Meet Me in Tahiti

Chapter One

Zoe Tayler’s mobile phone pinged, alerting her to an incoming email.

Her fingers froze on her computer keyboard.

She knew that email would be from [email protected]. Yes, Selena and Noel Tayler not only owned a domain name, they also had a dedicated address for corresponding with their only child. That was how serious they were about keeping a not-so-proverbial eye on her.

Whenever Zoe was on an international job her parents’ email obsession ratcheted up to frenzy level—particularly on day one, which brought an avalanche. Only gradually did the frequency taper off in the ensuing days, easing fraction by fraction with each of Zoe’s instantly returned I’m fine no need to worry replies.

Today—sigh—was day one. This would be their fourth email of the day, and the just-roll-with-it process of allaying their myriad concerns lay depressingly ahead of her.

It was noon in French Polynesia, which made it 11 p.m. in England. There should be time for only one more communique before her parents went to bed, so within the hour she should be free.

Unless...

Well, unless she decided not to answer this one. In which case she could be free immediately.

Her fingers twitched on the keyboard as the idea of going off-the-grid took hold.

And then she laughed.

Futile to hope her parents would shrug their shoulders, assume she was fine and go to bed. The more likely scenario was that they’d call Zoe’s mobile, and keep calling, and when Zoe didn’t answer (because answering would render her little rebellion redundant) they’d fret over what ills might have befallen her—everything from a fever-inducing cold caught during her plane trip to her lying unconscious on the floor with a cracked skull. Within twenty-four hours they’d be knocking on her bungalow door with an ambulance on standby.

Yeah, hard no to that!

She leaned back in her chair, rubbing her hands up and down her thighs to remind herself why her parents needed to know she was all right.

Of courseshe was going to reply.

“Fight your big battles to the death but don’t sweat the scrappy skirmishes if you want to win the long war,” she murmured, and her hands abruptly stopped moving as she realized what she’d said. Not that those words didn’t suit the situation, but it shocked her that she could recite them—verbatim—after...what...twelve years?

Yes, it had been twelve years since Finn Doherty had said those words to her that idyllic summer they’d worked together at the Crab Shack in Hawke’s Cove.

Her parents hadn’t wanted her to take the job at the Shack; hadn’t seen the need for it given the generous allowance they gave her. But all of her friends had summer jobs lined up and she’d pleaded, and her BFFs had pleaded, and even Ewan, the owner of the Crab Shack, had pleaded (such a softie), and at last she’d been given the OK to be just like every other sixteen-year-old in the village.

Unfortunately, a week into the job she’d had a wisdom tooth out—typical that she’d get her wisdom teeth earlier than any other kid and that one of them would be impacted. (Seriously, it was like the universe had it in for her!) Her parents, true to form, had acted like she was about to be measured for her coffin and it had taken two days in bed and an extra day of frantic begging before Zoe was allowed to return to work.

But her parents’ capitulation had come at a price: constant phone calls.

After their eighth call on her first day back, Zoe had decided that giving up the job was preferable to having every Shack employee lining up to throttle her. She’d hurried out to the storeroom, phone gripped in one hand, blinking tears away because she didn’t cry, ever, when Finn had...well, materialized.

He’d looked at the phone, at her face, and understood the situation instantly. That was when he’d said those words to her. And then he’d told her that the big battle had been getting her parents to agree to the job, but the phone calls? Pfft, they were nothing.

And just like that, the phone calls had ceased to matter. So she’d called her parents, right there in front of Finn, and explained that if she didn’t answer a call immediately it didn’t mean she was being rushed to hospital, only that she was busy, and in such cases she’d call them back within half an hour, cross-her-heart-hope-not-to-die. Then she’d set the phone to vibrate, and whenever it had buzzed in the back pocket of her jeans, she’d smiled at Finn and he’d smiled back, sharing the secret. And over the next few days the calls had tapered off. The way the emails she was currently dealing with always did eventually.

