Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-nine
Mum?
Skye wasn’t sure if she’d said it aloud or if the word had simply echoed through her, breaking loose as her world slanted.
Her limbs turned leaden, heavy with shock.
She wanted to run, but her body wouldn’t respond.
All she could do was stare, mouth slack, as her mother and Martyn walked toward her.
They didn’t belong here. Not in this place. In her place.
Nausea surged. Her breath came shallow and quick.
The past and present were pulling tight together, leaving nowhere to hide.
Martyn looked wrecked but smug, like a man who’d crawled over a finishing line and still thought he’d won.
Her mother, as ever, looked inconvenienced.
She batted away a fly with a sharp flick, eyes locking onto Skye with steely focus.
“There you are,” she said, as if the desolate hillside on a remote Greek island were a prearranged meeting place and all she had done was show up a few minutes late.
Skye opened her mouth, but no words came. Her hands began to tremble.
“There she is,” Martyn intoned, his voice dripping in sarcasm.
Skye didn’t look at him, couldn’t look at him.
An image of his face the last time she’d seen him flashed through her mind, and she shuddered, repulsed by the memory, enraged by it.
It was this sudden surge of defiant anger that helped her to raise her chin and meet his gaze.
“Here I am,” she said, surprising herself with how calm she sounded. Inside, it felt as if all her organs were vibrating in unison. The air, already hot, seemed to crackle.
“We had to wait almost an hour for a taxi,” her mother said, removing her wide-brimmed straw hat and fanning herself with it.
There was a faint pink line across her forehead, and her usually immaculate hair appeared damp at the roots.
“And then the driver refused to bring us up here, dropped us off miles away. We had no choice but to carry our luggage up here like a couple of donkeys.”
The two people dragging suitcases along the road. Victoria had almost hit them.
“It’s a rough track,” Skye said. “You need something with four-wheel drive.”
She glanced instinctively over to the sisters’ house. Dusty’s truck was parked outside, its bumpers caked in dirt, the back a mess of tools, planks, and bags of dry cement.
“Well, then,” her mother went on, staring around, “which one of these is yours?”
Skye looked at Martyn. Fear closed fist-like around her throat as she took in his mocking smile, the twist of his mouth that told her he’d won.
“I…I, er.”
“For heaven’s sake, Skye,” her mother snapped. “We’ve come a long way—a very long way. The least you can do is invite us in for a cold drink.”
How was this happening?
Skye was torn between the urge to fight and be polite, the need to escape and the importance of standing her ground. She felt suddenly exhausted, every limb a water-soaked log.
“It’s over here,” she said faintly. “The house with the blue door.”
Time thickened. Each crunch of dry earth rang out like thunder in Skye’s ears.
The key was a weight in her hand, her fingers sluggish, skin tingling with dread.
She didn’t want him here. He had no right to cross this threshold, to pollute the only space she’d kept untouched by him.
He knew that; of course he did. That was why he’d brought her mother.
Cassandra MacKinnon—cool, composed, impossible to refuse—was his Trojan horse.
His way inside. Martyn meant to trap her.
She couldn’t let him.
There was a dull thud as her mum’s suitcase rolled down the step.
Martyn followed with only a gym bag, the same ostentatious leather one he’d had monogrammed in gold, as if it were a trophy.
There was a matching one with her initials back in London, presumably languishing in the bottom of the wardrobe where she’d left it.
In Skye’s mind, she was no longer an SL—Lockhart now a name she wanted nothing to do with.
She fought the urge to slam the door in Martyn’s face, stopping just inside with her arms folded to hide the shake in her hands.
When he stepped forward, she stepped back.
“I was going to give you a kiss, but if you’re going to be like that…” he said. His eyes glittered with something Skye didn’t want to name. She turned away.
“Where are the tea bags?” her mother called. She had wandered through into the kitchen, and leaving Martyn by the door, Skye went to join her.
“I’ll make it,” she said, reaching for the jar.
To her dismay, Martyn followed. He leaned against the doorframe with all the nonchalance of a Roger Moore–era James Bond, though with none of the charm. Cassandra had helped herself to a bottle of water from the fridge and sipped it demurely as she looked out over the back garden.
“Looks as if a bomb’s gone off out there,” she observed. “We read about your little discovery. This mess is down to the authorities, I presume?”
“They didn’t want to leave a stone unturned,” Skye replied. “Not once they’d seen the bones.”
Her mother gave a nod.
“And did they find anything else?”
Skye dropped the teaspoon she was holding, and it clattered against the draining board.
Her bag was on the table, and she heard her phone buzz from inside.
It was bound to be Joy, asking where she was, impatient to sit and enjoy a cold beer with her friend.
Skye made no move to retrieve it. The phone was safer hidden away, where it couldn’t be snatched from her hand or thrown against the wall.
Steam filled the kitchen. Cold sweat dappled her chest.
“Skye?” her mother repeated.
“Oh, sorry. No, nothing else,” she said, pouring hot water into the mugs. Her mum and Martyn liked their tea barely brewed, a detail she’d always found odd. Skye took after her dad, preferring it the color of mahogany.
Not that it mattered now. Her stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut.
“So were they animal bones?” her mother persisted. “Or did you win a house built on an old burial ground?”
She made it sound as if the whole situation were a joke. But Skye would not play along, not this time. She’d gone along with too much for too long, and look where it had left her. The lessons had come hard, and she was not about to forget them.
“We don’t know yet,” she lied, sloshing in milk. “The police haven’t let us know.”
“We?” Martyn said. “Us?”
“The villagers.” Skye passed a mug across without looking at him. “It concerns all of us.” Andreas’s words came to her then, and she almost smiled.
“We’re a community,” she went on. “It’s not like London, where you can live next door to someone for years and never even learn each other’s names.
Here, we talk to one another, help each other.
” She stopped short of saying look after each other, though from the disgruntled expression taking shape on Martyn’s face, it was clear the implication had been received loud and clear.
Her mother turned from the back door and faced her.
“Is that why you ran away?” she asked.
Skye recognized a cross-examination when she heard one beginning and braced herself.
“So you’re saying the reason you threw away a perfectly nice life, a perfectly acceptable existence,” her mother persisted, “is because you wanted to be part of a community?”
“No,” Skye said. “I left because my life was perfectly awful and perfectly unacceptable.”
Cassandra scoffed, and tears stung behind Skye’s eyes. She stared hard at the ceiling, willing them not to fall.
It wasn’t her mum’s fault. Cassandra had been completely unaware of what was going on. Skye had never told her, had never felt able to shatter the illusion.
“Now do you see what I mean?” Martyn said purposefully. “Nothing I do is enough, Cassandra. Your daughter is determined to find faults where there are none.”
“Faults?” Skye was incredulous, her voice wavering. “I found faults? Me? You were the one who—The one who—”
But it was no good. She couldn’t say it. Not with her mum in the same room.
Skye’s mother had always called her father weak—too sensitive, too idealistic, too easily hurt by the world.
Everything Skye had loved about him, her mother had dismissed.
And selfishly, Skye hadn’t wanted the same judgment aimed at her.
It had been simpler to pretend, to play a part.
Eventually, that had become easier than being herself.
But since arriving in Folegandros, she’d started to find her way back. To abandon that now would be the worst kind of betrayal, and she was done with that. She had been for a long time.
“Mum,” she began, ready at last to speak the truth, to be vulnerable, to trust that the only parent she had left might finally see her pain, understand her fear, and help her carry it.
The words were right there, on the tip of her tongue, so close to setting her free.
And then, a loud crack.
The floor shifted beneath her and the world began to shake.