… IF I could, I’d tuern back the clock, or at least apologies for what I did. But I don[t think I’lll ever get the ppportunity, wikll I?

She’d blindly written the last lines, riddled with typos, looking at the screen as if through a wall of water, the letters blurring in the fog of tears, with clammy fingers that tried to overtake each other as she typed, faster and faster, because Naomi Lamar would have bitten a chunk of flesh from her body out of disgust at herself, if she’d had even a second while she was writing to consider what she’d done. What she’d just confessed to the spider. Which was: the worst thing.

She hadn’t remembered it again, because that would have meant having to forget it first. Deep down she’d always known what the spider wanted to hear. She just hadn’t been capable of writing it down. Thinking about it was bad enough. But thoughts could be suppressed, by pain, hunger or cold, for example. Things she’d had in spades over the last few weeks.

To know it was written down, even the process itself of writing it, was something else entirely.

To see the wickedness in black on white, her own shame before her very eyes, was much worse than merely thinking about it, and the spider knew this.

That’s the reason, that’s the only reason I’ve had to type into this wretched computer here at the bottom of the well.

Without correcting her spelling (which, for some reason she couldn’t even explain to herself, Naomi had done previously when typing the invalid confessions – it was probably just force of habit; she’d always stressed to Anouk the importance of good spelling) she’d tugged on the rope. She was desperate to tie it around her neck rather than on the bucket the notebook was placed in. Although with her on the end of the rope she doubted it would be yanked up.

Ever since the computer had vanished upwards into the darkness above her head, she’d started scratching again.

Her arms, neck, skull.

Naomi was sure she’d given the spider what it wanted.

Hunger, thirst, the tapeworm, the bedbugs; there was a point to all those punishments, she understood that now.

She had no idea how the spider had got to the bottom of her secret. On a cruise ship of all places.

But if you looked at it in the cold light of day, there was a point to everything now.

It’s just that I’ll never get to look at anything in the cold light of day again.

Naomi felt a menacing thought brewing inside her and started to hum. She knew she’d be allowed to die soon.

Not because I’m partly guilty for the death of my best friend.

She opened her mouth.

Not because I had sex for money.