So deal with it, Zoe. The sooner you deal, the sooner you’re free.

She switched windows on her computer. For long responses—and she was determined to compose a long one, knocking off every possible issue she could think of as a forestalling tactic—she preferred keyboard typing to tapping on her phone.

She couldn’t imagine what there was left for them to warn her about but when she opened the message she saw they’d found something: Cristina, Zoe’s regular travel companion.

The email was oh-so-carefully worded; this wasn’t a hill her parents were prepared to die on lest Zoe decide no more travel companion at all, but nevertheless the dictates were clear: Zoe should remember Cristina was there to help. It was fine for Cristina to enjoy herself, and nobody expected her to hover over Zoe twenty-four hours a day, but Zoe shouldn’t see it as an imposition to request Cristina’s assistance whenever she needed it. Cristina was stronger than Zoe as well as being a trained nurse, so Zoe shouldn’t insist on doing all those transfers to and from her chair herself all the time.

The easy way to head this particular concern off at the pass was to let her parents know that Cristina had become as tediously dedicated to Zoe’s well-being as they were, to the point where Zoe had to send her on made-up errands to win herself some breathing space. Today, for example, Zoe had asked her to carry out a completely unnecessary accessibility check of the entire Poerava resort. Problem was, though, if she told her parents Cristina had been afflicted with the protect-Zoe-Tayler-at-all-costs disease they’d probably kick off a campaign to get Zoe to hire Cristina as a permanent live-in assistant.

Not! Happening!

Zoe wished she knew what she did that made people want to stand guard over her so she could stop doing it. It happened to everyone who came into her life sooner or later, and as for those who’d known her from her cradle?

Well, gah! Just...gah!

Yes, three miscarriages before Zoe was born had conferred “precious” status on Zoe. Yes, Zoe had suffered all the health issues associated with being premature. Yes, Zoe had been a sickly child, in and out of hospital with bronchiolitis. But—ginormous, important BUT—by the age of eleven she’d been as hardy as any kid in the village. Small, yes, but perfectly formed and perfectly fit. And yet a slight breeze sent half the village running for her coat. A yawn and the other half would urge her to rest. A scratch on her arm and she’d be fending off offers to drive her to the hospital. As though she were a piece of delicate porcelain teetering on the edge of a cliff and it was everyone’s collective responsibility to stop her going over.

Thank God for her best friends, Victoria, Malie and Lily, who treated her like they treated each other: no fuss, no concessions, just love. Without them, Zoe would have spent the span of her life from primary school to coming-of-age peering through the windows of her parents’ clifftop mansion—or as the girls called it “Palace de Prison”—at everyone else frolicking on the beach below.

Zoe smiled around a sigh, as she always did when thinking of her friends. She depended on the girls in a way she never let herself depend on anyone else. It didn’t feel like a weakness to need them, to lean on them when the going got tough. They had each other’s back, always. Knew each other’s frailties and strengths. Knew each other’s scars. Were always there for each other—whether it was a quick phone call between two of them or an all-in session via video conference.

Zoe’s visit home last Christmas had come about after one of those video calls. It hadn’t been easy, going back to Hawke’s Cove. But Victoria had been struggling over a decision that might have torn her from the man she loved (her now-fiancé Oliver Russell) and so Zoe had sucked it up and joined Lily and Malie on a surprise visit. They had a codename for those big deals—the scared-to-death and flying-high ones, the heartbreaks and exaltations, the ones that meant you dropped everything to be there: the Lost Hours.

Zoe was proud of the fact that she’d been the one to inspire that codename. They’d taken a trip to Ibiza to celebrate Victoria’s birthday and because V was the last of them to turn eighteen it was all-out-for-freedom that week. So all-out Zoe had managed to get lost at a foam party. One moment they’d been dancing as a group, the next the foam had gone right over Zoe’s head—she was the shortest, at just over five feet—and pandemonium had apparently ensued as Victoria, Malie and Lily had searched for her for the next three hours. They’d been scared out of their wits and checked her over as thoroughly as a doctor when she’d resurfaced, despite Zoe reassuring them that she hadn’t been kidnapped or drugged or conked on the head. Eventually they’d let the matter rest—perhaps reading the gleam of mischief in Zoe’s eyes that told them she was thrilled at having had a secret adventure.

