Chapter Thirty
Dec
“Honey, I’m home!”
I grinned at my silly joke as I stepped inside the resort room I shared with Liv for as long as we were on the show, but my face soon drooped into a frown as I looked around. All the curtains were shut, blocking out the sun, and there were no lamps on to make up for the lack of light. Liv was sitting at the little table on the far side of the room in silence.
“Baby girl, why are you sitting around in the dark?” I asked, crossing the room.
“My head hurts,” she said.
“Oh, shit. Taken some painkillers?”
“Not yet.”
Her answers were so brief, so stiff. She was obviously in some sort of mood. I sat down at the table across from her, and my frown deepened as I saw two large bottles of hand sanitizer in front of her. “What’s going on, Liv?”
“I haven’t been feeling well lately,” she replied, evading the question. ”So I wanted to run something by you.”
“Uh…sure. Shoot.”
She stood up, looking down at me with a shrewd expression. “Something occurred to me today. Something I should’ve thought of sooner. You must really hate my family, right?”
“Why?”
“My dad screwed your family over in business. Took most of your money. Left you in a position where none of you could afford your sister’s expensive life-saving treatment. And then my mom tracked you down a few years later and offered to help your family as a sort of ‘fuck you’ to dad now that he’s dead, seeing as she couldn’t stand him when he was alive and probably wanted to make him roll over in his grave.”
“That’s pretty much exactly what she said when she approached me, yes.”
Liv nodded. “But even then, she wasn’t going to help you for free. Instead of just giving your family the money, she basically forced you to marry her so she could look good to her media buddies for a few years. She’s almost just as bad as my dad, if not worse. At least that’s how you must see it, right?”
I shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t the biggest fan of your father while he was alive, but I’m not gonna talk shit about the dead. And as for your mom…well, you don’t exactly agree with what she’s done to me either. I know you aren’t her biggest fan.”
“Not my point,” Liv said.
“Then what is your point right now?” I asked, furrowing my brows.
She remained standing. “Mom’s worth a few million. Nine, to be exact. She got ten percent of Dad’s fortune after he died. Callum and I got the remaining ninety percent. But Callum’s gone, so now that ninety percent is legally all mine. There’s a lot more than a few million there. So, let me paint you a picture.”
I stroked my chin. “Okay.”
“Imagine doing this. You could take Mom’s offer; marry her for a few years in exchange for enough money to help your own family. Or….you could do that and also get close to me. Close to the point where we eventually get married, after you’re no longer fake-married to Mom, of course. I’m worth a lot more than her, after all. You could make me a bit ill for a long time, make people start to see me as a sickly person in general. Then, somewhere down the track, you could make me sick enough to kill me. No one would suspect much, because they would’ve come to know me as being frequently ill by that stage. As my husband, you’d get all that money then. Way more than whatever Mom’s paying you. Hell, you could even knock her off too. Then you'd be the last one standing with a gigantic pile of cash that once belonged to my family. Far-fetched, perhaps, and it would presume that you're quite adept at getting away with murder. But if you pulled it off, it'd be the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to my family, wouldn't it?”
“I suppose it would,” I replied slowly. “So is this something you think I’ve done? Or something I’m in the process of doing?”
Liv sat down. To my surprise, she laughed. “No. I don’t think you’d do that. Not at all.”
“What’s with the insane story, then?”
She sighed. “I went to the doctor today,” she said. “Someone has been getting triclosan into my system somehow. It’s a hand sanitizer ingredient. I actually found two bottles of it in the cabinet.” She gestured to the hand sanitizer in front of her. “That’s why I’ve been feeling sick. I think someone’s been sneakily feeding me this sort of stuff.”
“So you think I’ve been doing that?”
Her eyes widened. “No! I’ll admit, that scenario I just described occurred to me for like…maybe ten seconds when I saw these bottles. You know, because I’m naturally a bit dramatic and my mind just randomly goes to crazy places. But then my brain actually kicked in properly, and I knew you could never do that. I trust you, Dec. You’ve never done anything that would make me not trust you. You’ve helped me and saved me so many damn times already, and I know beyond a shadow of doubt that it’s not you doing this to me.”
