Chapter Seven
Ella
Ella sipped from her glass of water even though she wasn’t thirsty. The throbbing in her temples wouldn’t ease. The cool liquid slid down her throat, and she took another drink before glancing back at Marco Marcos. He spun a pen between his fingertips, his inquisitive brown eyes not leaving hers.
They’d quickly shifted from the polite niceties of “how are you finding your time here?” to the more serious, making-you-reconsider-every-decision-leading-to-this-moment questions.
When Ella set her glass down but still didn’t say anything, he raised his wild brows, glasses bouncing on the bridge of his nose.
She sighed and looked away at the framed picture of a crab on the back wall. Even its beady eyes were judging her. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“Honestly.”
She met his unwavering gaze again. “How am I supposed to know if I’m a disappointment? You can call my mother if you like.”
He clicked his pen twice before twirling it between his hairy fingers. “That wasn’t the question, Ella, but it’s interesting that you connected those two elements together. Why do you think your mother is disappointed in you?”
Ah, shit.
While their mum accompanied Devin to each of his violin practices, their dad got lumped with ferrying Ella to the various extracurricular activities her parents had signed her up for, hoping she’d find her calling. Swimming, dance class, tennis, and a painful martial-arts taster, where Ella took a beating from a girl four years younger than her, splitting her eyebrow. The trip to A and E didn’t deter them, and the cool touch of her mother’s comfort grazed up Ella’s forearm. “ We’ll find you something that makes you happy, darling. ”
Ella had settled for netball. Her parents loved coming to watch the matches—Dad calling encouragement from the sideline, Mum in her Barbour jacket, scarf wrapped tight around her neck, and Devin sitting cross-legged on the floor, head deep in a science book.
But Ella didn’t feel the passion playing the way Devin did. She found hers perfecting the details of a project, finding the perfect font, and seeing the growth of her clients on her computer screen. Concrete proof that she was doing something that mattered.
But now she was useless again. No wonder her parents wanted to intervene.
She chewed at her lip, feeling it wobble. She didn’t want to open that can of worms. She looked down at the printed A4 resting on her lap, where a stick figure flailed its limbs helplessly, its top half attached to balloons and its lower to weights holding it in place. Words were placed inside. Disappointment. Lonely. Worthless. Shame. Guilt. Pain.
A delectable word cocktail. Ella was spoilt for choice. After yet another confusing yoga class this morning, with Riley blowing hot and cold and Pauline gushing about how amazing and life-altering the ruins were, Ella felt a connection with all of the words at once. Exploring her feelings about her mother and living constantly in Devin’s shadow would only make her feel worse. No thanks.
She readjusted her bikini strap under her top, moving it off her sunburnt skin. Falling asleep on the beach yesterday had come with the nasty price of a sore nose, chin, shoulders, and chest, too. Under Marco Marcos’s stare, it seared even more.
Without saying a word, he scribbled in his pad, eyebrows twitching like caterpillars crawling across his face. Then he flipped to a new page and leaned back in his cream chair with a creak.
“Often, when we feel stuck, identifying the root of these feelings can help us understand those emotions and navigate a way forward. There’s so much pressure in day-to-day life, Ella. Most of the time, these pressures are ones we needlessly put on ourselves. I can help you. I want to help you. But if you’re not honest with me, that makes it difficult.”
Ella clicked her tongue. All this talk was prickling her nerves extra hard today. She was trying. In her own way. It wasn’t her fault everyone else was better.
“You seem annoyed,” he commented. “Would you like to expand on that?”
No alcohol. No phones. No Maeve. No Riley. Every time Ella went to the beach, it tried to bloody kill her. Everything she said was monitored and picked apart. The way she moved and breathed , for Christ’s sake .
This place sucks. Worst. Holiday. Ever.
She imagined the giant crab crawling out from behind the painting and seizing Marco’s bald head in its shiny, red pincers.
“I’m fine,” she said, with a sigh.
His stare flitted over her face. Then he clicked his pen and started scribbling.
Get me out of here.
* * *
When the session finally drew to a close, Ella stomped out into the afternoon sun, her head still aching and her skin feeling like she’d been rolling around in nettles. A visit to the beach was out of the question. She didn’t want to see anyone, and she certainly didn’t want to see Riley.
Actually, the more she thought about it, the more appealing it sounded to get on the first boat she could see and return to the mainland. What were Winnie and her mum thinking, sending her here? She needed to hear her best friend’s voice and tell her how stupid this all was.
