Emma: Dinner on night two was a lot quieter than night one. Not a surprise after what happened to Dad.
Julius: It helped that Daniel and Emma were at opposite ends of the table.
Emma: Everything was quiet and pleasant. Liz asked something about the possibility of visiting Dad in hospital, but Mum said there were limited slots, so they might as well continue to enjoy the holiday. If it had been anyone except Mum saying it, I would’ve thought it was a little dig about them spending all day at the pool. I don’t think she meant it like that, though.
Liz: Daniel was really worried about Geoff – we both were. We’d have done anything to help.
Emma: Things were winding down when Daniel got up to leave. He held a cigar up in the air as if that explained everything. It was one of those giant Bratwurst-like things, the sort of expensive one you only ever see fat, rich men puffing away. They act like massive dicks, so they might as well practise sucking on one, I guess.
He disappeared out of the restaurant and I didn’t think much of it. That’s when Mum told me I should eat more.
Julius: I heard that. Definitely the wrong thing to say.
Emma: I ignored her at first, pretending I hadn’t heard – then she spoke louder. She said: ‘You got so thin when you went away. You can eat anything you want here.’
Julius: Mum would never say Emma had been to prison. She’d always talk around it, saying she’d ‘gone away’, or ‘had things to do’. That was probably the weirdest. Simone and I were trying to be honest with the girls, but then Mum would say Emma had ‘things to do’ and it would confuse them even more.
Emma: I had a bit of rice on my plate, perhaps some fish. I wasn’t hungry but also didn’t want to argue for a second night in a row, especially in the circumstances. I said I’d had a large lunch, which was a lie, though Mum didn’t know that. There was an irony in that I had been telling her to look after herself, but there she was saying the same to me.
Julius: The girls were excited because Auntie Emma was going to look after them that night. After Simone and I split, I always tried to create events for them to look forward to. When it was my weekend with them, I’d let them know in advance where we were going so they’d want to see me. That holiday was all about setting little goals. They could swim in the morning, go to the beach in the afternoon, or have ice cream in the evening. That sort of thing.
I’d not told them properly about what happened with Dad, only that he’d had a fall and was poorly in hospital. They didn’t know about the coma, or how serious it was. I wanted to keep their minds off it, so that whole day was about the build-up to their evening with Emma.
Emma: The girls were getting more and more excited as we had dinner. One of them would say: ‘Are you going to let us stay up until nine?’ If I said I would, the other would ask if it could be nine-thirty. It probably didn’t help that Julius let them go back for a third bowl of ice cream each.
Julius: When they were two or three, Emma bought the twins a squeaky hippo each for their birthday. Those hippos were so loud, you could hear them through walls. You could hear them in the garden when they were inside a locked house. Emma might have forgotten, but I hadn’t. If the girls wanted three bowls of ice cream, then three bowls it was.
Emma: As everyone was finishing, Julius went to take the girls upstairs into the hotel. I told him I’d be up in about twenty minutes but that I had to grab a few things from the cottage first. Really, I wanted to wash my face and have a little rest.
Mum said she hadn’t finished eating, so I left her at the table with Liz, and then headed past the pool towards the cottages.
Liz: Left her Mum all alone. Tells you something, doesn’t it?
Emma: I had let myself into the cottage and was on my way into the bathroom when I heard footsteps from the back…
…
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I don’t think it was footsteps. There was grass at the back and I don’t think I’d have heard someone walking unless they were being really loud. I heard something, though – which is why I let myself out the sliding door at the back. That’s when I saw Daniel peeping into Mum’s cottage.
Chapter Nine
TINA
Daniel: That’s slander. Or libel. Or both.
Emma: Daniel was peering through the window at the back, but I wonder now if the sound I heard was him trying the door.
Daniel: Absolutely, one hundred per cent, not true.
Emma: When he saw me, it was like he was a kid caught in the fridge after midnight. He held up his cigar, which he hadn’t lit, and said he was looking for somewhere to smoke. It might have been more believable if the hotel’s only smoking area wasn’t in the opposite direction. He knew that because he’d gone there the night before.
Daniel: I asked one of the little server fellows where I could smoke – and that’s where he pointed me. If you want to take it up with anyone, take it up with him.
Emma: I told him the smoking area was in the same place it had been the night before. The same place he’d gone that morning. He stared back at me for a second and I know he was trying to think of a better explanation for why he’d been snooping. In the end, he disappeared off towards the place he should have been.
Daniel: You should be asking her about why she was staying in that cottage in the first place. Her dad had an accident and, somehow, she benefitted from it. There’s a whole lot of questions I’d have for her, if it was me.
Emma: I watched him go and followed him around the front. He kept turning and looking at me and it definitely felt good to have him on the run.
Daniel: There’s something wrong with that girl.
Emma: I waited until Daniel had gone and then went back into the cottage. I was trying to think why he’d be snooping around, but it didn’t feel like something I could simply ask Mum, or tell her. She had enough going on, plus I doubt she’d have seen it the way I did. She’d have waved it away as something innocent. But Daniel knew Mum was still at dinner, so it felt like something he’d done on purpose.
Either way, I found myself inside and scrolling through my phone. I knew I was going to have to be up and invested in looking after the twins, but it had been such a long couple of days that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.
I checked the time and, even with the difference, I knew Tina would have just shut up the shop back at home.
Tina (friend of Emma McGinley): I was driving home but pulled over as soon as I saw that Emma was calling.
Emma: I work in Tina’s clothes shop. After I was released, I thought the only job I could get would be with Dad – and that was if he’d have me. It would have meant working with him and, more importantly, Daniel, every day. It would never have lasted and I would have ended up breaking my probation. It was Tina who saved me.