a safe distance out from one of his paranoid phases (otherwise, he’d just end up in a Reddit conspiracy theory spiral), so this was a positive sign about my brother’s current mental state. Distracted by this—and by the lingering sensation that I had made a critical error—it took me a minute to fully absorb what Benny had written under the photograph. When I did, I felt as if the entire mountain was about to collapse under my feet. Boulders shaking and rumbling, tearing themselves from the earth in order to tumble in unison down the hill and smash everything that lay below.
VANESSA WTF ARE YOU DOING HANGING OUT WITH NINA ROSS WITHOUT ME?
I stood too long on the top of the mountain, trying to wrap my head around my brother’s message. Nina Ross? That name again. At first I thought that I might have conjured it up, a vestige from my mother’s diary earlier in the week. But I read Benny’s comment again, and the name NINA ROSS was still there; and it still made no sense. Benny had to be hallucinating again. Because there was absolutely no way that Ashley Smith was Nina Ross.
But Benny had phone privileges. Benny only got phone privileges when he was lucid.
What did Nina Ross even look like? I still had only the haziest recollection from that day we’d crossed paths at the café. Didn’t she have…pink hair? Wasn’t she chubby? A pimply Goth, with self-esteem issues. That hardly sounded like the toned, self-assured woman who was waiting for me down the hill. And yet…it had been twelve years. All that could have easily changed with a diet and a makeover. (Just ask Saskia.)
Was it possible?
I dialed my brother’s phone number with numb hands, half-frozen with the cold, my heart thumping so hard I worried that it might jump out of my chest.
My brother answered on the first ring, his voice breathless and squeaky. “Seriously, Vanessa, what the hell? Nina Ross! Oh my God. What’s she doing there? Did she ask about me? How long has she been back in town?”
“That’s not Nina Ross,” I said. “It’s my rental guest. She’s a yoga teacher named Ashley and she’s here with her boyfriend, Michael, who’s a writer. She’s from Portland. Her dad was a dentist.” I willed this into truth with the conviction of my voice.
“Well, maybe she changed her name. It happens. Seriously—ask her!”
“Look, it’s not her,” I said, my words a little too sharp. “Sorry, Benny. Probably you’re just remembering her wrong. It’s been a long time. Do you really remember what Nina Ross looked like?”
“Of course I do. I still have photos of her from back then. And I already looked at them to double-check because I knew you were going to say I was crazy. Here, I’ll send you one.” I could hear him fumbling with his phone, the scrape of his sleeve across the microphone, and then a moment later my phone chimed with a text.
It was a low-res selfie, taken with an early-model camera phone. The shot was grainy, but I immediately felt an uneasy ping of recognition: It had been taken inside the caretaker’s cottage. Benny and a teenage girl lay side by side on the gold brocade couch, their faces pressed up against each other as they made silly faces at the camera. They looked young and unfiltered and pleased with themselves, tangled up in each other like puppies tumbled in a pile.
The girl had dark brown hair with fading pink tips; her eyes were rimmed with heavy black liner. Her skin was lightly pimpled and there was a softness to her chin although she was certainly not as overweight as I remembered. There was something else underneath all that though: the raw, unformed material from which a harder, more savvy woman would someday be carved.
Benny was right. The girl lying there was Ashley. (Or: Ashley was Nina?) The years had passed, and she had changed a lot (she was much improved, aesthetically speaking); but it was there in the curve of her smile, in the wide dark eyes against the olive skin, in the self-assured conviction with which she gazed at the camera: Nina Ross.