Goats, grazing on the hillside in their pens, bleated at her as she passed, while a bored-looking teenager sat on the crumbling stone wall offered a bob of his head. More people greeted her on the way, but Ella marched forwards, until she spotted the tree with the creepy fingers swaying at the top of the path.
She dumped her bag at the tree’s base and retrieved her phone from inside. After a quick glance around, she heaved herself onto the branch, wincing as her sore skin brushed against the bark. She gritted her teeth and kept climbing, letting out pained grunts until she reached the same place as the other morning. Her signal bar jumped up, and she switched her data on. Her phone immediately vibrated with notifications, and the corners of her mouth lifted.
See, you’re not a complete lonely loser.
But then her eyes scanned the words on her screen, and her blood ran cold.
No. She read it again. Then she clicked the notification, bringing up a picture of Maeve and Annabelle, beaming and holding Annabelle’s newly engaged hand up to the camera.
Ella’s gaze fixed on their perfect smiles, and tears pricked her eyelids. She homed in on the gigantic, beautiful rock on Annabelle’s finger. They were engaged? Maeve and Annabelle…engaged? Her mind couldn’t comprehend it, but there it was, right in front of her, in perfect filtered pixels.
A surge of emotion overpowered her, and she let out a sob. This wasn’t right. Maeve wasn’t supposed to marry Annabelle. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
She brushed stray tears across the back of her hand, reading through the comments with blurry eyes. All the congratulations from her old coworkers, Maeve’s dickhead dad, Maeve’s friends that Ella had once considered her own friends too.
Truly, worst holiday ever .
She was never going to be good enough, no matter what she did.
She leaned back, letting the sadness consume her. Memories of their relationship played in front of her eyelids, the sinking feeling spreading into her chest like sludge and weighing her down, until it was all she could feel. All the words from Marco Marcos’s sheet swirled around her at once. Ella stopped squashing down the emotion and let it all out. She didn’t care anymore .
Too late to react, her phone slipped out of her hand. It clunked as it hit multiple branches on the way down, then landed on the hard ground with a smash.
“No! No, no, no!” She slammed her fist into the hard bark, instantly regretting it as pain shot up her forearm. With a heavy body, she lowered herself down to the ground, dropping clumsily onto her arse. She scrambled to her phone, pain throbbing up her back, and flipped it over. The black screen was shattered, and despite her pleas for it to work, it remained unresponsive.
How was she supposed to call Winnie? She was officially stuck here now. Permanently.
God. What a way to hit rock bottom. Arse first, falling out of a tree.
So she sat, cradling her smashed phone, and let the tears fall. She felt crushed. By all of this. Not even a bathtub of margaritas would help. And now she couldn’t even speak to Winnie about it. Another sob broke from her throat, and a shadow passed over her.
“Ellie, what’s wrong?” A tall man was approaching. She recognised him as Rick from her course. Those pale calves were bright enough to blind someone. “Are you alright?”
She sniffed, not having the energy to correct him on her name. She truly did not care. “I’m fine.” When he hovered, glancing around for some assistance, she added, with a little more bite than she intended, “Rick, please leave me alone.”
He took a step backwards. “Uh, sure.” He gave her an awkward salute and shuffled off.
Ella waited for his floppy head of hair to disappear down the hillside before groaning. She didn’t mean to be rude, but she only wanted to speak to Winnie. She always knew the right thing to say to pick her back up again.
But that wasn’t going to happen; she was on her own. And unless she wanted to follow in Pauline’s footsteps, she couldn’t just stay curled up in a ball and cry. Maeve had moved on. Ella needed to, too. She just needed to get up off the ground.
“Get it together, woman,” she muttered to herself.
With a heavy sigh, she forced her limbs to move and wiped her face, but the tears wouldn’t stop. Her mind was running in circles around her, and she pressed her palms into her eyes, overwhelmed.
“Ella?” another voice called behind her.
Ella didn’t have to turn to know it was Riley. Great. She didn’t need her adding to the mix as well. But Ella felt the woman stand next to her and lay a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
Ella didn’t know how to respond. Truthfully, everything hurt. She didn’t know where to start.
“Ella, please. Talk to me. I’m worried.”
