by Katy Cannon
Mattias was speaking English.
Why would Mattias be speaking English? Unless…
“Willa! Look who is here to see you!”
Too late to run, I froze, my back to the door.
“What, no hug for your dear old dad?”
Scott Andrews. Actor. Willa’s father.
What should I do? What would Willa do?
What would Alice do next?
My heart pounded in my chest as I realized the truth. There was nothing to do, except face up to what I’d already done.
Sofia was on her feet, hugging her long-lost half-brother. Across the table, Luca tried to get my attention, his expression concerned. Even Antonio looked a little confused as to why I wasn’t jumping up to greet my father. Rosa just stole another roll while no one was looking.
“Willa?” Sofia said gently.
I was out of time.
Gathering all my courage, I stood up. And then, biting my lip, I turned round to face the man who was not my father.
And that was when all hell broke loose.
The tension was too much for me.
I checked the clock on my new phone. Still only 9 a.m. Back in LA I’d probably still be in bed. Here I was rattling around the flat like a restless toddler.
There was only one thing for it. I texted Hal and told him to meet me at the coffee shop on the corner.
“We’re going to do it,” I said, as soon as he sat down with his mug. “At eleven this morning – midday in Italy – Alice and I are both going to come clean at the exact same time.”
Hal’s eyebrows shot up over his cappuccino moustache. “You’re going to tell Mabel you’re not Alice?”
I nodded. “In –” I checked my phone again – “two hours and thirty-seven minutes. You need to keep me occupied until then.”
To his credit, Hal did his best. He even confiscated my phone and switched it to silent to stop me checking the time every thirty seconds.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about telling Mabel.
Apart from Hal, Mabel was the person who knew me best in this city. Who’d made me welcome in her home and tried to understand and support me, even if I didn’t always understand myself.
Mabel was the one I’d betrayed more than anybody.
So Mabel deserved the truth.
Eventually Hal gave up on conversation and resorted to screens instead. “Come on. We’ve got another hour. Let’s go back to Mabel’s flat and binge watch something trashy and terrible.”
“You’d do that for me?” I asked, smiling up at him.
He sighed dramatically. “I’m doing it for me. Even I can’t take this waiting any more.”
Hal made jokes and teased me about my taste in TV shows all the way back to the flat. Normally I’d have ignored him, but I knew he was only trying to distract me, so I launched a passionate defence of reality TV instead. I was just arguing that observing human nature helps us learn more about ourselves – which definitely sounded like something Alice would say – when I opened the flat door and stumbled through, laughing.
Then I saw Mabel standing at the foot of the stairs, phone in her hand and her face bone white.
“Who are you?” Willa’s dad looked so confused I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
Sofia looked between us, equally baffled. “Scott? What do you mean…?”
I winced.
Luca got it first. “Oh my God. Who are you?”
No magical waterfall could make this go away. Everything in me was screaming to run and hide. To out-race my own embarrassment. To cover my eyes so I couldn’t see the disappointment, confusion and anger in the eyes of people who’d been my friends.
Instead, I summoned up every bit of courage I had, sucked in a deep breath and said, “My name is Alice Wright. I’m a friend of Willa’s. We met on the plane from LA and, well, we swapped summers, without telling anybody.” I met Sofia’s gaze and felt like my heart might break. “I’m so sorry for lying to you all. We were… We’d planned to tell everyone the truth today, anyway. Just … not like this.”
Anything would have been better than this. Luca’s expression was stormy, his hands clenched at his sides, and I knew instinctively that I’d have a hard road to win back his trust. I wished I’d just gone with my instincts and told him yesterday, in the caves at the beach. But I’d waited – too long, it turned out.
I tried to catch his eye but he shook his head, backing away. Then, without saying a word, he turned and stormed out.
“Antonio?” Sofia said softly, and that was all he needed. He gathered up Rosa and led her out of the kitchen to follow Luca. I could hear Rosa asking why they had to go – she wanted to stay and listen.
She wanted to stay, and I wanted to go, more than ever.
“You and my daughter … you switched places?” Willa’s dad asked incredulously. “Where is she now? Is she OK? Who is she with?”
For someone who’d sent his daughter away for the summer so he could do his own thing, he sounded a lot more panicked than Willa had led me to believe he would.
“She’s in London. She’s fine. I promise,” I said, as soothingly as I could.
“But why? Why on earth would you do such a horrible thing?” Scott asked.
My eyes burned with tears, but I wouldn’t let them fall.
“You’ll have to ask Willa about her reasons,” I said, trying to stay calm. “But I know she was angry about being sent away for the summer to people she’d never met.” I turned to Sofia. “I think she’d have loved it if she had come, though. I know I have.”
“And you, Alice?” Mattias asked, coming to stand behind his wife, one hand on her shoulder for support. “Why did you come here? What was so awful about where you were supposed to be this summer?”
I looked down at the floor, shamefaced. “My dad … he was away for the summer too, working in Australia. We were supposed to spend the holiday together but instead he arranged for me to stay with his new girlfriend in London – a woman I’d never met.”
