The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  Odette giggled, unable to contain herself any longer.

  Rowan whirled around to face them, her eyes wide.

  “What the—”

  “Boo!” shouted Odette. “We found you, Mummy!”

  Rowan stared at them both for a moment.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said, ending the call.

  She slipped the phone into the pocket of her shorts and crossed her arms.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Who was that?” Russ said.

  Odette shouted over both of them.

  “We’re playing hide-and-seek, Mummy!”

  “Work stuff.”

  Russ pulled a skeptical face.

  “Didn’t sound like work.”

  “I’m not having this conversation with you. Not now.”

  “Why not? Worried it might ruin the wonderful vacation atmosphere we’ve got going on?”

  Odette jigged up and down excitedly on her father’s back. “Mummy—”

  “Because there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Don’t try to pull your usual bull on me. I see how you are with him.”

  “With who?”

  “Sean. Yesterday at the beach you were all over him.”

  “He was looking out for our daughter while you were sleeping off a hangover. Again.”

  “Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to embarrass me?”

  “I think you’re managing that very well on your own.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Do you have to drink at every single meal?”

  “I’m on vacation! Supposed to be bloody enjoying myself—but I didn’t choose the company, did I? They’re your friends, not mine.”

  “All the same, it would be nice if you played with our daughter instead of passing out in the sun every afternoon.”

  “We’re playing now. You’re the one skulking out here on your phone.”

  Odette clapped her hands.

  “My turn to hide, Mummy!”

  Rowan reached for her daughter, giving her a smile. “Come on then, baby.” She plucked Odette off Russ’s back, settled the little girl on her hip the way she had carried her when she was a toddler. “Let’s find a place.”

  “And then we can both hide?”

  “Yes. We’ll both hide from Daddy, somewhere really clever.” She turned and headed off down the path around to the back of the house, Odette bouncing on her hip. “Somewhere he’ll never find us.”

  27

  I found Sean in our en suite, fresh from the shower. He was shirtless, his broad chest and back already darkening from three days of sun.

  Izzy was right. If I really wanted to put my mind at rest, it was time to talk to Sean. Besides, between the drama of finding the teenagers at the gorge and last night’s tension-filled dinner with the girls, I still hadn’t had a chance to tell him about what I’d seen Alistair doing by the pool.

  The conversation was going to be beyond awkward considering how long we had known each other, but it would be a lot easier than what was to come after. The children’s well-being had to take priority—we were parents first, partners second—and a part of me hoped, selfishly, that a concern for his children might bring him to his senses. Bring him back to me.

  If not, it was time to confront him with the truth.

  I’d thought I could ride things out for a week as I built the picture, piece by piece.

  But all of the evidence I had collected pointed in one direction. I couldn’t wait.

  It was time to force the truth out of him, one way or another: I had to know. Not here, not where everyone could hear us, where one of the kids might walk in on us at any moment. And not where she might interrupt. She knew the estate and all of its secret places.

  Not here, in the villa. But I knew the perfect place.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning against the doorframe.

  “Hey yourself,” he said, spraying aftershave.

  “Do you want to go for a walk before dinner?”

  He looked at me a little uncertainly. “A walk?”

  “Down through the vineyard. It’s a lovely spot at this time of day—you get a wonderful view of the sun going down.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “Daniel’s going out in a minute to play with the bigger boys and I’ve asked Izzy to keep an eye on Lucy.”

  “OK. Sure.” He gave me a wary look. “I’ll be right with you.”

  I sat down on the end of the bed and watched him buttoning a pale blue shirt, thinking back to my talk with our daughter the other night.

  “Has Lucy talked to you about her friend Alex?”

  “The crazy one?”

  “Tall, skinny girl, plays the clarinet. In Lucy’s friend group.”

  “No. Have they had another argument?”

  “Lucy mentioned her the other night; she was upset about something but wouldn’t say what.”

  Sean shrugged, turning away to close the wardrobe.

  “She’s not talked to me about it.”

  Across the corridor I heard Daniel’s door shut with a click. Our son hurried past as if he were late for something.

  “Daniel?” I called to him.

  His face appeared in the doorway.

  “What? I’m just going to meet up with Jake and Ethan.”

  “That’s nice.” I forced a smile. “Hey, has Lucy said anything to you?”

  “About what?”

  “Alex. From school.”

  “She doesn’t talk to me, Mummy. Not about girls’ stuff.” He looked at his watch. “Or do you mean big Alex from Year Eleven?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s she?”

  “He. The one who had that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  I frowned. Conversations about school sometimes went like this, when I hadn’t been paying close enough attention to the comings and goings of friendship groups, gossip, the falling-out and making up that seemed to happen on a weekly or daily basis.

  “Is Lucy friends with him?”

  Daniel shrugged.

  “Dunno.”

