they all were. They’d each behaved badly, treacherously, in their own ways.
Emil sat watching as Max comforted his – their – wife. He looked utterly alone, Nina sitting on the opposite side of the table with shining eyes, her hand pinched over her mouth, knowing she couldn’t interfere or save her little brother this time. This was his mess. He’d made it, he had to tidy it up.
No one spoke for a very long time. Then slowly, Emil scraped back the chair and walked over to them both. He put his hands on each of their shoulders. Max’s. Hanna’s. Hanna’s head lifted as she looked back at him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘For everything.’ The words chimed with heavy sincerity.
‘Really?’ she asked. Disbelief crackled her voice, like a child being told Christmas could be repeated.
‘We’ll work this out,’ he nodded, meeting Max’s gaze. ‘We will. Everything’s as it’s meant to be. I can see that now.’
Bell saw the tension break in Max, many more than seven years’ worth of guilt washing through him in waves, and she knew he’d suffered long before Emil ever had. But it was over. At long last, the truth was out, and –
She saw Emil’s head turn in her direction, his remarkable stare coming to rest upon her and looking for – what? An option? A back-up? A future?
But she didn’t register it. Something else was pushing to the forefront of her mind, her attention snagging on a detail that had meant nothing in all the noise. Slowly she twisted back, glancing behind, because her eye had caught sight of something before – a tiny wink of red in the long grass, by the camellia bush.
She peered closer, and saw it was a toy Corvette.
‘Bell?’ She heard the concern in Emil’s voice as she lifted her gaze and stiffly scanned the garden, looking over the helter-skelter, the carousel, the bouncy castle . . . She felt her blood run cold as she looked back at them all watching her, frozen like statues.
‘Where are the children?’
Chapter Thirty
They split up, one in each direction, Hanna sprinting towards the jetty, certain they’d be taking the boat back to Summer Isle. Bell could hear their shouts shake through the trees, the children’s names being called out with bald-faced terror.
Bell knew Linus had heard everything. He’d been hiding in the bush, listening to every word – hearing how his mother had fallen in love with another man, how his father had threatened his mother with losing him, how his mother had chased his father in the car, both of them angry, reckless, dangerous . . . He had been frightened of having to choose but now he had chosen – and he hadn’t chosen any of them. He had taken his sisters and he was taking them to safety, away from all the so-called grown-ups who professed to love them.
She knew all this because she knew him. She loved him, actually, that was the truth of it. She loved him like he was her own, though he wasn’t. She was the nanny. Just the nanny. And yet she’d always been more than that. They’d demanded more from her and she’d given it because she’d needed a family, a home, when she had been alone and stranded in the world.
She tore through the trees, her palms slapping against bark as she pushed off against them, running blindly, past the birches and pines, the blueberry bushes and the hawthorns that scratched her legs.
She came to the water’s edge, the sea suddenly there like a bear saying ‘boo’, the levels much higher than usual, dredged up by the low pressure of the coming storm. She stared out, screaming their names, but it was hard to see and hear – the water was being whipped up by the wind, the standing waves in the strait making it hard to spot a small rowing boat or a kayak. Please God, not a kayak, not out there, not in these conditions . . . She scanned up and down the shore, stumbling on the rocks as she surveyed the water, straining to hear for cries over the wind, but there was nothing . . .
She decided to keep to the perimeter and walk round. It was the water that was the danger. As long as they didn’t go in the w—
Suddenly she stopped.
She knew exactly where they were.
The others had realized it too, Hanna still sprinting as Bell met her on the rocks, their feet slipping