there was simply nowhere that was ever going to feel OK without Gaia and Coco in my life.
As soon as I reached the kitchen Gaia came rushing up to me in floods of tears and wrapped her arms around my legs. Then she started to jam her feet into the ground in an attempt to stop me from moving forward, both arms pushing me backward.
“No!” she shouted. “You’re not leaving!”
I tried to speak, but there was a fist-sized lump of infinite grief in my throat and it made talking and breathing very difficult.
“Gaia,” Tom barked. “Go to your room.”
“No!” she screamed, spinning around to face him. “You go to your room! I hate you!”
With that, she burst into hysterical tears and sank to the floor, drawing her knees to her chin. Coco staggered toward her, calling, “Ya-ya! Ya-ya!” It was then that I realized that “Ya-ya” was never Coco’s name for me—it was her name for her sister. She said, “Awwww, Ya-ya,” and wrapped her arms around Gaia to console her, and I thought my heart might break.
I pulled the diary from underneath my arm and held it out toward Tom. I thought very carefully about what I wanted to say to him. There were so many things I could have said. You monster. How could you?
But Gaia and Coco were within earshot. He might have been a cruel and villainous husband, but somehow he could also be a very good father, and he was all that Gaia and Coco had left. I had to do what I could to protect them.
So instead, I said quietly, “I want you to know I read this. And I’ve photographed the contents. If I hear that you’re treating those girls anywhere near as badly as you treated Aurelia, I will send those photographs to the police. Understood?”
He widened his eyes and snatched the diary out of my hands, flicking through it briefly. Something twitched in his face. And yet he said nothing.
“What’s all the screaming about?” a voice said. Derry came in through the kitchen door with Clive following behind. Both of them had been out for a stroll, and they looked at the scene with perplexed expressions. I hoped with all my might that Tom wouldn’t start shouting again that I was a fraud.
Derry’s eyes fell on the book in Tom’s hands, then on me. “You’ve got your suitcase. Where are you going?”
I couldn’t speak and I was using every ounce of willpower to keep from bawling my eyes out precisely as Gaia was doing. Tom shifted his feet and said, “She’s got to go home. She’s going now to the airport.”
Derry took this in. She looked astonished, if not a little transfixed by the diary in Tom’s hands. “I’ll drive you,” she said. “It would be a shame not to say a proper good-bye.”
* * *
—
I was sobbing in the front seat of Derry’s car as we pulled out of the drive and toward the dirt road that ran through the trees. Added to everything else was the knowledge that Tom was most likely going to toss Dora out into the wild, and I suspected she was still far too tame to survive on her own.
She’d die, cold and alone, because of me.
“Are you all right?” Derry asked. I could only nod and blow my nose loudly on a piece of loo roll that I’d stuffed up my sleeve.
“What happened?” she said.
I blew my nose again. “It’s a long story . . .”
“Did Maren do something?”
“No. It was all my fault.”
“Was it something to do with the diary you gave Tom?”
“Not exactly.”
There was a weird feeling in the air, but I put it down to what had just happened.
“Well, what was it?”
“I screwed up again.”
“How, exactly?”
I couldn’t even begin to explain it all again. I was devastated, absolutely devastated.
We reached the end of the dirt road and turned left onto the main road that ran along the edge of the fjord. I looked down at the ruffled water and the trees swaying in the wind. It had started to rain heavily, and in the distance flashes of lightning lit up the sky.
The car had fallen silent, nothing but the drum of the rain on the roof and the groan of thunder filling the quiet. I tried to think of something to say to fill the space. I wanted to explain myself to someone, and above all I wanted to pretend this wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t real. But it was: I