Chapter 29
‘Half an hour ago?’
There was a terrible echo in this room – or in Toni’s own head. She heard the conversation between Gabri and her mother, but it was a struggle to make any sense of it.
‘Yes, I thought he was upstairs on the bed. He was listening to an audiobook with his headphones on and I thought he must have just fallen asleep, but when I went up to check on him, he wasn’t there!’
‘Has he run away before?’
Toni snapped back into the present. ‘No! He wouldn’t be running away.’ Despite the warm evening, she rubbed her arms against the cold on her skin. ‘He must have gone somewhere – to the beach? Did he come looking for me?’
She whirled around and headed for the door again, taking off for the beach at a run, but when she got there, the wedding guests were still milling – laughing and sharing hugs and kisses, oblivious to how little it all mattered if she didn’t find Cilli – and she couldn’t make out individual figures in the small crowd.
Reshma approached, her gaze full of concern, but Toni swiped at her eyes and moved away, unable to say anything. She heard Gabri’s low voice behind her, explaining the situation to Reshma as she moved down the beach.
‘Can you get Donatella and any of the staff she can spare?’ A moment later, he called, ‘Toni?’ and jogged up to her.
She hadn’t realised she’d come so far up the beach, staring at the driftwood and pebbles and the rocky hills with endless shrubs that could conceal the prone form of a lost, injured boy.
‘Toni, the turtles! Maybe he’s gone to the turtles.’ The hope in his voice was tangible and when she turned to face him, the world came back into focus, starting with his drawn features. ‘Come on.’
He snatched her hand and they rushed for the other end of the beach.
Her nose was blocked and her heart in her throat and she seemed to be expending all her energy on breathing, so she struggled to match his pace, but it didn’t matter.
When they arrived at the tapes marking the location of the nest, there was no one there.
A sob worked its way up her chest and out in an ugly snort and then she was wrapped up in a pair of comforting arms, a familiar body that held warmth and the scent of lemons – and memories of better times.
A shudder went through him and his hand clutched the back of her head tightly, but when he took a deep breath and spoke, his voice was steady.
‘He won’t be far. There are people to help look for him—’
She tore out of his grip, heading blindly for the path around the headland.
‘We have to find him! He doesn’t speak Italian!
He doesn’t know this place – the rocks. It’s getting dark.
I should never have brought him along – or I shouldn’t have agreed to come here at all.
If I hadn’t taken that week off, I would only have been gone a week and none of this would have happened. Gabri, if he’s—’
She turned back in a fresh panic to find Gabri right behind her. He clutched her face in his hands and trained his gaze on hers until she was forced to return it. ‘I’m going to go and find him, okay?’
‘What?’
‘I know you’re scared, but you need to stay at the cabin with your mum in case he comes back. Most likely, he’ll come back and he’ll want to see you.’
She managed a faint nod as his words slowly formed a picture that made sense through the fog of her fear. ‘Right.’
‘Just in case he’s not on his way home already, I’m going to head out to find him. You need to call me if he comes home, or if any of the staff at the hotel find him.’ His fingers stroked through her hair. ‘He’s going to come home soon and he’ll need a hug from his mum.’
Hot streaks down her cheeks were the first indication that her tears were falling.
‘I’ll bring him back.’
His heavy hands on her seemed to cement her feet back on the ground and her rational brain managed a few pulses. She knew he couldn’t promise he’d bring Cillian back, but he was right; this was too big a problem to solve herself, so close to dark.
‘Get back to the cabin and I’ll call you soon.’
She managed to find her way back, even though most of her brain was consumed with doom scenarios or impossible questions about where Cillian could have gone – and why.
Only when she’d plonked herself in a chair and clutched Daphne’s hand did it occur to her how strange it was that no-strings Gabri, who’d insisted he didn’t like children, was out there searching for her son.
The little beach around the headland was deserted, with no sign of recent footprints. Gabri couldn’t rule out that Cillian had been there, but it seemed unlikely, which was a relief, given the way the surf was crashing on the rocks to the south.
Even picking his way along the gravel path back to the main beach was treacherous in the low light and he rushed back to the car park to fetch a headlamp and a torch and see if Donatella had managed to find help.
The hotel gardener, two waiters and Donatella herself agreed to fan out from the beach and divided up the surrounding areas.
Gabri took the headland to the south, near the place he’d just left.
He didn’t know the area as well as the others, but he remembered the cliffs on the other side of the hill where the older kids sometimes jumped into the water and his resolve wobbled again at the prospect of finding the boy in that area – in a state he didn’t want to imagine, much less explain to Toni.
But while his heartbeat was erratic and his blood fizzing with alarm, his head was clear and there was nowhere else he wanted to be than battling through the shrubs on this isolated hillside, yelling Cillian’s name.
He followed the path doggedly, as fast as he dared in the conditions. His shirt tore on the bushes and he wasn’t wearing the right shoes. His throat was dry as a summer on the isola, but he hadn’t thought to bring a bottle of water – had assumed he wouldn’t be gone long enough to need it.
The path joined the road again and he stopped to think. Surely Cillian wouldn’t have left the dirt path. The soothing rush of the sea could be heard close by. Maybe he’d wanted to find the next cove.
Gabri gritted his teeth against the fear that prospect instilled in him. The cliffs could be dangerous at any time of day, but in the dark? Pulling out his phone, he dialled Toni’s number.
‘You have him?’
‘No.’ Saying the word cost him a year of his life. ‘He hasn’t come back?’
‘No.’
