The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

It was funny. I’d also noticed she resembled someone I knew in days gone by. But that someone was long dead, so I put it out of my mind.

Once we were safely ensconced in our gorgeous bungalow, I flung open the sliding glass doors that opened onto the wide deck and serene sea beyond and collapsed on the couch, releasing Mary Elizabeth onto the fuchsia silk pillow beside me. “That was terrible. They’re all going to hate me. All 143,000 of them.”

“No they’re not,” Felicity assured me.

I held my hand out. “Throw me my smokes.”

She palmed the pack and shot me a look. “You sure?”

“Come on. It’ll be my first of the day.” I’d snuck one out the window when I took a shower this morning, but she didn’t need to know that.

“But you’re doing so great.”

It was true I was smoking far less than I used to, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. “For Godsake, just throw me one. My nerves are all jangled, and you’re not letting me have a pill.”

She extracted a cigarette from the pack and threw it at me. I caught it and strolled to the open doors, striking a light on a matchbox emblazoned with the name of the resort.

I inhaled, letting the nicotine do its work. The dive pool on our deck glittered invitingly, but I’d had enough sun for one day. The wrinkles just weren’t worth it. “Madison has to be a Leo,” I mused, blowing out a line of smoke that quickly dissipated in the breeze off the ocean.

“Why?” Felicity asked.

“She obviously thrives on attention. To court the public like that, inviting all those people into your private life to judge you?” I shivered. “I can’t imagine.”

“That’s just Gen Z, everything is public. If a thousand people didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.”

“But you’re not like that,” I protested. It was true, all her social medias were private, with only a handful of followers.

She shrugged. “I’m a private person.”

“Which is why we work so well together,” I said. “Why does Madison have so many fans, anyway? I mean, I know she’s a YouTube star or whatever, but what’s she famous for?”

“She had leukemia when she was a teenager and got a huge following blogging about her struggle with it.”

My jaw dropped. “Okay, now I feel like an asshole.”

“Her dying wish was to be on a TV show,” Felicity went on, “so they gave her a walk-on role on Dallas Divas, which spiked the ratings so much that when she got well they made her a series regular.”

“How do you know all this?”

She laughed. “The internet.”

“I need a drink.” I sighed, gazing out at the miles of turquoise water around us. “What do we have?”

She traipsed over to the refrigerator and opened the door. “Nothing.”

“Order us something, will you? I’d love a chardonnay. Just get a bottle.”

I stubbed the cigarette out in a shell ashtray as she dialed room service from the phone next to the Buddha-shaped lamp. I was grateful she had the sense to order a Chinese chicken salad for me as well (my favorite) and a club sandwich I knew was for her. The girl could eat bacon every day and never gain a pound, bless her heart.

When she hung up, she handed me a bottle of water and one of my A-pills, thank God. I’d lost my Screen Actors Guild health insurance when I didn’t make the earning cutoff last year, and now my shoddy health insurance would only give me a thirty-day supply of my prescriptions, which wasn’t enough to cover the six weeks I’d be on the island, so Felicity had procured the rest of the pills for me through a doctor she knew. Or was it a pharmacist? It didn’t matter. She’d gotten them, which was what was important. Of course they were all generics with unpronounceable names, so we’d nicknamed each according to function. A-pills were for anxiety, D-pills for depression, P-pills for pain, and S-pills for sleeplessness. “Is it time?” I asked.

She nodded. “Past time.”

Finally. I downed the pill with a gulp of water, relieved. That must have been why I was feeling so panicky. Managing the pills could be tricky because they all had different half-lives, so they had to be taken at different times, and the A-pills made time seem slippery and unimportant. I’d often lose track. But I’d been so much better since Felicity came along to keep up with everything.

The morning I met her in the park, my horoscope had said that a chance meeting could change my life. To expect help from unexpected places and that gold was a sign I was on the right path. I went out to walk Mary Elizabeth the same as I did every day, and all of a sudden there by chance was Felicity. When she literally dropped a gold bracelet on my path and Mary Elizabeth fell in love with her at first sight, I knew she had to be the “help from unexpected places.” It was a miracle, really. A stroke of fate. And I believed in fate.

I’d gone to church sometimes growing up and always felt there was something out there bigger than myself, but I never had the time to explore it until I was in rehab the second time, after my DUI. The first time, rehab had masqueraded as an exorbitantly expensive “spa” for “exhaustion,” but this time I had to satisfy the terms of the court and hadn’t worked in two years, so it was stricter and less lavish. Though it ended up for the best and yet another example of fate stepping in because while I was there, I met a powerful psychic whose name was actually Faith, believe it or not. She shared her knowledge of metaphysics with me, and I’ve depended on her sage advice ever since. She’s the one that gave me my amethyst pendant and the tigereye bracelet I wear for