The Summer Swap

Chapter 5

Lily

Lily worked on her painting, lost in her own creation, until the sun set and the light faded.

It calmed her mind and she wished, for a moment, that this could be a job. That her parents might understand and say our daughter is an artist with the same pride they would have said our daughter is a doctor.

But she wasn’t an artist, was she? She was just someone who enjoyed painting.

And her parents didn’t understand.

It was up to her to find a way to make this life work. So far she hadn’t managed that.

She took a shower, changed into shorts and an old T-shirt, and poured herself a glass of homemade lemonade from the jug she’d filled the day before.

She didn’t feel like eating so she sat for an hour on the deck, nursing her lemonade and appreciating the warmth of the evening. Slivers of light danced across the surface of the water and the air smelled of salt and summer. She shifted her gaze from the ocean to the vast inky sky patterned with shimmering stars and felt her problems shrink.

Here, perched on the edge of a continent, her past life felt a long way away.

It felt like a place for forgetting. For forgiving. For planning a fresh start.

Somewhere out there medical students were hunched over laptops studying. They were studying anatomy, physiology, pathology and pharmacology.

She was relieved not to be one of them. She might not know what she wanted to do exactly, but she knew what she didn’t want to do.

She finished her drink, and headed to bed.

It wasn’t late, but she was tired. Since the night she’d packed her bags and walked out of medical school she often felt tired, mostly because she didn’t sleep well. The moment she closed her eyes her past swirled round and round in her brain. During the day optimism won. She felt hopeful and saw possibilities. Everything was going to work out. At night her brain punched optimism in the face, and she saw only obstacles and looming catastrophe. Instead of thinking I’ve done the right thing, she thought, What have I done?

She could have been a doctor. She could have made her parents proud.

They’d believed she could have had a good life. Been a success.

One day she was going to figure out exactly what really defined success. She wasn’t sure, but she knew it wasn’t hating every minute of what you were doing. She knew it wasn’t waking in the morning dreading the day.

Tired of overthinking, she lay on top of the bed in her sleeping bag, listening to the sound of the waves. She left the blinds open so she could still see the stars through the skylights.

She pushed aside guilt about her parents and instead thought of Hannah. Did Hannah think about her? Presumably not, because she hadn’t sent a message and it had been months now. Too many months.

She missed Hannah so much.

And now Hannah was going to have Amelie as a sister-in-law.

Amelie would be a member of the family. She’d be there for Thanksgiving and Christmas. For the rest of his life Todd would be smiling at Amelie. Kissing Amelie. Amelie, who had made her life a misery. Amelie, who hid the less wholesome side of her nature behind a dazzling smile that blinded most people to her more narcissistic tendencies. Maybe it was wrong of her to think it, but Amelie didn’t deserve anything as good as Todd to happen in her life.

Which just went to prove that you didn’t get what you deserved.

With a groan of frustration, Lily pushed her face into the pillow. She had to stop thinking about Amelie. She had to stop thinking about Todd. But how?

She loved him with every aching bone in her body. She needed to find a way to stop loving him, but she was still working on that. And in the meantime she had more immediate problems to deal with—like the fact that she was now a college dropout with no future.

She needed a new life, a different life, but it wasn’t as if you could order that online.

Her parents knew about her career crisis, but they didn’t know about Todd, and she had no intention of telling them. They’d tell her that she was still young, that there were plenty of fish in the sea (hadn’t they heard of overfishing?) and that she’d meet someone else eventually. She’d tried that. She’d dated a couple of guys in college, and one when she was in med school. They’d all fizzled to nothing. One was a good guy and maybe, just maybe, if she hadn’t known Todd existed, it might have turned into something. But she did know Todd existed. And that was the problem.

Lily didn’t want to meet anyone else. She didn’t want to fall in love with anyone else. She didn’t want to fall in love ever again. It was too painful. As far as she was concerned, love was like malaria or yellow fever. It was to be avoided. There had to be a vaccine. There had to be something, because surely someone must have invented something to make sure human beings never had to feel this bad. And she couldn’t even blame Todd, because he’d done nothing. There had been that one kiss (the single best moment of her life by a long way) but he’d never mentioned it, so she assumed that he either wished it hadn’t happened or didn’t remember it. The one good thing was that he had no idea she felt the way she did, which was a relief, because if he had known she would have had to move to another country.

Hating herself for not having more willpower, she checked Amelie’s social media and saw a photograph of her and Todd, followed by a stream of hashtags: #soulmate #manofmydreams #truelove.

Lily wanted to add a few hashtags of her own, but she used all her willpower and put her phone down instead.

She closed her eyes, not anticipating that she’d sleep but she must have done because she was woken by a loud noise coming from somewhere beneath her.

She lay without moving, and then flinched as she heard breaking glass and a voice.

Heart pounding, she sprang out of bed. Home invasion. Burglars. Always a risk for empty properties, especially those on the Cape. And it was obvious from the noise they were making that they thought the cottage was empty. It was isolated, so they’d assumed that their presence would go undetected. They’d do what they wanted to do, take what they wanted to take and then leave. They hadn’t factored in a witness.

She’d seen enough movies and read enough thrillers to know what happened to witnesses, and it was never good.

Fear swamped her. She forced her mind to scan the options.