‘All right. I’m still looking. There are more places to search. I’ll call you again soon and you call me if he comes back.’
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he spoke. If Cillian was going to return on his own, surely he would have already done so. Gabri couldn’t understand why he’d left the resort in the first place. The only reason that had made sense – the turtles – they’d already ruled out.
He remembered Cillian’s wide eyes the day he’d first seen Toni’s son, his concern for the turtles.
His next thought made him pause. They’d checked the nest, but if Cillian wanted to see the turtles hatching, he wouldn’t have been at the nest. He’d been stricken at the idea of disturbing the vulnerable creatures.
If Cillian wanted to watch for hatching turtles, he would have to find an observation point a safe distance away.
Heading back into the scrub at a jog, he retraced his steps, still calling out Cillian’s name at intervals, listening desperately for a response.
Following his progress on the Maps app on his phone, he peered over the bushes when he reached the headland above Innamorata, searching for a view of the corner of the beach where the female turtle had laid her eggs.
There was a little copse of juniper obscuring much of the view, but at one point – yes. He caught a glimpse of the tape on the beach. There would be a better view from the other side of the rope—
He slipped, tumbling onto his backside and groping for the nearest handhold, which turned out to be a scraggly olive tree.
The slope was steep, which would have been obvious in daylight, and thick with underbrush – the reason he hadn’t fallen any farther.
When he’d found a stable position with his feet dug into the hillside, he squeezed his eyes shut and waited for his breath to return, only to slowly become conscious of other sounds of breathing, then a rustle.
‘Cillian?’
He almost didn’t believe it when a response reached his ears after a short pause. ‘Shh,’ was all he heard at first.
‘Grazie al cielo,’ he muttered, dropping his head back against the soil as the adrenaline leached from his body. ‘We were so worried something had happened to you.’
Almost camouflaged in the bushes to his left, he made out the pale face of Toni’s son and a thousand different feelings coursed through him. Christ, this wasn’t over yet.
He flinched and Gabri hurried to switch off his headlamp.
‘You need to stop shouting,’ Cillian said urgently.
‘All right,’ Gabri said in a whisper, pulling out his phone.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked with a wild hand gesture.
‘Your mamma has been out of her mind with worry,’ Gabri said, unable to keep his exasperation out of his voice. ‘I have to tell her straight away that you’re okay. Are you okay? No limbs missing? Still have your head on? No bleeding to death?’
‘No bleeding to death,’ the boy repeated in a tone that reminded him again of his mother. ‘But call her quietly.’
Gabri nodded as he pressed call.
‘Have you—?’
‘Yes, he’s here. He’s fine. I’ve found him.
Give us a minute and I’ll bring him back.
’ The privilege of being able to say those words made him light-headed – or perhaps that was the relief.
Without moving his gaze from the deepening blue of the ocean, he groped for Cillian’s shoulder and found his hair instead, giving it an almighty scruff that he only tolerated for a few seconds. ‘Here.’
He tapped the button for the loudspeaker.
‘You’re okay, aren’t you, Cilli?’ he prompted.
‘I’m not bleeding to death.’
Gabri swallowed a nasty Italian oath, even though neither of them would have understood it anyway. ‘He’s fine,’ he growled instead.
‘Oh, God, sweetie, I was so worried!’ came Toni’s voice through the speaker. ‘Gabri, are you okay?’
He hesitated for a breath before he answered. ‘Not really. But I’ll recover. Can you call Donatella to let her know? We’ll see you soon.’ He ended the call rather rudely without saying goodbye and then pinned Cillian with a look.
‘I must have come past here at least twice. I don’t think you’ll be in any trouble, because we’re all so… relieved that you’re okay.’ Another narrowly avoided curse. ‘But your mamma… You can’t do that to her.’
His skinny arms crossed in front of him.
The lucky kid was perched apparently effortlessly on the slope, while Gabri felt like a prisoner of gravity.
‘We’re going home tomorrow. If the turtles don’t hatch tonight, I won’t get to see them, but I knew Granny would never come with me and if she did, she wouldn’t understand that we need to keep away so we don’t frighten them.
I looked it up. They’re caretta caretta, Loggerhead turtles.
The babies lose a fifth of their body weight trying to get to the sea and if they go the wrong way, they die. ’
Gabri didn’t know where to start – with his own emotions, let alone with Cillian’s. ‘Did you read about the incubation period as well? It’s too early for these eggs to hatch.’
‘But Cristina said we don’t know exactly when the female turtle laid the eggs. What if the nest has been there longer? I thought— I hoped…’
God, how those words cut him. Toni was right; Gabri was an idealist. Thirty-seven years old and he hadn’t accepted that sometimes, he couldn’t fix things for the people he loved.
Not that he loved Cillian. Of course he didn’t. But he could. He could.
‘You think it was stupid, running off,’ Cillian accused.
‘No,’ Gabri countered gently.
‘You think I scared Mum on purpose, to get her attention or something.’
‘No,’ he said again. ‘I know you look out for your mum.’
‘We’re fine, the two of us. Everyone seems to think it’s sad or difficult, but it’s not. We don’t need you.’
‘Oh, I know you don’t,’ Gabri agreed emphatically. He tried to fix things while Toni learned to accept them and move on like an adult.
‘I would have gone home on my own later.’
Gabri nodded, giving a non-committal hum of assent in case the gesture wasn’t visible in the dim light. Stars pricked the darkening sky now. ‘I believe you, but we’re very close to the edge right now and I’m hoping I’ve had enough scares for one night. Can we go back now?’