It had been two months before the summer ball that would mark the end of school, and with the daring still racing through her blood Zoe had made the decision then and there that the ball would be a turning point, kick-starting a new life.

Careful what you wish for.

That night had certainly kick-started a new life. A new life for all of them. Just not in a way anyone could have anticipated.

Which she was not going to think about now. She was going to think only positive thoughts. As though by magic, her phone lit up.

Video call.

Lily.

Zoe smiled as she hit the button to accept. “Hey!” she said. “It’s close to midnight over there! Do you miss me that much?”

Lily opened her mouth...then closed it.

“Lily?” Zoe said, alarmed at the distraught look on her friend’s face.

Lily opened her mouth again...and burst into tears.

“Lily!” Zoe clutched the phone so tightly in her hand she was in danger of cracking the case. “Tell me, tell me what it is!”

“Sorry, sorry!” Lily wiped furiously at her eyes. “It’s just... Blake.” A sob escaped her, but Zoe could see her pulling it all together, the way she always did. “H-he’s d-dead.”

“Oh Lily! Lils! I’m so, so sorry. Do you need me to come? I will, you know I will.”

Lily shook her head furiously. “You hate Hawke’s Cove.”

“This isn’t about Hawke’s Cove, it’s about you.”

“You’re on a job.”

“I’m a fill-in, nothing more. It’s a junket. Like...blerrgh. You know I don’t do those.”

A ghost of a smile from Lily. “And yet there you are.”

“Meh!” Zoe tossed in nonchalantly. “I like the guy who asked me to do it, that’s the only reason.”

“As in like?”

“As in no! Geez! Rolf lives in Germany. It’s an online friendship, nothing more. Let’s leave the romance to V and Devil, shall we? On the subject of which, this is Lost Hours business. They’re joining us, right?”

And just like that, Lily was crying again. “I was going to dial them in but I...I mean, they’re both...you know, all loved up with Oliver and Todd. But Mum’s not here and I just...I feel kind of lost, and I knew you were in a time-friendly zone and...oh, I don’t know what to do!”

OK, sound the alarm! Lily lost? Not knowing what to do? It. Did. Not. Com. Pute.

“Just hold on, I’ll conference in V and Devil and we can all cry together.”

“You never cry. And you wouldn’t have to even if you did. You barely knew him.”

“I’ll cry for you like a professional mourner. And Malie will cry for real. You know she adored him almost as much as you.” She started tapping at her phone.

“Not V!” Lily said suddenly. “I mean, the Hawkesbury Estate!”

“The estate? I don’t see what that has to do with V. Unless it’s a will thing? But how could that—OK, what am I not getting?”

“Not a will thing, a wedding venue thing. Not that there’s going to be a problem, because I won’t let anything go wrong, but she might worry.”

“Er...if you think the death of the richest man in Hawke’s Cove can be kept a secret for more than an hour you’re dreaming. Or is Mrs. Whittaker dead too? ’Cause I’ll bet she’s already got the megaphone out.”

“Oh. I just... I’m not thinking.”

“Not thinking? You? You’re scaring me with that kind of talk! Anyway, Victoria isn’t going to give a damn about her wedding!”

“Victoria certainly is going to give a damn about her wedding,” Victoria said, laughing as she joined the call.

At which point Lily burst into tears again.

“Or...maybe...not?” Victoria said. “What’s going on?”

“Blake Hawkesbury’s dead,” Zoe explained.

“WHAT?” Malie said, announcing herself.

“Today,” Lily said, and kept on crying. “It happened today.”

“And Lily’s mum’s out of town,” Zoe said, imbuing the phrase with as much meaning as she could. Subtext: someone has to get there fast!