“So my daughter is somewhere in London with some woman nobody knows, getting up to I dread to think what!” Mr Andrews yelled. Apparently he’d gone through disbelief and panic already and landed straight into anger. “I need to speak to Willa. Right now.”
“She has her phone,” I said softly. “Every time you or her mum have spoken to her this summer, it’s really been her. I’ve been updating her on life here, so she knew what to say.” My voice got smaller as I realized the magnitude of our screw-up.
We hadn’t just lied to the people we were staying with. We’d lied to our parents too, over and over. And if something had happened to one of us, something worse than Willa getting her bag stolen in London… What would have happened then? How would our real parents even have found out?
Willa’s dad stormed out of the room, phone in his hand, punching at the screen with one finger as he went. Quickly, I whipped my phone out of my pocket to text Willa to warn her.
But Sofia was still staring at me, disappointment and betrayal clear in her face.
“I think we’d better call whoever you’re supposed to be with right now and explain what’s been going on. Don’t you?”
I’d never heard her voice so cold. Normally she was all warmth and cheer and happiness. Not today. I’d broken that love and trust she’d given me so freely.
But that was OK. I wasn’t her niece, she never had to see me again.
And in the end it was that thought that set the tears flowing.
Sniffing, I dialled the number Dad had given me for Mabel, and handed the phone to Sofia.
It was time for me to go home.
ALICE: Willa, you need to pick up.
ALICE: Your DAD is here.
ALICE: And, unsurprisingly, he’s kind of noticed I’m not you.
ALICE: RING ME BACK!
WILLA: Sorry! Hal had my phone.
WILLA: And also TOO LATE.
“I just don’t understand.” Mabel sat at the kitchen t
able, staring across at me like she was trying to find the answers in my face. “Why would you do something like this? Alice … except that’s not your name, is it? You’re Willa, right?”
I nodded. What on earth was I supposed to say?
“And you.” She glanced up at Hal, standing beside the table. He hadn’t been invited to sit, and there were only two chairs, anyway. “You don’t seem very surprised. You knew?”
He gave a nod. “I, uh… I’ve met the real Alice, remember? I knew Willa wasn’t her. But—”
“I begged him to go along with it,” I broke in. “It wasn’t his fault. I told him I’d get him into trouble if he didn’t.”
Hal gave me a funny look. “No, she didn’t. She just … she sounded desperate. And she said that Alice needed my help and, well … I figured if they’d already done the swap, all I could really do was make sure she didn’t get into too much trouble.”
Trouble. That word was kind of mild for what Alice and I were in right now.
Catastrophic meltdown sounded closer. Although Alice would say I was being melodramatic.
How was she coping, over in Italy, with my family and my dad of all people? Dad didn’t have the best temper when things weren’t going his way…
“You should have come to me, or even your dad,” Mabel said, her voice quiet but dangerous. “Told us the truth.”
“I know that now,” Hal replied, hanging his head in shame. “I’m sorry.”
Mabel’s attention turned back to me. “And you. I don’t even know what to say to you. I welcomed you into my home, tried to make sure you were having a great time – and you lied to me from the moment you arrived.”
“And that was wrong,” I admitted. I never could just leave things there, though. “But…” I started, and Hal groaned.
“No, Hal,” Mabel said, her eyes hard. “If Willa has an excuse for what she’s done, I want to hear it.”
“Not an excuse,” I said quickly. “An explanation. What we did was wrong, Alice and I know that – that’s why we’d planned to tell everyone the truth today, anyway. But the thing is, when we planned the swap, we didn’t know you, or my aunt in Italy. Think about it from Alice’s point of view, right?”
Now Mabel looked interested. Still mad, but also curious. “OK.”
“She thought she was going to have this fantastic summer with her dad, in Australia. Then suddenly she’s put on a plane and sent somewhere she doesn’t really know, to stay with a woman she’s never met, who her dad says is ‘an old friend’. Everybody knows that means girlfriend.” Mabel’s mouth twisted a little uncomfortably at that. “But he didn’t say that until she asked. He hadn’t told her anything about you and him dating or anything until he needed to send her here. He didn’t talk to her about any of it. Not how much you were going to be part of their lives after he got back from Australia, or whether you guys are planning on getting married, or if that’ll mean they have to move to London, or any of that. So really, can you blame her for not wanting to come here?”
Mabel’s mouth opened and then closed again. I glanced up at Hal; he was smirking, just a tiny bit.
“You might be right, there,” Mabel said, after a moment. “And what about you? What was so awful about Italy that you wanted to come here instead, Willa?”
I shrugged. “For me … it wasn’t so much not wanting to go to Italy as wanting to be here in London. I … didn’t go to science camp the last couple of weeks. I went to a theatre course instead, one I’d been booked on for months before my mum decided to stay in LA.”
“That was why you came here? A theatre course?” Mabel said incredulously.
“Well, that and not wanting my parents to keep making decisions for me without talking to me about them,” I admitted.
“Like Jon did with Alice,” Mabel murmured.
“Exactly. Neither of my parents had time for me this summer, so if they couldn’t be bothered taking care of me, I figured it wouldn’t much matter to them where I actually went.”
