Chapter 1
Chapter One
ISLA
If I breathe deep enough, I can still taste Maggie’s blackcurrant jam. Not the posh Bonne Maman stuff with the checkered lid, but her own sticky concoction that clung to your fingers and turned Sunday toast into a whole damn memory – the kind that settles in your bones long after it fades.
Maggie’s jam clings to memory like it did to Sunday toast. Sticky. Stubborn. Impossible to forget.
I peer through the car window. Peeling paint. Roses that haven’t been trimmed. Maggie loved her roses, always with her secateurs in hand, a little trim here, a little trim there. She used to tell me I was her rose. You have to stand proud, Isla. Like the last rose of summer.
I’m glad she can’t see me here like this, crawling back, swallowed by regret.
Five years ago I was Hollywood’s golden girl. Now I’m radioactive.
I step out of the taxi with all the grace of a woman who’s just climbed out of an SUV at Cannes – then nearly trip on a loose paving stone, because Sea Salt Bay’s roads have turned into a slip-slide of churned-up muck.
Welcome home. The driver doesn’t offer to help.
Probably still judging me from when he asked if I was that Isla Quinn and I smiled too long without answering.
His eyes went wide in that way I’ve learned to recognise – the moment recognition hits, followed by the mental calculation of whether to ask for a selfie or pretend they don’t know.
‘You are, aren’t you?’ he pressed. ‘My wife loves you. Well. Loved. Before all that business with…’ He trailed off, eyes flicking to the rearview mirror like Marcus Vale himself might materialise.
I smiled. The smile I perfected for press lines.
Empty. Professional. He didn’t ask again.
‘Cheers,’ I mutter as he drives off, the tail-lights fading like every other man I’ve trusted.
Off you go, little man with your flat cap and onion-scented taxi.
(Why do taxis always smell awful? Garlic?
Salami? New York ones were worse. I used to hold my breath.) Funny how you adapt.
Back then, I craved the sea-tanged air of Sea Salt Bay.
Salt Cottage looms ahead, battered and faded.
Kind of like me. Except Maggie’s cottage hasn’t been torn apart by the tabloids and someone else’s mistakes, doesn’t flinch every time a camera flash goes off, and definitely hasn’t got a half-finished therapy app on its phone titled ‘Healing is a Journey’.
The gate creaks in protest. Or judgement. Hard to tell. I give it a pat – ‘Be nice to me, yeah?’ – as I drag the suitcase over the threshold. My sleeve catches on the doorframe, fabric pulling tight across my shoulder, and I flinch – hard, instinctive. My whole body goes rigid.
Just fabric. Just a door.
But my breath comes shallow anyway, heart hammering like I’m still in that room, still trying to smile through it, still pretending it’s normal for your producer to—
I stop the thought. Breathe. It’s been years since I’ve had to share space with him, and my body still doesn’t believe I’m free.
Inside, the cottage is exactly how I remember it, and not at all.
The smell hits me first – lavender, sea salt, and dust. Maggie would be furious about the dust. She used to clean in a pinny with classical music blaring like it was war prep.
Now it’s spinning in the air with the breeze from the door.
The floorboards creak under my weight, remembering me, even after I tried to forget this place.
The walls exhale their dampness against my skin.
It’s cold and my bones get that ache, the one that says, let’s get under a duvet and never move again.
I shrug down into the seams of my coat. It won’t be leaving my body any time soon.
Everything is … too much.
My eyes sting. I blink it back.
It’s so quiet. I sigh and the sound reverberates around the walls before echoing back to me. No phones. No chatter. No staff trying to whisper while glancing sidelong at me wondering if I’m going to break.
The kitchen is like Gran – Maggie, she always insisted on – has just stepped out for a moment.
A tea towel is folded on the back of a kitchen chair.
The image of her folding it and placing it there is so sharp, so precise, so real, that for a moment I forget to breathe as this steady ache spreads across my chest.
Maggie wasn’t sentimental. No fuss. No frills.
I’m pretty sure the Keep Calm and Carry On phrase was coined from one of her well-drilled Pull Yourself Together speeches.
She gave me enough over the years. Every summer, July would roll around, and my parents, unwilling to waste their annual leave spending time with me, would cart me off here, to the coast, where the sea was bright, the weather often brutal, and my Gran soldiered on.
I reach for the kettle, almost expecting it to still be warm.
It’s stone cold. Another ache pings in my chest. At the kitchen sink, the tap groans, a thundering of the pipes as water pulses awake.
It sprays from the tap at an angle, coating me in cold.
Lifting my sleeve, I swipe it off and fill the kettle before placing it back on the ancient range and trying the gas – it’s still on.
Phew. I probably would have cried if it had been switched off.
As the kettle puffs and wheezes, taking a hundred years to boil, I stare out the window.
The wind taps against the glass. The small cottage garden should be fading with the ageing grace of a 1920s film star into autumn, but it’s dry, brown, like winter wants to grasp it in its greedy little paws.
When the kettle sings, I pour water into the teapot and put on Gran’s tea cosy.
I’ve never seen one outside of the cottage.
Maggie. I mustn’t start calling her Gran now she’s dead. Christ, she’d hate that.
I pour the tea, scald my tongue, and sit on the sofa, where Maggie always sat. Watched Bake Off from. Obsessing over meringue structures while I rolled my eyes.
I’d give anything to hear her say ‘soggy bottom’ again.
Above the fireplace is the oval mirror I spent my teen years preening in, checking my tan was just so, my freckles dusting my cheeks, the blush sitting beneath them natural, hair beach-waved.
