by T. M. Logan
She studied the bag as if she’d never seen one before.
“I do,” she said quietly, a tear rolling down her cheek. “They are.”
Daniel sat on the edge of the bed, regarding his sister with worried eyes. In a small voice, he said finally, “Why are you crying, Luce? What happened?”
She wiped her eyes angrily on the bedsheet. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t like it when you cry.”
“Me neither.” She sniffed. “Thank you for the sweets, though.”
“Your hair is wet.”
“From the pool.”
“Are you going to open your sweets, then?”
She smiled. Just a tiny bit. “Do you want one, little bro?”
He smiled back. He liked it when she called him that.
“I’ve cleaned my teeth already.”
She shook her head. “Seriously?”
“You should have some, though, so you’re not sad anymore.”
She took one from the packet and put it in her mouth. “When you’re a bit older, you’ll wish for the days when all you had to worry about was eating sweets after you’ve cleaned your teeth.”
“Hmm,” Daniel said, willing to take her word for it. “So what do you worry about?”
“Bad stuff happening. Bad things that can’t be put right again.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He popped one of the sweets into his mouth.
“Nothing else bad is going to happen. Mum said.”
“What if it already did?”
“What do you mean?”
“A bad thing already did happen.”
“When?”
“Does it matter?”
“You can tell me, you know. I won’t tell Mum.”
She smiled. “Yes you will, you’re such a goody-goody.”
“Not.”
“Are.”
She handed him another sweet.
“Something happened and I sort of feel like it was my fault. Like I wanted it to happen.”
They chewed in silence for a moment.
“Did you want it to happen?” Daniel said.
“No. Not at all.”
Daniel pulled at a loose thread on his pajama top. “I thought it would be really nice being at the vacation house but it’s like everything’s going wrong, isn’t it? I wish we could go home tomorrow. Do you want to go home?”
She looked down. “No. I’d rather be here.”
“Do you think Mummy and Daddy are going to get a divorce?”
Lucy stopped chewing. “What?”
“A divorce. Like my friend, Isaac.”
“No. What makes you say that?”
“They’re being really weird with each other. They’re not going to get divorced, are they? Isaac in my class, his parents are divorced, and he says it’s all OK, but I can tell he’s sad about it.”
Lucy was silent for a moment, her face lit from below by the glow of the phone’s screen.
“You shouldn’t worry about stuff like that, little bro. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Daniel stood up and took a few steps toward the door but then stopped, turning back to his sister.
“Please don’t tell Mum and Dad what I said about them having a divorce.”
“OK. As long as you don’t tell them I was upset.”
“Deal.”
She put the bag of sweets on her bedside table and lay back down on the pillow. “And thanks for the present.”
“I’m glad you liked them.” He smiled in the dark. “Night, then.”
“Night, Daniel.”
He pulled the door closed and crept back across the corridor to his own bed, pulling the covers up to his neck and tucking his body into the sheet the way he always did, so no spiders or bugs could crawl underneath in the night. The noise from the grown-ups outside by the pool seemed to have died down, and all he could hear through his open window was the chirping of crickets, a wall of sound in the night outside with no edges, no beginning, no end.
ONE MONTH EARLIER
Shame boils away, leaving only a crust of anger behind.
She has more anger than she knows what to do with, feels it crowding out everything else.
She wants many things that she can’t have.
She wants to blot it all out. To blot him out, and everything he meant to her. Everything he’s done to her.
She wants to forget, to scrub the last nine months of her life and start again.
She wants things to go back to how they were, before it all went sour.
She wants to be able to walk into school without feeling the eyes on her back, seeing the pointing fingers, hearing the snickers.
She wants him to feel—just for a day, an hour, even a minute—as wretched as she feels now. As used and humiliated and panic-stricken and furious as she feels, every single minute that she’s awake.
But she knows she can’t have these things.
Because that’s not how the world works.
THURSDAY
57
I woke with a ball of dread lodged deep in my stomach, in anticipation of what I had to do. I had put it off for a while now and the dramas of last night had shifted my attention elsewhere, but there was no avoiding it. No getting around it.
I left Sean still asleep in our bed, showering and dressing quickly as I mentally ticked off what I had found out in the last few days. Izzy had admitted she was seeing someone who was already married, but had refused to tell me his name. She’d admitted he came from Limerick, just like Sean. She had already tried to throw me off the scent by insisting that Sean would never betray my trust. Most damning of all, Izzy was the one who had appeared when I sent the message to CoralGirl from Sean’s phone. I had set the trap and she had walked right into it. She had come when summoned.
But what about the other evidence? His lingering embrace on the beach with Rowan, his wedding ring in her drawer, Russ’s insistence that she was having an affair? Sean had denied point-blank that anything was going on with her—he had looked me straight in the eye and sworn it, and he’d never been a good liar. It was one of the things I loved about him.
Had loved about him, I thought, with an ache deep in my chest. Then there was Jennifer and Sean being caught together unawares in Daniel’s video, her weird reaction when their hands brushed at lunch, their early morning “walk” to the village together, supposedly delayed by a visit to the weekly market—the market that took place on a different day.
