only real industry on the island and if someone gets blacklisted, there’s nowhere to go.
Lander: Emma told you this?
Emma: I asked him why my phone. The screen was locked and nobody could get into it. He said it was only to inconvenience me. He saw Rhea with my phone and, when she told him what it was, he insisted it be put back.
…
There was a part of me relieved to hear it. The phone really had been taken and returned. I’d not imagined it.
Lander: I… We… we were on the cliffs to say goodbye. That’s all.
Emma: I told him that I hoped everything worked out with him, Rhea and his kids. I said I wanted him to be happy and he said the same to me.
Rhea wouldn’t have been happy, but we hugged and it was another of those moments when it felt as if I was slipping through time. It was the way he held me, the position of his hands on my back and the curve of his shoulders. I think a hug is like a fingerprint sometimes. It wasn’t that I craved the past, it was that there was a comfort to it.
We separated and then he said goodbye. I think we both knew we’d never see each other again after that. I watched him walk away and there was a closure that I never thought we’d have. If that’s the only good thing to come from the holiday, then I suppose it’s one thing. Perhaps I should remind myself once in a while that it wasn’t all bad.
Lander: I don’t know why she’d say all this now. I know nothing about her phone.
Chapter Thirty-One
THE IMPORTANT SILENCES
Emma: By the time I got back to the hotel, Mum had returned from the hospital. She was sitting on a lounger a little away from the pool, quite close to the walkthrough for the cottages. The sun had dipped below the trees on the furthest side of the pool and shadows were covering half the patio. The buffet was open again, so people were starting to head back inside.
I didn’t know if Mum knew that the girls had been temporarily missing and certainly didn’t want to be the one to tell her.
She was on her own, holding a book but staring over the top of it towards the sky. I went and perched next to her, but it took her a moment to notice I was there. When she turned to me, she seemed so… haunted.
I can’t think of a better word.
When you’re young, you think of your parents as invincible. You think they know everything, which is why you’re constantly throwing questions at them. Then there’s a strange crossover point where you start to realise that there are issues you understand much more than they do. You notice that they don’t know how to adjust something like a toaster, or that the clock on the microwave is always wrong. It’s odd little things and you start to wonder if you’re the grown-up now.
I’ll never forget that moment on the lounger, because Mum looked so old and I felt so helpless. I wanted to hold her and be next to her. There’s an urge to say everything will be all right, even though we both knew it wouldn’t be.
I started wondering if it would be better to lose a parent suddenly, or if this long, winding build-up is the way it’s supposed to be. Where you can sit and have conversations about nothing that are really about everything.
We sat for a little while and then she spoke. It was so soft that I barely heard her over the noise from the pool. That quietest voice in the room again.
She said: ‘How did you know where the girls would be?’
I was a bit surprised Julius had told her they’d gone missing, but I suppose it would have been hard to keep from her, given the number of staff who’d been searching.
I told her that I hadn’t known for certain and that I was only going off what I would have done at that age. Mum nodded but didn’t reply at first.
When she did, she had already moved on. She said that the manager had told her she could stay on in the hotel if Dad was stuck on the island. I told her that she had commitments at home, with treatments and doctor visits. That she had to think of herself. She nodded along, but I don’t think she took it