“Right, I’m coming,” Malie said, and actually jumped to her feet.

“What about Todd?” Lily sniffled.

“We’re not joined at the hip, you know.”

Lily shook her head, adamant. “No, you can’t come, you’ve got that surf competition coming up.”

“There’ll be other competitions,” Malie said, and then abruptly started crying too. “But there was only one B-B—” But she choked, and couldn’t continue.

She didn’t have to. Everyone knew Blake Hawkesbury had loaned Malie the money she’d needed to flee Hawke’s Cove after the accident. Maybe he’d done that out of a sense of responsibility—it had been his only son Henry’s girlfriend, Claudia, driving the car that night—but Zoe had always thought it was simply because he was kind. The deep down type of kind. To all of them. Especially Lily, though, to whom he’d become a mentor, almost like a father, after giving her a job in his hotel kitchen when she was sixteen.

Zoe may not have had much to do with him but the memories she had were good ones. “Hey,” she said, overwhelmed by nostalgia, “remember how he always let us get away with sneaking onto his private beach for our barbecues, pretending he never knew we were doing it?”

“Yes!” Victoria agreed, smiling mistily. “And how he sent that case of his finest champagne to me and Oliver to celebrate our engagement? He was so happy to be hosting our wedding at the Hawkesbury Estate.” Her smile dropped as the tears came to her too. “And now he won’t even be there.”

Silence, except for Lily, Malie and Victoria weeping.

And then Malie blew her nose. “Right. What do you need?”

Lily heaved in a shuddery breath, then let it out, making a visible effort to get back to her normal self. “I need you to go to that surfing competition and win it for Blake.” Another heaved-in breath. “And Zoe, I need you to stay where you are and write me something poignant to say at the funeral. And Victoria—”

“Save your breath,” Victoria said, cutting her off. “I’m coming to Hawke’s Cove tomorrow and it’s not to discuss wedding plans.”

Lily gave a choked sob. “Of course you’re coming. Of course you are, and I need you to come.” Another hitching sob. “But right now, I’m going to get into bed and cry my eyes out.”

Lily rang off, leaving Malie, Victoria and Zoe staring at each other.

“Will she be OK?” Zoe asked.

Malie blew a corkscrew curl out of her eyes. “She’ll pretend she is, anyway.”

“Maybe I should come over for the funeral?” Zoe said, tentative.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” Victoria said. “You think we don’t know how much you hated coming back for Christmas?”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing. I’m not taking the risk that another visit so soon will have you vowing to stay away forever when I need you at my wedding in August.”

“Not to mention my wedding when the time comes so don’t let the Cove outstay its welcome. Or do I mean you outstay your welcome? Whatever, just don’t pretend you don’t loathe Hawke’s Cove with a passion and would rather swim with the piranhas in the Zambezi than come home.”

“I think you mean the Amazon—”

“Details!”

“But, OK!” Zoe huffed out a short-lived laugh. “Hey, do you think Henry might finally turn up?”

Malie rolled her eyes. “Who knows?”

“Who cares?” Victoria said, and then grimaced. “Sorry, I don’t mean that, I take it back. Henry may have been a spoiled brat—”

“Not may have been, he was a spoiled brat, and probably still is a spoiled brat!” Malie threw in.

“But, if you’ll shut up, Malie, for a few seconds—I think he suffered as much as the rest of us. Not physically, obviously, but emotionally. I mean, yes, it was an accident, but Claudia died, right next to him in that car. How do you even start to deal with that?”

“Claudia’s parents still blame him,” Zoe said, and then she sighed. “And so do mine.” Another sigh. “Talking about my parents, if I don’t email them within the next ten minutes they’ll declare a state of emergency. So that’s me, signing off.”

“Measurements!” Victoria called out. “Remember, I need your measurements if I’m going to make your bridesmaid’s dress not look like a sack on you!”