But it was all circumstantial. And all of it paled by comparison to seeing Izzy walk into that clearing by the gorge: a stone-cold piece of evidence that could not be disputed or misinterpreted. It was time to get this over with, right away, this morning, before I could spend too long thinking about it. Before I could change my mind or lose my nerve again.
The truth was, I had wronged them all. Each of them in different ways.
I had fallen in love with Jennifer’s boyfriend at university.
I had helped bring Izzy’s fiancé to the place where he met his death.
I had passed on the malicious accusation that destroyed Rowan’s first marriage.
What kind of friend was I? Perhaps I deserved everything that was coming my way.
Lucy was on my mind, too. I wanted to talk to her again about what had happened in the pool last night, but she was still fast asleep, her room dark thanks to the blackout curtains. There was no sound at Daniel’s door, either. In fact, the whole villa was unnaturally quiet and empty as I made my way down to the kitchen to make coffee; there were no voices, no clatter of crockery from the dining area, no flip-flops on the polished tile floor. Daniel wasn’t in the living room, where I’d usually found him at this time of the morning—perhaps he’d finally started sleeping in at last. Two days before we were due to go home, but better late than never.
There was a note on the kitchen countertop next to the kettle.
&n
bsp; Gone for lunch in Béziers, back this afternoon. J + I x
Béziers was the nearest big town, half an hour south by car, on the way to the beach. It seemed that Jennifer and family had opted for a change of scenery today and Izzy had gone along for the ride. I checked my watch—it was only just nine o’clock—feeling simultaneously disappointed and relieved that the showdown with Izzy would have to wait until she got back. It would give me time to prepare what I was going to say.
It wasn’t a huge surprise that Jennifer, Alistair, and their boys had left the house early. After last night’s row between Alistair and Sean, and the state the boys were in when they’d returned to the villa, it made sense that they’d want to skip the Awkward Morning After. That was Jennifer’s usual tactic: avoid, ignore, look the other way, hold the problem at arm’s length until it faded and was forgotten. Izzy, by contrast, had a tendency for straight-talking honesty that some people mistook for rudeness. I was somewhere in the middle, I supposed.
I sliced and buttered a croissant and took it out onto the balcony with my coffee. The sun was already fierce, the air heavy with humidity and the damp, claustrophobic heat of impending thunder. And yet the sky was still a perfect azure blue, no clouds in sight and not a breath of wind. The only sound was a pair of swallows whirling high above me, calling to each other as they turned and chased in an endless dance.
If truth be told, it was probably a good idea for everyone to have a few hours apart and do their own thing. Moments from last night kept coming back to me: Daniel pleading to go home; my husband’s half apology in the kitchen; the look of horror on Lucy’s face when she fled the game of water polo; Sean squaring up to Alistair, veins standing out in his neck, telling him what would happen if he didn’t keep his hands to himself. The word on Ethan’s lips as he lay, drunk, in the grass. Oblivion.
This vacation had gone wrong in so many ways, I had lost count.
Odette came out onto the balcony in her pink sparkly swimsuit, munching on a brioche. Rowan followed, espresso in one hand and car keys in the other.
“We’re going to try the beach again for a couple of hours. Fancy it?”
“My lot are still asleep.”
“How’s Lucy doing?” She gave me a concerned look. “After what happened last night, I mean?”
“She was pretty upset.”
“I thought Sean was going to punch Alistair’s lights out.”
“Watch this space,” I said, “it might still happen.”
“Give her a hug from me.”
Russ emerged from the kitchen carrying a canvas beach bag, and they roared off in the Land Rover, leaving just the four of us at the villa.
Just me, my cheating husband, and my traumatized children.
Now would be the time to check Izzy’s room, I realized. See what she had hidden in there that could confirm my suspicions beyond any possible doubt. Even though I wasn’t totally sure what that might be. Something that belonged to him, perhaps, a note, a photo, a cell phone—evidence, of whatever kind. I hurried upstairs and was about to let myself into her room when Daniel’s door opened across the corridor and he emerged, fully dressed, book in hand.
“Morning, Mummy,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“Oh … just going to check whether Izzy had that book I wanted to read. Never mind.”
Lucy and Sean seemed determined to sleep in, so Daniel and I walked into the village, his little hand tight in mine as we weaved our way through ancient streets too narrow for cars, house walls of weather-beaten stone pressing in high on both sides. We found a playground behind the church, with benches in the shade of tall plane trees, and I sat and watched as he played on the swings and slides, the climbing frame and merry-go-round, wondering how I would explain to him what his father had done, and what it meant for our family. How could my boy possibly understand a betrayal so large, so far reaching? Would he forgive his dad? Would he end up blaming me?
Eventually he tired of the playground so we walked into the village square for croque monsieurs and Oranginas in the shadow of the little town hall, watching a couple old men playing endless games of pétanque on a long rectangle of sand beside the bar.