“Jesus Christ, Liv. You nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.”
“I guess I was trying to prove a point of how much I trust you,” she replied. “I may have over-dramatized it a bit…”
“No shit. For a second, I thought you actually believed I was out to get you for your inheritance. Like a black widower.”
She smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. No, I was just trying to illustrate the point that other people in your situation might be capable of such awful things. But I know you would never do anything like that.”
“Right.” I suddenly sprang to my feet. “Wait, shit. You really buried the lead, Liv. Someone is trying to make you sick!”
“Yup. At least, I’m pretty sure they are. I won’t know for absolute certain until I have more tests done in a week.”
“But if some asshole is trying to hurt you, we don’t want to wait a week to be sure,” I said grimly. “We want to find out who the fuck it is right now.”
“Exactly.”
“Just to be clear, I have all that hand sanitizer out of pure habit,” I said, gesturing to the bottles. “With Amelia in the hospital all the time, I always have to make sure I’m totally clean before going to visit her, because she can be prone to infections. So it’s become a habit to always use hand sanitizer.”
Liv touched her hand to mine. “I’m sorry, Dec. I didn’t mean to bring that up or sound like I was accusing you.”
“It’s fine. I get it. But Liv, we need to figure out who the hell is trying to make you sick.”
She shook her head. “I have no idea who it could be. I thought it could be Andrew slipping stuff in my food again, just to be a douche like he was on the yacht, but then Isobel reminded me that he and Yvonne got voted out a few weeks ago.”
“True. So who’s left aside from us? Isobel, Mark, Hayley, Simon….who else?”
“Emily and Juan.”
“I genuinely always forget those two exist, even though there’s only eight of us left now.”
“Same.”
“So out of those people, who is most likely to be a dodgy prick going around poisoning people?” I asked. “I assume whoever is doing it thinks this triclosan stuff will make you feel sick enough to leave the island, forcing us to drop out of the show.”
Liv shrugged. “I guess so.”
“So who?”
“No idea. I’ve been thinking about it for an hour. Mark—no way. He’s so nice and meek. Isobel—also no way. I actually considered it could be her for a hot minute, but she really helped us with the Shayla debacle. If she was just going to screw us over eventually by making me sick, why would she bother helping us in the first place?”
“That’s true. I think we can rule her and Mark out. So what about Hayley and Simon?”
Liv paused. “Honestly, they both seem a little too…”
“Vacant? Too dumb to even consider poisoning someone?”
She gave me a tight smile. “That’s a bit of a mean way to say it, but yeah, that’s what I was getting at.”
“I think Emily and Juan are much the same,” I said, scratching my chin in thought. “What about crew members? Have you pissed any of them off?”
“Crap. I didn’t even think of any crew members. I hope I haven’t pissed any of them off enough to do something as horrible as this,” she said, a concerned frown puckering her arched brows.
“Maybe one of them was best buddies with that junior producer, Ben. Maybe he or she knew it was us who contributed to him getting fired for sleeping with Shayla and spilling shit to her, and they wanted revenge.”
“Maybe, yeah. Honestly, it could be anyone!” Liv sighed dejectedly, and for the first time since I stepped into the room, I saw genuine fear in her beautiful eyes. “How are we ever going to find out who’s been doing this?”
I frowned. “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m gonna get to the bottom of this. No matter what it takes.”
She looked up at me, eyes shining with emotion. “Promise?”
“Of course, baby girl. No one’s gonna hurt you ever again. And until then, you aren’t touching any food or water that doesn’t come straight out of a sealed packet.”
She gave me a rueful smile. “Lucky there’s so many vending machines in the resort.”
I nodded and patted her hand, returning her smile. On the inside, I was seething. Some fucking asshole was going out of their way to try and make my little girl sick, and when I found out who the hell it was, they were going to pay.
One way or another, they were going down.