helping her, but her thoughts were racing and she was having difficulty focusing on what he was saying.
“Sophie, come on!” He’d gone several steps ahead, but she remained fixed in one place, her feet sinking into the sand.
Slowly, she shook her head. “You go. I’m going back.”
“What?” He gripped his hair, a gesture she was beginning to understand was his token expression of exasperation. “But—no! I can’t let you! It’s too dangerous.”
“Since when do you let me do anything, Jim Julien?” she replied hotly. “Lux is my sister and Dr. Crue is my mom. If I run away now when they need me the most—what does that say about me?”
“If this is about trying to fix the mess your mom made—”
“Yes, it is about that! But it’s also about doing what is right! It’s about family, Jim.” She forced herself to relax a little, and unclenched her fists. “I know you don’t want to get involved here, and I don’t want you to. Go home, Jim. Send someone to help. But I can’t do that. I can’t walk away. Because when you love someone, that’s what you do—you get involved. You get so involved that their pain becomes your pain. You get involved to the point where there’s no getting uninvolved because that’s what love is, and that’s what family is. Don’t you get that? Can’t you understand it? The Jim I knew ten years ago would have understood!”
He stared at her for a moment, his form a dark silhouette against the wisps of pale pink light on the far horizon. “Don’t tell me about getting involved,” he said darkly. “I know all about getting involved. Getting involved means getting hurt, and I don’t want you to get hurt, Sophie. You mean . . . you mean a lot to me, and God knows I can count the number of people I care about on one hand, so how can I let you go back?”
“I told you I would pay you to bring me here,” she said, her tone flat. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can, I swear. I’m good for it. But I no longer require your services.”
“That’s all this is?” he asked, spreading his hands. “A service? A job? I’m just the pilot to you? A nameless cab driver that you can shut the door on and forget ever existed? Are you telling me that I mean nothing to you, after all these years?”
“Jim, I didn’t mean—”
“Look, I did get involved, Sophie, the moment I decided to go back for you. I risked my neck to save yours and now you just want to go throw all of that away. Well, fine. If I’m just the guy you paid for a service, if that’s all I am—then fine. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Jim!”
“Go on. Go back. Try to save your sister and your mom and get yourself shot or whatever. I don’t care. I’m just the pilot, and you’re just another client.”
“I didn’t—” She groaned in frustration; she didn’t want him to be angry at her. She didn’t want to part like this. He had risked his life for hers and she felt like an ungrateful jerk for blowing him off, but she realized she couldn’t have it both ways—she couldn’t have Jim and save her family. She’d have to just let him think she didn’t care, or he’d never let her go. “You’re right,” she whispered. “That’s all this is. Sure, we had fun a long time ago, but now . . . I paid you to do your job, no more than that, and now I—I’m done with you. Go home and don’t try to stop me.”