Daniel asked to go to the shop after lunch, so we took a detour past the village’s crumbling medieval ramparts and into the air-conditioned cool of the small supermarché, crammed between an estate agent and a tiny antiques shop, both closed for lunch. The supermarket catered mostly to visiting tourists, its shelves lined with wine and beer, fresh fruit and vegetables, suntan lotion, beach toys and barbecue charcoal. I picked up a few bits and found Daniel in the sweets aisle, weighing two big bags of sweets in each hand.
“Surely you can’t still be hungry after that big lunch,” I said.
“They’re not for me. They’re for Lucy.”
“Well, aren’t you a lovely brother?” I said, giving his fine dark hair a rub. “She’ll be very pleased.”
I remembered that we needed more bug spray and went around the other side of the aisle to look in the display. The local stuff was far more potent than anything you could get in the UK, which seemed to have almost no effect on the mosquitos here—I had already counted more than a dozen bites on my legs alone.
Through a gap in the shelves, Daniel said, “I’m trying to cheer her up.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“She’s been really sad about things.”
I found a can of serious-looking mosquito repellent and tucked it under my arm.
“Uh-huh.”
“I made that film of her and she was really cross. She’s waiting for her exams and stuff, and her friends at school are being mean and thingamabob Bayley.” He hesitated. “I saw her last night at bedtime and she was really upset.”
“What thingamabob?”
“You know, that boy Alex Bayley, who was in the hospital—there’s a tribute page on Facebook.”
“Aren’t you too young to be going on Facebook?”
“They don’t check, not really. You just tick the box that says you’re old enough.”
Over the top of the shelf, he held up the two packets of sweets. “Shall I get her Starmix or Tangfastics?”
I offered to pay for the sweets but he insisted on using the last of his vacation pocket money, carrying them proudly out of the shop in a striped plastic bag.
We bought soft ice creams from the tabac and wound our way slowly back up the hill, Daniel excitedly telling me that Ethan had made friends with him again.
It was early afternoon by the time we got back, the villa’s interior an oasis of cool after the noon heat. Lucy was still nowhere to be seen.
I gave her door a cautious knock.
“Lucy?”
Her room was in virtual darkness, shielded by the blackout curtains and chilled to the midteens by the air conditioning.
“Lucy?” I said softly. “Are you OK?”
No response.
Slowly my eyes made out her form on the bed, her back to me, curled into a fetal position.
“It’s past one o’clock, love. Are you going to get up soon?”
Still there was no response. I was about to give her a gentle shake when Daniel’s voice reached me from the bottom of the stairs.
“Mum!” he shouted. “I’m going in the pool, are you coming?”
I backed out of Lucy’s room, pulling the door gently shut behind me.
58
I was aware of someone above me as I dozed in the shade of one of the big poolside umbrellas, a soft cushion behind my head, my phone in my lap. Voices, and footsteps, and activity up on the balcony, and then the presence next to me. A smell. Male.
I opened my eyes to find Ethan looking down at me.
“Tea’s ready,” he said. “Sleepyhead.”
I looked for my watch, but my wrist was bare.
“What time is it?”
“Almost five.”
Yawning and swinging my legs off the lounger, my phone clattered to the ground. I checked the screen
for scratches, unlocked it, and saw it was still open on Facebook, the tribute page Daniel had mentioned earlier. I closed the app and followed Ethan slowly up the steps to the balcony. Out of the shade it was still fiercely hot and almost unbearably humid—the air as thick as soup—but the wind was picking up at last. For the first time in days I saw clouds on the horizon, a thick, gray wall to the south, coming in off the sea. The forecast had been predicting a thunderstorm for the last few days. Maybe it was finally here.
I dropped my eyes to the garden and found myself looking at my husband, sitting on an ornate white stone bench at the far corner of the lawn, partially hidden in the shade of an olive tree. Sitting next to him, so close their heads were almost touching, was Izzy.
They were both leaning forward with their heads down, talking fast, back and forth. I was too far away to hear what was being said but it was an animated conversation, Sean shaking his head repeatedly and Izzy nodding, emphatic, hands clasped together in front of her.
Look at them, thick as thieves. What are you two talking about? How you’re going to break the news? How you’re going to tell me?
There was a painful lump in my throat.
Or is it just a matter of when?
It looked as if Sean were disagreeing with her. Perhaps he wanted to wait until we were back home, but she didn’t want to wait anymore? As I stared in fascinated horror, he looked up and spotted me. For a second our eyes locked and he stiffened, abruptly looking away as if he’d been seen somewhere he didn’t want to be. He jumped up from the bench and walked away from Izzy toward the stone staircase and the balcony where dinner had been laid out.
I went and took my place at the table next to Daniel.
Lucy appeared in a long-sleeved T-shirt, whey faced, her hair unbrushed, and sat down without a word on the other side of me. She helped herself to a tall glass of lemonade from the jug in the middle of the table and then sat, sipping it, seemingly uninterested in any of the food. The big table was laid out with a huge array of cold meats, cheeses, fruit, pastries, freshly sliced baguettes, and three pizzas as big as hubcaps, cheese still bubbling from the oven. Everyone—except Lucy—began to fill their plates in near silence, punctuated only by Odette’s excited babble of postbeach chatter with Rowan.