Epilogue
Sitting in a beach bar, sipping cocktails, it feels as though we’re on holiday.
But we’re not.
This is our life now.
My father orders drinks in Spanish so heavily accented that the bartender grins, instantly forgiving.
We lounge like tourists, sunglasses and all, but we’re not on holiday.
The truth is, this is now home. And this beach bar is the South American version of our favourite restaurant back in Lymington.
It’s Portofino ‘Exile Edition’, with rum in place of rosé, and blinding sunlight to bleach away the memories.
One of the older British ladies, who we see most days, gives us a cheery wave from her table under the cabana.
Mum and I wave back, and Dad gives her a friendly nod.
The other ‘expats’ have become a tribe, gathering at the water’s edge most afternoons, sharing crab legs and local gossip.
Others are quieter. The girl with the sunglasses – I don’t know her real name, but everyone calls her Montreal – told me, ‘We’re all ghosts here, so we don’t tell ghost stories.
’ I nodded as if I understood. But I was still too new, too recently dead, to let the old stories go.
We’re all running from something – disappointments, bad divorces, criminal charges. They’re all here, and now, so are we.
It was a gift from heaven when Jade decided to steal my life.
I used her grisly plan as a way to escape and start again abroad.
And now I’m in a beach bar in Belize with my parents.
We all have new identities and new, relaxed lives.
My parents liquidated all their assets, and we’re living simply here by the beach.
There’s a strange kind of peace to being in hiding.
Maybe it’s that you’re constantly surrounded by the threat of discovery, so every moment you’re not discovered feels like a small, secret victory.
Maybe it’s the drink, or the endless palette of turquoise and ochre outside the window, or the way the air blows in off the ocean with a lulling, amnesiac quality.
Maybe this is what it means to acclimatise.
Or maybe it’s just the first wave of delusion, as all the things you’ve fled from – the people, the mistakes – crash over you and then, for a time, roll away.
‘How are you doing, Munchkin?’ Dad asks, his gaze softening across the sun-worn table.
‘Good,’ I reply automatically with a nod, despite the ever-present guilt tugging at my stomach.
Mum, sitting next to me, rubs my shoulder. ‘Are you sure? You look like you’re brooding.’
She’s not wrong, but I don’t want to delve too deeply into how I’m feeling.
The past few months have been such a whirlwind of shocks and revelations.
I think – I hope – we’re finally acclimatising.
But I’m not sure if it all feels quite real yet.
‘Not brooding,’ I answer. ‘Just . . . zoned out for a bit.’
I catch my parents glancing at one another. Not quite worried, but not quite happy either.
‘As long as that’s all it is,’ Mum says. ‘You know you can talk to us, right?’
I give a small laugh and an eye-roll. ‘Yes, Mum. I think after all we’ve been through, I definitely know I can talk to you.’
The first week here was a honeymoon of sorts – afternoons spent clinking glasses with my parents at the driftwood bar, letting the slow-footed bartender ply us with his special ‘jungle punch’, a secret recipe guarded with the kind of earnestness usually reserved for war crimes.
My mother giggled after her second glass and swore it must be the altitude, which didn’t make any sense at sea level.
My father, whose sunny optimism has always been the engine of our family, insisted he use only his mangled Spanglish to order, collecting linguistic bloopers like seashells.
The official language of Belize is English, but we discovered that most of the locals either speak Spanish or Creole, so we’ve all been slowly trying to master Spanish.
‘You’re not thinking about . . .’ – Mum lowers her voice a fraction – ‘her, are you?’
I hesitate for a moment. ‘No. Well, a bit. It’s hard not to.’
‘You can’t feel bad about it,’ Dad says, a hint of gruffness in his voice.
‘I don’t,’ I retort. ‘Although she is locked up for my crime.’
Mum shoots Dad another look before turning back to me. ‘What she did to you was a million times worse, Bee.’
‘What she tried to do,’ I correct.
Mum nods, lips pressed tight. ‘It’s a miracle you discovered her before it was too late. I can’t even imagine . . .’ She swallows.
‘A miracle and a little bit of luck,’ my father continues, and for a moment the table falls quiet. ‘In any case,’ Dad eventually puts in, ‘she’ll be out in a couple of years, maybe less, so no need to feel too guilty.’
