The Three by Sarah Lotz

first footage of the area where they thought Stephen’s plane had gone down: a shot of the ocean, grey and rolling, the occasional piece of debris bobbing in the waves. The rescue boats scouring the water for survivors looked like toys in that bleak endless seascape. I remember thinking:
Thank God Stephen and Shelly taught the girls to swim last summer.
Ridiculous, I know. Duncan Goodhew would have struggled in that swell. But in moments of emotional
extremis
, it’s incredible what you cling to.
    It was Mel who came and found me. She may smoke forty Rothmans a day and buy her clothes at Primark, but she and her partner Geoff have hearts as big as Canada. Like I said before, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
    ‘Come on, love,’ Mel said to me. ‘You can’t give up hope.’
    The yobs at the bar were giving me a wide berth, but they hadn’t taken their eyes off me the entire time I was there. I was in a terrible state, sweating and shaking, and I must have been crying at one point as my cheeks were wet. ‘What are you staring at?’ Mel barked at them, then took my hand and led me back to the briefing room.
    An army of psychologists and trauma counsellors had arrived by then. They were busy passing around tea that tasted like sweetened dishwater, and setting up screened-off counselling areas. Mel sat me protectively between her and Geoff: my own shell-suited bookends. Geoff patted my knee, said something like, ‘We’re all in this together, mate,’ and handed me a fag. I hadn’t smoked for years, but I took it gratefully.
    No one told us not to smoke.
    Kelvin, the fellow with the dreadlocks, and Kylie, the pretty redhead who’d been holding the balloon (now nothing but asquiggle of rubber on the floor), joined us. The fact that us five were the first to hear the news gave us a shared intimacy, and we huddled together, chain-smoking and trying not to implode. A nervy woman–a counsellor of some type, although she looked too high-strung for the role–asked us for the names of our relatives who’d been on the doomed flight. Like all the others, she had the ‘we’ll update you as soon as we know’ line down pat. I understood, even then, that the last thing they wanted to do was give us false hope, but you
do
still hope. You can’t help it. You start praying that your loved one missed the flight, that you’ve got the flight number or date of arrival wrong, that everything is just a dream, some loony nightmare scenario. I fixated on the moment before I first heard about the crash–watching those kids dismantle the long-forgotten Christmas tree (a bad omen if ever there was one, although I’m not superstitious)–and found myself longing to go back there, before the sick, empty feeling had taken up permanent residence in my heart.
    Another panic attack started poking its icy fingers into my chest. Mel and Geoff tried to keep me talking while we waited to be assigned a trauma counsellor, but I couldn’t get a word out, which wasn’t like me at all. Geoff showed me the screensaver on his smart phone–a photograph of a grinning twentyish girl, overweight but attractive in her own way. Told me that she was Danielle, his daughter, the one they’d been there to collect. ‘A bright girl, went through a rough patch but back on track now,’ Geoff said glumly. Danielle had been in Tenerife on a lavish hen party escapade, had only decided to go along at the last minute when someone else dropped out. How’s that for fate?
    I was struggling to breathe by now, cold sweat dribbling down my sides. I knew if I didn’t get out of that room immediately, my head would explode.
    Mel understood. ‘Give me your number, love,’ she said, squeezing my knee with a hand weighted down with gold jewellery. ‘Soon as we know more, we’ll let you know.’ We swapped numbers (I couldn’t remember mine at first) and I ran out of there. One of the counsellors tried to stop me, but Mel shouted, ‘Just let him go if he wants