Ella didn’t want to open her eyes and see the sympathy no doubt showing on Riley’s face. Maybe if she squeezed her eyes tightly enough, she could rewind time and pretend none of this had happened. But she was done pretending. It didn’t get her anywhere .
“I swear everything I touch turns to shit or tries to kill me,” she started. “I was only trying to call my friend, and now…I can’t even do that. I’m just stuck here…”
Riley rubbed her back, and Ella just wanted the ground to open up and swallow her whole. Any minute chance she’d had of scoring with the beautiful blonde had officially leaped off a cliff to die forever. Just like her last pathetic attempt with Maeve.
“Come on,” Riley urged, trying to guide Ella towards her. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
Ella didn’t like promises. Maeve had promised her too many things that had fallen apart. Their own home. Being co-partners of Switch Studios. A whole life together. But there was something about Riley’s voice that made Ella drop her hands and open her eyes. When the kaleidoscopes focused, Riley’s steady blues looked back at her, and a cool balm spread across Ella’s chest.
Riley gave her a small smile, indicating behind her with the lift of her chin. “Come on. I have a phone you can use. You can call whoever you need to.”
Ella’s lungs heaved as an involuntary sob escaped. The idea of speaking to Winnie relieved some of the pressure in her head. “Thank you.” She sighed, her words coming out in a soft whisper.
“Just don’t tell Senhor Arenoso,” Riley joked, her mouth pulling up at the corners. She led Ella away from the tree and towards some stone stairs leading further up the hillside. Ella’s mind was too overrun with everything to speak, so she just focused on Riley’s back .
Riley held back the overgrown branches covering the path, and Ella thanked her as she hurried past. The steps opened up into a small, lush garden. A blue, striped hammock hung between two large strawberry trees at the bottom, with more steps leading up to another cabin, pink oleander shrubs blooming on either side. Ella’s eyes darted at all the colour around her, and she breathed in the sweet, fresh scent, trying to calm her sniffles.
When she hesitated, Riley led the way, encouraging her like someone trying to round up a stray dog.
The wind tousled Ella’s hair as she reached the last step, and she turned around to take in the sight. Wow . She’d thought the view from the courtyard was impressive, but this was something else entirely. The elevated height gave a god-like view over Sandy Springs. The white slats of the cabin roofs disappeared into the green canopy, and she could just make out the tiny people gathering in the courtyard. The endless, unruly ocean stretched beyond them to the blue sky, sunlight glinting off the waves. She could see for miles. Her gaze followed the land as it curved, spotting the dock at the bottom. Is this where Riley saw us on that first night?
She cringed at the memory, then cringed even more at the state Riley had found her in just ten minutes ago. Fuck’s sake.
She glanced back at Riley, standing tall in the doorway. Now that her initial panic had passed, the reality of the situation was starting to sink in.
This was Riley’s cabin. Her own personal cabin .
Ella’s eyes were drawn to the large wooden dreamcatcher hanging over Riley’s bed. The soft blue duvet and decorative pillows, including an adorable “bee happy” one. She tried not to let thoughts about Riley and her bed spiral into anything else. She cleared her throat, not knowing where to look.
“The phone is in here,” Riley said, holding the door open for her. “It’s a landline, plugged in behind the sofa there. Call whoever you need to. I’ll give you some privacy.” She smiled, dimples forming in both her cheeks, then ducked back out the door, leaving Ella alone in her cabin.
Ella couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t normal procedure for Riley—but then, what did she know? Riley was probably just being nice. It’s her job, Ella. She shouldn’t read into it.
Although…
Riley’s space sucked Ella in as her gaze roamed over her belongings. Embroidered artwork brightened up the wooden walls, along with a variety of paintings that Ella wondered if she’d created. A covered canvas rested on an easel, with pots of paint gathered underneath. Large wooden shelves overflowed with books of all colours, and every corner or shelf had another green plant soaking up the sunlight that was pouring through the windows.
Ella briefly thought of the plants in Maeve’s office before pushing the thought away. She didn’t want to cry about Maeve ever again. Or think about her here. Riley and Maeve were nothing alike .
She ducked behind the yellow sofa and picked up the landline phone. Luckily, she’d known Winnie’s number by heart since they were teenagers. She dialled it and took a seat on the sofa, sinking into the soft cushion.
Winnie didn’t answer. Ella sighed and called again, holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder.
She answered on the fifth ring. “Uh, hello?”
“Hey, Winn. It’s me.”