Now. Christ. No wonder the taxi driver was staring.
My hair – usually glossy from those ￡200 Mayfair blow-dries – is pulled back in a greasy ponytail.
The Celine coat that I just had to have hangs off me like I’m playing dress-up.
I’ve lost weight. Not the good kind. The kind where your PA gently suggests you’re ‘looking a bit peaky’ and your co-star won’t do close-ups with you anymore.
Dark circles under my eyes that no concealer can fix.
I look exactly like what I am: a woman running away.
On the mantel sits a letter from the solicitor, dead centre and gathering dust, like it’s been waiting for me.
I reread it even though I know what it says. I own this place. Not rented. Not borrowed. Not arranged by a studio PR team. Mine. Entirely mine. The weight of it sits strange in my chest – like guilt and freedom twisted together.
Next to the letter, something else catches my eye – a stack of newspaper clippings.
I pick them up, breath catching in my throat.
Maggie kept them all. Every film premiere.
Every award. Even the tabloid shot of me at the BAFTAs with Marcus Vale.
Producer. Mentor. Three-time BAFTA winner.
The man who ‘discovered’ me, who produced my first three films, who made me a star.
His hand sits on my lower back in that photo – possessive, proprietary.
What the camera didn’t catch was how his thumb pressed into the hollow at the base of my spine.
A pressure point. Just hard enough that I couldn’t shift away without it being obvious.
A warning disguised as a touch. Stay. Smile.
Be grateful. The camera didn’t record the shiver I pushed down.
The slither of a chill that crept down my skin and burrowed itself into deep and dark secret places.
I was eighteen when we met. He was forty-three. ‘You have something special, Isla,’ he told me on that first day. ‘Let me protect it. Let me protect you.’ And I believed him. God help me, I believed every word.
It started as guidance. What to wear, who to be seen with, how to handle press. Then it was who I could call, where I could go, whether I could visit home. ‘Darling, you can’t afford the distraction. This is your moment. Trust me.’
I trusted him.
By the time I understood what I’d trusted him with, I’d already signed three more contracts. Already owed him everything.
Even now, sitting in Maggie’s cottage five years after our last film together, I reach back and touch that spot on my spine. The phantom pressure still lives there. My skin remembers what I tried to forget.
The tabloids want to know what I knew about his crimes.
They should ask what I knew about my own body. I’m still trying to remember.
A postcard falls out – sent from here to my New York address three years ago. I never received it. Across the address someone has scrawled: Not known at this address.
Maggie’s handwriting: Kit’s wife is very ill. He could use a friend.
I read it three times. Four. Like the words might rearrange themselves into something that doesn’t feel like a knife between my ribs.
Kit had a wife.
Kit had a wife and she was ill and Maggie thought I should know. Thought I might … what? Come back? Write? Call?
Three years ago. The postcard is three years old.
Returned to sender because Marcus had moved me – moved us – without telling anyone.
Not even my own grandmother. I’d been grateful at the time.
The New York penthouse, the packed schedule, back-to-back press tours.
Busy meant successful. Busy meant important.
Busy meant I didn’t have time to miss home or wonder why Maggie’s calls went unanswered or notice I hadn’t spoken to anyone from Sea Salt Bay in months.
I didn’t realise I was already gone. Already erased.
Kit’s wife.
He got married. Married. My bones are aching and I shift my weight from foot to foot.
There’s a tight band around my ribs. The start of a heart attack?
Then I take a deep breath. Hauling it in, greedily taking the oxygen, focusing on the exhalation.
Be in the moment, that’s what that therapy app says.
Of course he got married. He was twenty-one when I left, whole and golden and good, the kind of good that belonged in Sea Salt Bay, belonged to someone who would stay. Not like me. Never like me.
But ill.
The word sits heavy on my tongue. Ill. Not sick. Not unwell. Ill. The kind of word Maggie would use when something was serious. When her cat stopped eating. When Mrs Trethewey’s husband went into hospital and didn’t come back out.
Is she better now? Is she…
My stomach turns over.
I don’t even know Kit anymore. Don’t know if he still takes his tea with too much sugar or has that scar on his thumb from the fishing hook that got lodged when I distracted him with a breathless kiss.
Don’t know his wife’s name or if she has dark hair or light or if she makes him laugh the way I used to.
Don’t know if he hates me for leaving.
The postcard trembles in my hand. Not known at this address. Like I’d been erased. Like I’d never existed at all.
Maybe that’s what I deserved.
Kit. Kit, Kit.
His name rattles around my skull like a stone in a tin can.
My phone buzzes. My stomach clenches on instinct.
Third message from Simone today.
The most recent headline ticker-tapes across my screen: ‘ISLA QUINN: HERO OR ACCOMPLICE? Vale lawyer suggests Quinn knew all along…’ I turn the phone face-down. My throat closes.
A crash of waves in the distance makes me jump.
I realise the sea’s closer than I remembered.
Or maybe I’ve just been too far away for too long.
The sound is melodic, familiar yet foreign all at once.
Part of me wants to squelch in the mud down to the sea, but the other part of me, the part that is hypnotised by the sound of the waves, wants to hide.
Sleep. Curl into a ball and maybe get forgotten about in this place, covered in a fine layer of dust that time will preserve.
I curl up like Maggie’s old cat, Percy.
Tug the purple blanket loose. Dust rises, but the smell settles deep in my bones.
I’ll just sleep.
No one knows I’m here.
For just one moment, I can sleep.