Don't Look Back by Gregg Hurwitz Page A

move through her.
    She sourced the sound of wet breathing to the neighboring hut—Claire’s hut. The thatched palm roof was painted with lantern light, and through the slats of the wall Eve detected movement. She progressed carefully along the walkway, dodging slugs, and knocked.
    The door swung in against her knuckles.
    Claire stood contorted, her foot brace locking out her knee, forcing her to double over uncomfortably. It took Eve a moment to see that the metal band running beneath Claire’s bare foot had wedged between the floorboards where an eroded knot had widened the gap.
    Claire’s face was flushed with frustration, her hair pasted to one sweaty cheek, and her eyes smoldered; she’d been stuck for some time.
    “Don’t you do it,” she said. “Don’t you fucking pity me.”
    “Okay,” Eve said.
    Claire tried to lunge forward to unlock the brace, the metal digging into the raw skin of her ankle. She bit back another yelp.
    Eve remained in the doorway until Claire looked up again, breathing hard, nostrils flaring. “Fine,” she said. “I need your help, okay?”
    Eve entered and knelt before her, shifting Claire’s weight and freeing the catch. The metal gave, squeaking around the hinge, Claire’s knee sagging into a relieved bend. Eve gripped the orthotic at either ankle, working it back and forth until Claire’s leg lifted free. Claire staggered back two steps and sat heavily on her bed. The women regarded each other.
    “Okay,” Claire said. “We don’t need to have a big sadpocalypse over this.”
    “Got it,” Eve said. “No sadpocalypse.”
    Claire blew the hair out of her eyes. “I bet you feel all Florence Nightingale, sweeping in here saving the day.”
    Eve watched the bugs flutter around the lantern. A moth touched the glass, crumpled, dropped to the floor.
    “Anika,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Her name is Anika,” Eve said. “And—stop me if you’ve heard this one—she’s younger. And elegant, I’m told.”
    Claire’s face shifted, the squint softening, angry lips unpursing until they grew fuller, prettier.
    Eve had never been one of those Sex and the City women who struck up instant friendships in line at a grocery store, bonding over Kate Spade, bitching about men. Truth be told, she envied those women, their ease and here-I-am confidence. Her relationships tended to be fewer and older, the kind that could go months without a phone call and then resume midsentence. Quick intimacy was not second nature. And yet if she’d learned anything this past year, it was that her instincts required improvement.
    She cleared her throat though it was not in need of clearing. “We got married a few years out of college,” she continued. “I wasn’t … formed yet. Relationships like that, they’re like bad horses. You’re never sure how to get free because you’re too busy trying to hold on.”
    “Men can wear you down,” Claire said. “But not unless you let them.”
    Eve allowed the sentiment to sit for a moment, sensing there might be something beneath the rebuff. Claire pulled her ankle into her lap, rubbed at it angrily. After a moment she looked up, her eyes loosely focused on the wall above Eve’s head.
    “I was seeing someone,” she said. “Good enough guy, left the toilet seat down. Moved in together, all that. We were right there, on the verge. Then I got diagnosed. I told him he could leave, that I’d understand.” A one-shoulder shrug. “So.”
    Eve nodded once, slowly. “That sucks.”
    “This is gonna be no picnic,” Claire said. “ I wouldn’t stick around.”
    “Really?”
    Claire picked lint from the sheets. “I’m your age. Too old to take a wedding seriously. But still. You figure maybe there could be something, a white sundress, view of the water, someone … I don’t know … kind. ”
    “You don’t think there can be?”
    Claire gestured to the walls of the hut. “I’m taking this trip while I still can,” she said. “I got a