“They’ll be the same as they were at Christmas—and incidentally I’m wearing that divine pink dress you made me to a cocktail party tonight—but yep, fine. Measurements. As soon as I locate a tape measure.”

Zoe disconnected and returned to the email from her parents, rescanning the words and heaving another sigh.

She was going to have to refer to Blake Hawkesbury’s death, and she really hoped that didn’t have them harking back to the accident. She’d used up a lot of energy over the years putting that night behind her, leaving Hawke’s Cove in the past.

Lately, though, fate seemed to be conspiring against her.

The Christmas visit.

Victoria’s wedding, coming up in a few months.

Malie’s decision to move back there and reopen her family’s surf school in the near future, taking her entrepreneur fiancé with her—not that it was so much taking him with her as it was him being willing to follow her to the ends of the earth.

And on the subject of Malie, damn her for bringing up Finn Doherty during that visit to Hawaii in February, because ever since he’d been popping into her head at inopportune times. Damn her for all of her talk about how Finn used to look at Zoe like he wanted to strip her naked.

Damn her...but God, how Zoe loved her.

How she loved them all. They were her anchor and her safe harbor.

But they were also the tide, pulling her back to where she didn’t want to go.

You hate Hawke’s Cove.Lily.

You think we don’t know how much you hated coming back for Christmas?Victoria.

Don’t pretend you don’t loathe Hawke’s Cove with a passion.Malie.

She’d worked so hard to escape, she had escaped...but because of the precious friendships she’d forged there she was afraid she’d never truly leave it behind. In fact she felt a terrible, burning certainty that Hawke’s Cove was waiting for her to return, daring her to remember it all—a feeling that had been growing stronger since Christmas.

Maybe it was tiredness getting to her; since December she’d done practically back-to-back trips—Mexico, England, the Caribbean, Hawaii, New Zealand. And yet she’d so easily shelved what she’d thought was a firm plan to chill at home in Sydney for a few months. She should have turned down this job—it was so last minute she hadn’t been able to do her usual meticulous research, plus she really, truly hated junkets—but a nagging discontentedness had had her accepting.

And so here she was, replying to yet one more email, drowning in the...the suffocation of her life, the same suffocation she thought she’d fled ten years ago.

“And you think Henry Hawkesbury was a spoiled brat?” she asked herself out loud. “Get over yourself, Zoe Tayler. Blake Hawkesbury just died, Lily’s mourning, Rolf’s got pneumonia, and you’re complaining? You’re alive, you’ve got a job people dream about, you’re in paradise—stop bitching about having to write an email.”

Quickly, she typed:

I just heard Blake Hawkesbury died. Lily’s mum’s away at the moment so I hope you’ll check on her—you know how close to him she was.

And then she switched to autopilot and kept typing. She’d been typing versions of the same email for so long she could just about write it in her sleep. Soothe, placate, deflect.

She reread her message, checking for typos, hit send, then returned to her interrupted article.

But stubbornly, the words wouldn’t come. As she sat there watching the cursor blink, it struck her that when she’d checked for typos in that email she hadn’t absorbed one word of the actual content.

She went back to the email she’d sent, read it again, and knew why the content hadn’t pulled her in: it was tepid, it was practiced, it was nothing. Even the reference to staying in her room all day writing her story on Malie’s godfather’s surf school was a glib throwaway, nothing but a facile reassurance that they could go—to—bed—please!

Strictly speaking she would be working in her room all day. She was going to finish that article, then she was going to write a brief on the surf school for a documentary maker she’d met on a trip last year, then she was going to tackle the research on Poerava she ordinarily would have done a week before flying in. But she had oh-so-carefully “forgotten” to mention the cocktail party she’d be attending in the evening—an omission that suddenly troubled her.

She started to rub her hands up and down her thighs, then stopped herself. She didn’t need to remind herself why her parents worried; they never stopped telling her they worried. And at almost twenty-eight years old she didn’t need to confess every single thing she did or feel guilty about skipping an occasional detail that might cause them unnecessary anxiety.