‘She should be in there for life,’ Mum adds. ‘Thankfully, she won’t have any business or home to come back to, the evil little madam.’
It’s all been sold – every asset, every piece of property.
We cleared out all our bank accounts weeks before Jade took possession of my name.
My parents were meticulous, even ruthless, in shedding our old lives.
There was a kind of cold-blooded efficiency to it that I admired, even as it scared me a little.
I first became aware of Jade’s scheme last year, when I suspected that someone had broken into my apartment after a few items went missing.
I thought I might be losing my mind, especially when my neighbour Marisol was insistent that we’d made plans to meet up – something I had no recollection of doing.
Things were definitely off. So I installed cheap hidden security cameras and was shocked to see someone who looked just like me, entering my flat and rifling through my stuff.
Shoving items into a backpack and leaving. The whole thing gave me the creeps.
I told my parents about it, and they gave me the shocking news that I’m a twin.
To say I was blindsided is an understatement.
I looked at them, waiting for the punchline, but they were deadly serious, eyes fixed on their shoes.
Mum was the one to explain that she, too, was a twin.
That she wasn’t even my birth mother. That my biological mother was her sister – a woman named Nicola Morgan.
I felt like I was in some fever dream. It sounded like a joke. Or like something you’d read about in one of those magazines you see in doctors’ surgeries.
After hearing Mum’s confession, it began to sink in that she wasn’t joking.
That this was the truth. A secret they’d been hiding from me.
I thought I would never be able to forgive my parents.
Even though they begged me to see that they’d only kept it hidden to protect me.
I spat back that their protection hadn’t exactly worked out too well.
‘You can’t feel bad for her, Bee.’ Mum sips her cocktail now, her eyebrows dipping in the middle. ‘You need to put it all behind you. We need to move on. It’s the only way.’ She lowers her voice again. ‘That girl . . . she tried to have you killed.’
‘Your mother’s right. We need to forget the past and concentrate on trying to enjoy our new lives.’ Dad raises his empty glass at me, just as the waiter returns with fresh drinks. ‘Look around, Munchkin. This is paradise.’
I shift in my seat and try to relax. ‘I know all that. And I agree with you about Jade. She isn’t a good person. But . . . she’s still my sister. A sister I never knew.’
‘Maybe that’s a good thing,’ Mum says too briskly. ‘Given what she’s like.’
I know what she says is true, but part of me wonders, if we’d been allowed to grow up together, maybe things would have turned out differently – better.
Mum’s gaze narrows. ‘Seeing as we’re talking about things, is there anything else that’s worrying you?’
I shrug, not sure if I have the mental energy to bring up everything that’s on my mind.
‘Bee, you can talk to us.’ Her eyes soften and she gives me an encouraging smile that I can’t ignore.
‘Well,’ I blurt out. ‘I also . . . I can’t stop thinking about how I botched things so badly at Newbury’s. You spent years building up a successful company, and I wrecked it.’ My voice catches. ‘I was trying not to cause you any stress, but I ended up making things ten times worse.’
After my parents’ revelation about my twin, I decided that since we were confessing things, now would be a good time to tell them about my own precarious situation in the business.
They couldn’t exactly get angry with me.
And, anyway, I was at the end of the road.
I had no other place to turn. I worried about the strain it might put on Dad’s heart, but felt I had no choice, because the truth was about to come out anyway.
I admitted that the business was in trouble.
That I was in trouble. That a year after I took over, I’d made a bad business decision that had started to sink the company.
Instead of sticking to property sales and rentals, I’d decided to branch out into property development and invest in a small block of flats with the idea of refurbishing and reselling each unit.
But the whole project had run wildly over budget, and they were slow to sell.
I’d ended up making a loss that Newbury’s could barely sustain.
From that time onwards, my life had become pure stress.
I’d tried to fix things. I’d borrowed money, tried to get investors, even sweet-talked a magazine editor friend into running a puff piece about how successful Newbury’s was becoming under my ownership. But it was all fruitless.
My parents were dismayed to hear that I hadn’t been coping. They thought they were gifting me a life, when the truth was they had gifted me a disaster waiting to happen.
Mum shed quiet tears back then. It was the first time I’d ever seen her cry. She told me she’d always suspected something was wrong. She’d seen the shadow in my eyes when I thought nobody was looking. She knew stress, she said. After all, she’d lived with her own secrets, too.