as he pulled away. But then he forced a bright smile again. ‘I can’t believe you bought me a boat!’
What? No –
Bell automatically stepped forward, catching sight of Emil’s expression too. He was taken off guard, his tears suddenly staunched, his mouth shaping soundless words.
‘Well,’ he faltered, seeing her horror, then recovering himself. ‘I wanted to show you just how much you mean to me – so that meant it had to be something big.’
‘I love sailing!’ Linus cried, jumping up and down at the sight of the machine.
Emil laughed. ‘You get that from me. As soon as I was able to, once I got out of the hospital, I came out here just so I could be on the water every day. And then I waited and waited and waited for you. It’s the thing that made me better – the thought of sharing this with you.’
‘Are we going to go out on it?’
‘Of course we are. The crew’s got everything ready for you. The conditions are perfect. How fast do you want to go?’
‘Really fast!’ Linus shouted, almost overcome with excitement, and Bell instinctively stepped forward again and placed a hand on his shoulder, a silent command to settle down.
Emil looked down at her hand accusingly. She removed it again. She was interfering. In the way.
‘Well, you’d better hop in the dinghy then, and we’ll go out to her. She can’t get in here, the water’s too shallow.’
‘Me first!’ And Linus clambered down the small ladder at the side and hopped easily into the boat.
Emil turned back to face her, blocking her path. ‘You look unhappy.’ He stared at her levelly, confrontational. ‘Is there a problem?’
She glanced down at Linus to check he wasn’t listening. ‘You can’t just give him a boat,’ she said in a low voice.
‘I haven’t. It’s entirely notional. If he wants to believe it’s his, that’s fine. Where’s the harm?’
She stared back at him, unable to find the words – few enough to make her point, low enough to remain out of earshot. ‘Fine,’ she sighed, conceding defeat on this. Linus couldn’t see them at odds with one another. He was putting his trust in them both; it was only fair for him to believe they were doing the same. ‘Whatever you say. He’s your son.’
Emil smiled at the comment, looking down lovingly at the excitable boy in the boat. ‘Yes. Yes, he is.’
Chapter Twenty
Not here, she told herself. Not here.
But as she sat clipped to the railings with her head tipped back, her hair streaming, screaming with exhilaration, the tears flowed uncontrollably. It was all too beautiful, too perfect, too pure. She had made herself forget this feeling, spent four years suppressing the residual sensation of skating over the surface of the world, but now with the briny spray against her face and the wind tangling her hair into little whipsnakes once more, she was straight back there – in time. With him. In another life . . .
‘Are you crying?’ Linus asked, his hand warm on her arm.
She looked down at him, the wind whipping away her tears. ‘No, it’s just the wind,’ she fibbed, pushing down her heartache with a bright smile, knowing just how much Jack would have loved this moment. This had been their life together – well, not this rarefied echelon, clearly, but the world gliding beneath their feet as they rigged the sail and set the boom. This was what he had lived for. But the truth was brutal and simple and unavoidable – he wasn’t here, and he never would be again. He was gone.
She made herself say it in her head. He’s gone . . .
She saw Emil, clipped to Linus’s other side, watching her as though he detected the lie, and she looked away with a defiant chin-thrust to the air, her eyes closed, willing the past to leave her alone.
‘Hold on!’ Mats, the skipper, suddenly yelled as the boat turned, catching the wind, and in an instant they were aloft, up on the hydrofoils, a metre above the waves. She screamed with shocked delight as she looked down to find they were slicing across the water’s surface as if on a blade. Linus met her widened eyes, screaming and laughing too like they were on a rollercoaster, then looking over at Emil, who was the same, all of them caught in a shared bubble of euphoria. She had never seen him laugh before, she realized, and it changed him completely, lifting away the