Mabel’s mouth twitched up into a tiny smile. “I heard your dad in the background when I was talking to your Aunt Sofia, actually. I think it might have mattered to him just a bit.”
I could imagine. I just hoped he wasn’t yelling at Alice too much.
“So. What happens now?” I asked.
“Sofia and your dad are going to meet us at Heathrow, with Alice, tomorrow. I need to call Jon as soon as it’s morning in Australia, fill him in on everything. Except he’s out on the boat… Well, as soon as I get to tell him, I imagine he’ll be on the first plane home.” Mabel sighed and shook her head. “Heaven knows how I’m going to explain all this to him. And when I tell him that I didn’t even realize the girl living with me wasn’t his daughter, not to mention the lengths Alice went to not to spend time with me… Well, I can’t imagine Alice is going to have to worry about me being in her life any longer.”
A chill settled over me and I shivered. That was the plan – that was what I’d promised Alice I’d achieve for her.
Only now, it didn’t feel like such an achievement. It felt like a mistake.
I reached out and grabbed Mabel’s hand across the table. “She should. I mean, you should be in her life.”
Mabel’s smile was sad. “Willa, if the last few weeks – and especially today – have taught me anything, it’s that I’m not cut out to be anyone’s step-mother.”
“No! You’ve been fantastic. Like when I got my period – which wasn’t my first, actually, but I wish it had been!” I saw Hal wince beside me at the mention of periods. I ignored him. “Because you were great. Really great. And I know I haven’t always been easy, but you’ve been kind and understanding, and you’ve given me my freedom but not too much freedom and you’ve… You’ve cared. You’ve taken responsibility for me when you didn’t have to, and cared about how I’ve felt and what I’ve wanted. You’ve talked to me too, more than my own parents have in months.” I looked up into her eyes and hoped she was hearing what I was trying to say. “Alice would be lucky to have you as her step-mother. And I’m going to make sure she knows that.”
I had to wait until Willa’s dad stopped shouting at me and turned to shouting at his ex-wife down the phone instead, but eventually I was able to escape and find Luca.
He was with Achilles and Hercules, of course.
“I don’t have anything to say to you,” Luca said, the minute I appeared at the stable door. He was sitting between the two donkeys, knowing that I still didn’t like to get too close to them if I didn’t have to. They might not be horses, but I knew they could still pack a huge kick.
But if I wanted to make up with Luca, I’d have to risk it.
“Maybe I have something I need to say to you.” I stepped closer, one hand out to pet between Achilles’s ears, the way I’d seen Rosa do. “I’m leaving in the morning, as soon as we can get a flight, and I need you to know how sorry I am before I go.”
“Fine. You’re sorry. That’s great. Bye.” He still wouldn’t look at me.
Cautiously, I sank down to crouch between the donkey’s front legs, where Luca couldn’t help but see and hear me.
“I made a mistake. I wasn’t meant to be here – I should be in London with some woman my dad’s apparently dating. But…” How could I find the words for everything that Italy had given me that summer? “But I can’t wish we didn’t do it because if I hadn’t come to Italy, I wouldn’t have met you and your family. And if I hadn’t met you all, I wouldn’t be the Alice I am today.”
“And who is that?” Luca asked bitterly. “I thought I knew who you were. I thought you’d been sent away like me. That you’d found a home here like me, because no one anywhere else wanted you. But you’ve got a whole family out there, haven’t you? People who wanted you this summer.”
“My dad didn’t. We were supposed to be having this brilliant holiday in Australia together, but then suddenly he was sending me to stay with some new girlfriend I’d never met – or even heard of – before
.” I didn’t want Luca’s sympathy. But I did want him to know I wasn’t a different person now, not really.
“So you had a whole new family waiting for you? Not just your dad, but a woman who wanted to be part of your family too? A step-mother, maybe?”
“I… I guess.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. I’d thought of Mabel as someone pushing in where she didn’t belong. Not as someone who wanted to become part of my family to make it better.
“For years, I’d have given anything for just one person who wanted us – really wanted to be part of our family. And you had the chance to build a new family and you spat on it. You ran away and you lied.”
I couldn’t deny it. “I did. And I’m sorry.”
“So why did you do it?” Luca asked after a moment.
“Because … because I was avoiding facing reality. Avoiding moving on.” I could have claimed I was angry with my dad for sending me away, or for not telling me about Mabel sooner. But I’d had a lot of time to think about my choices while I’d been in Italy, and I knew the real reason I’d agreed to Willa’s plan.
The waterfall had cleared away all the things that were clouding my mind – the fear, the pain – until all that was left was the truth. It was time to move on.
Luca shifted slightly, nudging the donkeys apart so I could sit beside him, our backs against the wood of the stable wall. How many conversations had we had, sitting like this, our shoulders pressed together as we talked? The position meant we were unable to see into each other’s faces, but somehow that made it easier to talk about the stuff that mattered. The things that came from deep down inside us, that we wouldn’t have talked about with anyone else.
How could I have imagined that I’d walk away from Luca, and his family, at the end of the summer and never miss them?
“How did pretending to be someone else help?”
I tried to find a way to make him understand. “My mum died, a few years ago. And since then, it’s just been me and dad against the world.”