I doubt Antonio knows how serious leaving a fridge door open can be. My mind rushes back to that awful time when I managed to pass the buck over a bout of food poisoning in one of my restaurants by blaming a dodgy supplier when it was actually a faulty fridge which I should have been on top of. I got away with it, but it was a close-run thing and, a large part of the reason why I felt I needed to take a break.

None of us is perfect. But I like to think I learn from my mistakes, at least, and I’m not going to let it happen again.

65

Antonio

5 February 2022, 13:30

The Caribbean

My head swims and for a couple of seconds my vision blurs and I think I might pass out. I take a deep breath and swallow down the rising bile. Where is he? I wasn’t gone long – how did he get out? I look at the huge, stainless-steel body-sized drawers – surely you can’t open them from the inside? Is there a safety latch in there in case someone is put in by accident and they’re not dead after all?

The room seems to tilt and I put a hand out to steady myself. I take another deep breath, counting like I was taught to years back as a way of dealing with my catastrophizing when I used to regularly have panic attacks. In, one two three. Out, one two three. In one two three. Out, one two three.

Better. Calm down, I tell myself, and force myself to look at the drawer again. There’s no way he could have opened that himself from the inside. Momentarily I feel better but then the thought strikes me like a thunderbolt that if he didn’t let himself out, someone else must have helped him out. Someone must have found him. Heard him shouting, maybe. And that is SO much worse.

I let out a cry of anguish as I picture Stuart limping along the corridor, clutching his head and aided by his rescuer as he tells them what I did. Who rescued him? Where are they going? Probably to Leo, who will call the police and then they’ll come and arrest me and they’ll know that I must be hiding something otherwise I wouldn’t have hit Stuart and they’ll work out that Lola must be alive and they’ll search the ship for her and they’ll find her and she’ll go to prison too and she will kill herself in prison because she could never cope with something like that and I will have let her down again and it will all be my fault and I would want to die too.