Especially since she knew nothing was going to happen to her at the cocktail party. Nothing interesting, anyway. She’d been to so many of these events she could describe exactly how the evening would unfold. She’d dress up and do her hair and makeup. She’d drink champagne, eat canapés. Meet the resort manager if he/she was there, be schmoozed by the public relations executive who’d arranged her travel. She’d talk to as many people as she could, gathering information on the resort and the area’s most interesting attractions. And at the end of the evening she’d return to her room with Cristina and go immediately to bed to rest up for the always busy first day of action.

Boring.

So boring maybe she should just skip it. After her recent travel-fest no one could blame her for preferring a quiet night in. Even when you were being flown business class (as she invariably was), air travel was exhausting, especially when you had to navigate airports in a wheelchair. And then, of course, she had jet lag to contend with, which could kick in at any moment, not to mention—

“Oh. My. God!” she exploded. “Listen to yourself. Sermonizing on the evils of travel. Who even are you?”

She sat up straighter. She wasn’t going to lie to herself by pretending she was too tired to go to a party when what she was actually suffering from was a guilty conscience over not telling her parents she was going out. Nor was she going to send a follow-up email mentioning the party.

What she was going to do was remind herself—visually, since she couldn’t trust the tortured inside of her head—that she was living the life she’d always dreamed of.

She pushed away from the desk and wheeled herself onto the sundeck of her bungalow, gazing at the endlessness of blue.

Blue was her favorite color, and it didn’t get more beautiful than this, laid out in shades shifting seamlessly from crystal to powder to electric to azure to sapphire, all the way out to the horizon where the lagoon collided with a vivid cerulean sky. Her bungalow seemed to be suspended between two worlds—and in a way that was exactly what it was, perched on stilts over water, not earth. There were glass panels in the floor inside that allowed you to see the colorful fish darting freely below, but Zoe preferred this outdoor vantage point. In her soul she was soaring, skimming across the lagoon, rising into the air, flying straight up to the heavens.

Thiswas why she’d fought so hard to not return home to Hawke’s Cove with her parents. This beauty, this freedom.

It had been worth every trade-off she’d negotiated—the apartment that had been bought for her off-plan before construction so modifications could be made for her wheelchair, the physiotherapist who came twice a week, the cleaning service, the detailed itineraries provided to her parents whenever she was traveling, Cristina’s assistance, the regular phone calls when she was at home, the barrage of emails when she was working, a hundred other inconsequential intrusions.

It had been a fight for her life...at the cost of her parents’ hope for a cure.

“Fight your big battles to the death, but don’t sweat the scrappy skirmishes if you want to win the long war,” she said again, looking out across the lagoon.

Once more she heard Finn saying those words. But now she could see him, too. His crooked smile with the tiny chip in his front tooth as he’d tucked a hank of her hair behind her ear. She’d looked into his too-blue eyes that day and seen more than a color. She’d seen, so clearly, that Finn was mysteriously older than his eighteen years. His life had been nothing like her pampered existence—and yet he’d believed, he really had, that she was as strong as he was, capable of fighting for what she wanted, ready to do whatever she set her heart on.

What would he think of all those compromises she’d made to get where she was? Would he see her as a victor or would he say she was...

“Lost,” she said, and closed her eyes, trying to unblock the memory of the very last time she’d seen him.

Impossible.

As usual, only a snippet or two resurfaced, just enough to tell her it had been traumatic; the rest stayed safely buried.

She opened her eyes, stared out at the horizon, and saw again his eyes, the same color as the French Polynesian sky.

She may not have the full memory of that night but she knew one thing: however Finn Doherty may have looked at her during that Crab Shack year, his opinion had gone through a dramatic metamorphosis in the two years that followed.

And it didn’t matter. It really, truly didn’t.

She hadn’t seen him for ten years and she’d never see him again.

Which was just fine with her.

She had an article to finish, a party to go to, and a life to live.