on air. I could make out two girls of almost equal height and a boy, quite a bit taller.
I pulled out my binoculars. The trio had the same faces: almost heart-shaped; one of the girls was a brunette, the other had cool, long blond hair, and the boy’s was a shade somewhere between the two, half covering his face. The blonde with long hair was playing a guitar. Siblings? Maybe twentyish, maybe more. The guitar girl wore a dress—long—like a Laura Ashley design from the 1970s. Flowery and floaty. She looked like she’d stepped out of the movie set of Picnic at Hanging Rock or a vintage clothing shop. The other girl’s hair was cut in a neat dark bob, hip and stylish. She was wearing a black catsuit. Exactly the sort of bohemian, arty types I had imagined as guests at my would-be retreat.
And here they were now, having a picnic, the girl strumming a guitar; it made me ache with longing.
I didn’t want to stalk or seem like some sort of peeping Tom, so I spun my gaze around in a semicircle pretending, with my binoculars, to look at hawks circling above the pine trees. Occasionally, you might spot a California condor, and that was particularly thrilling considering the species had once been threatened. The wind whipped my hair across my face into my mouth, and the saltiness of the breeze took my breath away for an instant, causing me to gulp air.
Lowering my binoculars, I glanced behind me, up towards my house.
As I watched, I saw—I swear I saw—a figure, tinier than my thumbnail, dashing across Cliffside’s garden. The facade of my house faced the ocean—the cliff a sheer drop below—but to the side stretched my lawn, and behind that several acres of woods, where maybe someone had broken through. How? I lifted the binoculars to my eyes again to make sure I wasn’t imagining things (a big bird? a deer?) but got them all twisted up in my hair. When I focused again, whatever, whoever it was had vanished. The fear of being spied upon rose up inside me again, the notion I was alone without my husband. Vulnerable. Exposed. I hadn’t realized how dependent I had become on Juan, how much I had grown to rely on him for even the smallest things. When we met he was my boss and somehow that had translated into our marriage, too. Being so in love, so smitten, I had lost myself to him, lost sight of my own strength, my core. Like Cliffside, I had become almost camouflaged and saw myself through him.
I pushed my salty hair from my eyes and refocused the binoculars in the direction of the picnickers, but they had left—just a dip in the sand where their tartan blanket had been.
Then I remembered that to quench my thirst I had drunk nearly a whole Thermos flask of champagne on the hike down.
Was the figure in my garden my imagination?
Four
Even before I unlocked the door of my house, I knew something was up. When I got inside, I sensed there had been a visitor. A whiff of something. Perfume? Men’s cologne? A frisson shimmied up my spine, but I had Dutch courage from the champagne. If someone had it in their mind to kill me off or rape me, they would’ve done it by now. And there was no sign of a break-in. No smashed furniture or pictures flung from walls. Everything was exactly in its place. No, this person was after something else.
This person was playing with my mind.
Watching me, seeing if I’d slip up.
My heart plunged. How the hell did they—he, or she—get in here? The driveway gate had a code, which I had changed recently. I raced around in a frantic spin, into the kitchen then checked the sliding doors around the house. All locked. Windows too. This place was like Fort Knox, our security pretty state-of-the-art. Then I remembered. There was a key. For emergencies. In case I lost mine on the beach or something. I ran outside into the garden, to where the old tree stump was. A tree had died there, a eucalyptus I think, long before we came to the house. I stuck my trembling hand deep into its crevice, expecting a void, but it was still there: the key to the lower ground floor nestled in its ziplock bag, snug and hidden. I pulled the bag out. It was eye-crossingly stupid to have a key “hidden”