  “He had a thing, do you mean a party?”

  One of the older boys—I wasn’t sure which—shouted his name from downstairs. Daniel’s head snapped around: he was being summoned.

  “Got to go. Bye!” He scampered off.

  We followed him downstairs and out onto the balcony. It was still blisteringly hot, the air thick with humidity. Sean took my hand as we walked through the garden and I didn’t pull away.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “I’ll show you.”

  “Very mysterious.”

  We walked through the vineyard, the soft chirp of birds high overhead.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said, “away from everyone else.”

  “OK,” he said. “From mysterious to ominous inside a minute. This can’t be good.”

  “Something … something happened yesterday and you need to be aware of it.”

  I described what I had seen Alistair doing by the pool, looking at the pictures on Lucy’s Instagram feed, glossing over the details of where I’d been standing when I saw it. Sean’s frown deepened as I related the images of our daughter on the screen of Alistair’s phone. He didn’t speak at all until we reached the trees and the clearing by the gorge.

  “That’s pretty weird,” he said finally. “Did you confront him about it?”

  “I was going to, but by the time I’d got down to the pool he’d disappeared and I couldn’t find him.”

  “Right. I’ll have a word with him.”

  I knew this was how he would react. It was another of the reasons I had brought him down here, away from the villa.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I don’t want to cause a big thing, and Lucy will be mortified. I can keep an eye on her, talk to her if necessary, suggest she change her privacy settings, but I’d rather she di
dn’t find out—it’s just too creepy.”

  “She needs to know.”

  “It’ll scar her for life. Trust me.”

  “I’ll just have a quiet word with Alistair.”

  “Sean,” I said. “Please don’t, not now. I just wanted you to be aware, that’s all. It’s probably nothing.”

  “He was looking at her Instagram account!”

  “He was looking at lots of accounts, from what I could see.”

  “All right. But if I see him doing it I’m going to take his phone off him and shove it up his—”

  “Sean.”

  He held a hand up.

  “OK, OK. I always knew there was something a bit odd about him, though. I knew it. Christ, maybe this vacation wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  That was the easy bit. Now for the hard part.

  I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to summon all my remaining strength. Fear was boiling up inside me, as if I were about to take a leap into the dark with no idea where the ground was. I reminded myself that—sometimes, at least—to find the answer to a question you simply had to ask it out loud.

  “Sean, I’ve said what I needed to say.” I swallowed hard against the painful lump in my throat. “Now, is there anything you want to tell me?”

  28

  He stared at me for a moment, a frown creasing his forehead.

  “Tell you what, love?”

  “You know what.”

  He shook his head. “No. You’re going to have to give me a clue.”

  He was giving almost nothing away. If he was acting, he was doing an amazing job. But I had seen him acting in front of people before, laying on the Irish charm so thickly you could slice it with a knife.

  He’d charmed me, too, once upon a time.

  I gestured back up toward the villa. “I could just ask her instead, if you like.”

  “Ask who?”

  “You know damn well who!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Russ told me on our first night here. He thinks Rowan is having an affair.”

  “What?”

  “An affair.”

  “With who?”

  “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  Sean’s frown deepened. “What? Why are you telling me this?”

  I changed tack. “What did Rowan say to you at the beach, after you brought Odette back from the sea?”

  “I don’t … I don’t remember. Thank you?”

  “She whispered something to you.”

  He looked momentarily embarrassed, before his mask of composure dropped back into place like shutters being pulled down.

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “She damn well did, Sean, don’t lie!”

  “She thought her daughter was lost and she was grateful that I found her, that’s all.”

  “She was hugging you.”

  “So? She was upset. She was grateful. You’d have been the same if Lucy had been missing and Russ had found her.”

  “It was more than that. It was … She said something to you, I saw it.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “What is this all about, Kate?”

  “What about your wedding ring?”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you take it off when you’re with her? Is that what you do?”

  He rubbed absently at the bare fourth finger of his left hand.

  “No.”

  “So where is it?”

  He stood and moved nearer to the cliff edge until he was only a few feet away from the drop.

  “There’s a little gym downstairs next to the games room—have you been down there? I was doing some weights the other day and I didn’t want to scratch the gold. So I took it off and put it on the side, on one of the speakers. Must have slipped my mind when I finished my workout. I’m sure it’ll turn up.”

  It was a long and convoluted answer to a question I had only obliquely asked.

  The truth is simple, I thought. Lies are complicated.

  “When did you use the gym?”

  “I don’t know … yesterday, before we went to the beach?”

  “You don’t know, or yesterday? Which is it?”

  “Yesterday.” He nodded. “Definitely.”

  “And where is it now?”

  “Somebody must have picked it up.”

  “Somebody?” I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  “There’s only a few places it could be, it can’t have gone far.”