Call the police, obviously.

She reached for her phone and then stopped. If she reported an intruder, they’d ask her what she was doing there, how she knew, and technically she was an intruder, too, so she couldn’t do that. Also, if the intruders found her before the police arrived, it wouldn’t end well.

She sat back on the bed, legs too shaky to support her, heart thundering in her chest, immobilized by indecision.

She should leave. Get out of here while she could. Then she would report it. She’d say she saw lights or heard voices. She could figure that part out later. But now she needed to get out before they decided to check the whole cottage for valuables and found her instead.

She imagined them dressed in black, with masks covering their faces. Did they have weapons?

Would her shaky legs allow her to escape? Maybe she should just hide under the bed. She thought about all the movies she’d seen where the first thing the bad guys did was look under the bed, so she dismissed that. No hiding. And no screaming, because there were no immediate neighbors so no one would hear her and, anyway, they’d be back to the thorny issue of what she was doing here in the first place.

No, as far as she could see there was only one option.

If she could make it to the second bedroom, she could drop from the balcony onto the sand dunes below and be gone before anyone was aware of her existence.

As silently as possible she pulled on her jeans and a T-shirt and stuffed everything into her backpack. She rolled up her sleeping bag and stuffed that inside, too.

Then she tiptoed down the narrow flight of stairs that spiraled up to the loft, and paused on the landing area that was open to the living room below. She flattened herself against the wall, terrified that one of them might pick that exact moment to glance up. It was just a few steps to the comparative safety of the bedroom, but Lily found she couldn’t move. From here she could see down into the living room and her heart raced as she saw a figure move into view. The figure grabbed one of the sketches hanging on the wall, stared at it for a moment and then made an anguished sound and smashed it on the floor.

Lily jumped, identifying the source of the breaking glass. Not a window, but the paintings. And not a group of masked men, but one person. A woman. She yanked another painting from the wall and sent it the way of the others. Lily watched open-mouthed. Part of her wanted to stop the woman because this place was her responsibility and she was going to have to clear up the mess in the morning.

She was going to have to explain to the company (and to the owners, whoever they were) that she must have forgotten to set the alarm. Would that invalidate the insurance? If she was right and the paintings the woman was smashing were valuable, then she was in even bigger trouble than she’d thought.

As far as she could tell, nothing else had been damaged so far. Why would someone want to break in just to smash up paintings? Why not steal them? None of it made sense. And then the woman turned slightly, and Lily slapped her hand over her mouth to stop her gasp from escaping because she recognized her.

It was Cecilia Lapthorne.

She’d met her once, when she’d visited the Lapthorne Estate with Hannah, and there was no mistaking her slight build and short, carefully styled silvery-white hair.

She watched as Cecilia reached up to remove the final painting from the wall. The one Lily had been admiring for months. She had to stop herself from crying out. No. Not that one. Lily felt an almost visceral attachment to the work. And if she was right and it was a genuine Cameron Lapthorne, why would Cecilia be smashing it?

But she didn’t smash this one. Instead, she left it where it was and sank down onto the sofa. And then she started to cry. There was something about those heartrending sobs that tore at Lily. And now she faced a dilemma.

The urge to go to her and offer comfort was strong, but then she’d have to confess that she’d been staying here. She’d be arrested. And, anyway, Cecilia thought she was alone. The tearing sobs were raw and real, and Lily sensed that she’d only given in to this unrestrained display of emotion because she believed that there were no witnesses. Cameron Lapthorne had died a year ago. Cecilia and Cameron had been together for fifty years. Cecilia had lost Cameron.

Cecilia’s heart was broken.

Lily knew she needed to get out of the cottage, and not only because she needed to save her own skin. She was trespassing, not just on Cecilia’s property (if this was indeed Cecilia’s property), but on Cecilia’s emotions. She was witnessing something that wasn’t supposed to be witnessed.

She needed to give Cecilia privacy, even though part of her was reluctant to leave someone who was in so much distress. But would revealing herself help? It wasn’t as if Cecilia knew her. Her presence would bring awkwardness, not comfort.

Forcing herself to move, she took those few final steps to the second bedroom. Moving stealthily, she opened the door that led to the small balcony and dropped her shoes and her backpack onto the sand below. They landed with a quiet thud, which Cecilia was unlikely to hear above the sound of her own sobbing. Pushing the balcony door closed behind her, Lily eased herself over the wooden railing and let herself drop onto the sand dune below. It was farther than she’d estimated, and she caught her breath as she landed, but the sand was soft and she scrambled to her feet with no apparent injury. Grabbing her backpack and her shoes, she sprinted away from the cottage.

Using the torch on her phone, she’d managed to put two sand dunes between her and the cottage when she remembered her bike.

She stopped and glanced over her shoulder. If she went back for it now, she risked being caught. Better to go in the morning and pretend she’d just arrived to check on the place. That was her job after all. And judging from the scene she’d witnessed, she had a significant amount of cleaning ahead of her.

But that wasn’t her real problem. Her real problem was that she’d lost her home and her sanctuary. No more nights gazing at the ocean and the stars.

She’d never find accommodation this far into the season, at least nothing that fell inside her budget.

She closed her eyes, feeling defeat close over her.

She was going to have to call her parents and ask for help.