“Ella! Hey… How’s it going?” There was a muffled sound on the other end, and a deep voice mumbled in the background. “I’m sorry, Cal, but this might be important.”
Winnie’s heavy breathing was suspicious. “Am I interrupting anything?” Ella asked.
“Nah. It’s fine… Oh, Calvin, grow up.” Winnie blew out a breath. “Men. And they like to say that women are the dramatic ones.”
Ella bit her lip, shaking her head. “Were you…?”
“Yeah, but it’s fine. A break in the middle will just make it last a bit longer.” She laughed. “But enough about me. How are you? What phone are you calling me on?”
“I’m… Winn.” Ella swallowed. “I… It’s…so difficult here.”
“Have you given it a chance?”
Her accusatory tone made Ella sit upright. “Yes, of course—”
“Ella, you can’t bullshit me. You need to listen to what they’re saying. Focus on you for a change.”
Ella rolled her eyes. “God, you sound just like Senhor Arenoso. ”
“Just call me ‘wise one’ from now on.”
She snorted. “You’re stupid.” Then she remembered about Maeve and Annabelle. Her smile quickly soured. She told Winnie.
“Ah, fuck. Ella, I’m so sorry. That’s never nice to see. But you deserve better. You know that. You do.”
Ella let the words roll around her mind before responding. She unpicked other memories she’d shoved into the recesses of her brain. How Maeve turned her nose up at her for reading fantasy novels and watching romcoms. Their polarising moral views and how Ella was banned from discussing politics with Maeve’s family. How, when Ella put on a few pounds, Maeve offered to pay for a gym membership, which just made Ella feel worse.
She knew on a logical level that she and Maeve weren’t right for each other, but there was something about that door being slammed so firmly in her face that unsettled her.
“Let me hear you say it,” Winnie said, with all the enthusiasm of a cheerleader. “I deserve better.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Come on. You know I won’t stop until you do.”
“Fine.” Ella huffed, but her mouth pulled at the corners. She could always count on Winnie. “I deserve better.”
“Louder!”
“I deserve better!”
Winnie cheered, and she laughed. “So, whose phone are you calling me on?”
“It’s Riley’s, she’s—”
Winnie wolf-whistled down the line, and Ella pulled the phone away from her ear. “No. It’s not like that. She just works here.”
“Mmm. I don’t buy it. I have an Ella bullshit detector that’s currently flashing red and whirring like an air-raid siren.”
“Winnie.” Ella rubbed her hand over her face before continuing. “Fine. But it’s not what you’re thinking. I don’t think she’s into me at all.”
“How could she not be? Look at you!”
Ella smiled at her best friend’s enthusiasm before the feeling fell away. “I don’t think so. She works here, and I just keep being so stupid around her.”
“Isn’t that the Ella sign that you’re into someone?”
“Hey!”
“You know what I mean.”
Ella could see the nonchalant wave of Winnie’s hand in her mind’s eye. She missed her. She could almost see her sipping cocktails in their favourite spot, too, complete with a grumpy Calvin tending the bar.
“I don’t want you to be chasing this girl instead of focusing on you,” Winnie went on, “but I’m not gonna tell you to be a nun, either. A good shag might just set you right.”
Ella blushed, and she looked for Riley, even though she knew she couldn’t hear her. “Oh my god, Winn.”
“I mean it, Ella. I want you to do things for you. Find your groove again. If sleeping with a hot woman helps you do that, I’m all for it.”
Ella laughed, tracing a circle on the cushion with her finger. “How do you even know she’s hot?”
“Well, is she?”
Riley’s prominent cheekbones, blue eyes, and strong physique flashed before her eyelids. Her toned arms and dimples. But she was more than that. The kindness she’d shown Ella stirred a warm feeling in her belly. “Yeah, but—”
“Knew it.” Winnie’s voice took on a serious tone. “Look, I know it’s not exactly what you thought you’d be doing at this point of your life, but life is unpredictable. Roll with it. Seize every moment. Take advantage of this course. Don’t regret it.”
“Sounds like you could get a job here, Winn,” Ella grumbled.
“That’s ‘oh wise one’ to you.”
The sun streamed through the tall, open windows, warming Ella’s skin. She looked out, wondering where Riley was, but could only see the ocean from here. It did seem like she was stuck here for the foreseeable. She might as well make the most of it.
“So,” Winnie said. “Tell me more about this Riley.”