  I took his wedding ring from my pocket and held it out to him, the gold shining in the late afternoon sun.

  “Can you guess where I found this?”

  “In the gym, probably.”

  I waited a beat, winding up for what I hoped would be a knockout blow.

  “In Rowan’s bedroom, in her bedside drawer.”

  He stared at me for a moment.

  “Why were you looking through your friend’s bedside drawer?”

  “Because I was looking for something!” I said, my voice rising. “And I found it!”

  Without thinking, I threw the ring at him, hard. It bounced off his chest and fell to the ground, rolling toward the edge of the cliff.

  He crouched to pick it up, rubbing the dust and dirt off before slipping it onto his finger. “Rowan must have found it in the gym; she was probably just holding on to it for safekeeping.”

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “This is getting ridiculous, Kate.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.”

  “Why are you lying, Sean?”

  He looked down.

  “It’s not a lie,” he said softly.

  I was getting nowhere—he was giving nothing away. It was time to play my trump card.

  “I saw the messages on your phone.”

  There was a change in his posture then, a slowing of his movements. The muscles of his forearms bunched, as if for a fight, his chin lowered like a prizefighter expecting a blow.

  “What messages?” he said.

  “On Messenger, to CoralGirl. Saying you couldn’t stop thinking about her. Saying you felt bad about lying to me and didn’t know how much longer you could keep on doing it.”

  He twisted the wedding ring on his finger. Round and round.

  “When?”

  “Does it matter?” I felt the heat of tears behind my eyes. “A few days ago. The day we arrived.”

  I moved a little nearer to him, to the edge of the gorge, willing him to tell the truth.

  Please don’t lie. Please. Not now. Please show me that I’m wrong, that I’ve got this all totally wrong, that there’s an explanation for all of it.

  He looked away, his jaw tight.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Messages on your phone. You said you were going to sort things out when we were in France. This week.”

  “So you unlocked my phone?”

  “Yes.”

  A muscle twitched under his eye.

  “You looked at my phone. My personal stuff.”

  “It’s Rowan, isn’t it?” I felt my heart breaking, even as I said it. “The one you’re … seeing?”

  He looked at me with a mixture of shame and regret and anger, and for a moment I thought he was going to tell me. To come out with everything, right here, in this unfamiliar place with our oblivious children nearby. To tell me he was sorry, that it didn’t mean anything, that he would finish it, and all those other things that men are supposed to say when they’re caught in a lie. There was something in his eyes that told me he wanted to tell it all, he wanted to confess, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

  I looked up at him, the sun behind him creating a halo of light around his head.

  “Well? Tell me.”

  “You shouldn’t have looked at my phone.”

  “Swear it to me.”

  He took his
hands out of his pockets and moved a step closer to me. “What?”

  “Swear that you’re not having an affair with Rowan.”

  “This is bloody crazy.”

  “Why?” I said, my voice rising in pitch. “Why is it crazy? Why can’t you just say it?”

  He sighed and looked at me, right at me, holding my eyes with his. No tremor, no flicker, no shadow of dishonesty.

  “All right,” he said. “I swear I’m not involved with Rowan. There, I said it. Are you happy now?”

  “So who are you sending messages to? Who’s CoralGirl?”

  He blinked once, twice, then looked away.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Is that really the best you can do?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “The truth? I don’t think you know what that is.”

  If I had been paying more attention, if I had been a bit more careful—if I had been a little less upset and angry and bewildered—I might have noticed how close we were to the edge. Just a few feet away.

  He took another step toward me.

  29

  Daniel

  Play with the bigger boys, his mum had said.

  But she didn’t know them, not really. Jake and Ethan were OK when grown-ups were around but when they were on their own they were a little bit … crazy. Like, scary crazy, like Mason Reese at his school who’d been permanently expelled for setting a firework off in assembly. And grown-ups didn’t really understand the age gap. They said oh you’re nearly ten and Ethan’s just turned fifteen, that’s only a few years, not much really. But it was a lot. It was loads. It was almost half a lifetime. And Jake was almost a year older than his brother.

  The two brothers were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, black and khaki, flip-flops kicked off their feet. He’d not really spoken to them much since they’d all arrived at the vacation house. They’d both got massive—at least compared to Daniel—lanky and spotty, size 11 feet and funny deep voices like a dog barking.

  He was slightly scared of them, if he was honest.

  They’d been wandering around the big field behind the villa—a vinn-yard his mum had called it—but it turned out to be a bit boring. Just rows and rows of grape plants, all running in the same direction. Maybe he would go and find his sister—she was always good for some sport, in one way or another. She was usually by the pool: all she was interested in was getting a suntan. Sometimes he made funny videos of her with Dad’s camcorder, without her realizing it—that usually got a reaction. Although she was even grumpier and crosser and more boring recently than normal.