days – are going to be spent bereft of family. My guess is we’ll all be visiting a lot more often than we might think.’ He stopped and turned towards the view, pulling Joely in close to him so he could tilt his head to rest it on hers.
Realizing he might be talked out on a personal level for the moment, she gazed out at the perpetually moving waves with him and thought of all the different types of love there were. Right now, for her, the one she felt for her brother was the most important, but she understood that just like a tide it would yield to others, Callum, or Holly, or Marianne, or even Freda, when it mattered, and it made no one of them any less important than the other.
After a while he said, ‘We haven’t talked about you and Callum, but as he’s here I’m guessing you’ve sorted things out?’
Joely said, ‘For now, yes. For good, I hope, but let me ask you this, did you see how well he got along with Edward’s partner, Amanda, over lunch? Before I might not even have noticed it, or I certainly wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but now … Well, I guess that’s what happens when trust isn’t holding you together the way it used to. Suspicion and doubt sneak in through the cracks and before you know it even innocent scenarios are turned into something they aren’t.’ She didn’t add that she was afraid it might be the same for Callum going forward, watching her with other men, but it probably would be, how could it not?
‘It’ll get better,’ Jamie assured her. ‘It takes time, that’s all.’
‘You’re sounding like Mum now.’
‘Or Dad. It’s what he said to me when Clare and I ran into problems.’
Joely turned to him in confusion. ‘You never said …’
‘I didn’t want anyone to know. Dad only found out because Clare told him. I don’t think he ever confided in Mum, because she’s never mentioned it.’
‘So you …? Did you meet someone else?’
‘No, Clare did, but she came back and now … In some ways it’s better than ever. In others it’s different, but we live with it and if one of us gets worried we talk about it.’
Still stunned that she hadn’t known any of this, Joely said, ‘But surely she doesn’t have any reason not to trust you?’
He smiled. ‘I don’t think that’s the point. Now she knows how easy it is to meet someone else even when you’re not looking, she’s afraid it’ll happen to me.’
‘Oh God,’ Joely groaned, and dropped her head against him not wanting to think about how corrosive mistrust and insecurity could be.
Eventually they turned to walk on, moving into single file as the path became more of a ledge until they joined hands to climb over a stony mount into the Valley of Rocks.
‘Wow,’ he murmured, taking in the spectacular dry bowl between the moor and the sea. ‘It’s kind of otherworldly, don’t you think?’ He frowned. ‘What’s that noise?’
Joely pointed to a handful of goats clambering up the hillside. ‘It’s their hooves clattering on the stones,’ she explained and took out her phone as it bleeped with a text. She was expecting it to be Callum or Holly, possibly her mother.
It was Freda.
Where are you? Please try to get back before I die I have more to tell you.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘So, Joely,’ Freda said, her voice hoarse and seeming almost to float from her throat as it carried words into the warm air as if they were fledgling butterflies, ‘we are coming to the denouement – you know that means ending, I’m sure – and I imagine you have leapt to many conclusions by now.’ She smiled to herself, as though enjoying the unravelling of her thoughts, or secrets, or games, it was never possible to know exactly what was going on with her.
They were seated on the kitchen patio, enjoying the earthy scents of the meadow following a short burst of rain, and listening to the birds shrieking and twittering about the tor and soaring down to the sea. Several months had passed since Freda had sent the text summoning Joely back to Dimmett House because she had more to tell, spring had flowed and bloomed into summer, and her home had become a regular weekend retreat for most of her family, as she now termed them. True to character, she’d kept Joely waiting for details, toying with her, testing her and