Victor: She got his food – and then he almost died. What more is there to say?
Emma: Mum was almost whispering when she was talking to me. She said: ‘I think you should leave the table now.’
I wanted to defend myself, but, as I looked around, I realised she was saying what everyone else was thinking. Dad was still struggling to breathe – but he was staring at the empty space on the table in front of him. Nobody wanted me there, so I did the only thing I could. I stood up and I left.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Day Seven
IT’S A SECRET
Emma: I didn’t leave the cottage until five minutes to midday the next day. I heard Mum and Dad get back to their cottage the night before – and I heard them moving around in the morning – but nobody knocked on my door.
Daniel: Everyone had breakfast together on the final day – and it was a joyous occasion. It was nice to be surrounded by people who enjoyed one another’s company and who were all on the same page.
That’s how the entire holiday should have been.
Emma: I don’t know if this happened – but I’d assume Dad went out in a car that morning to collect whatever it was he had to collect, from wherever it was he had to collect it. He wouldn’t have left the island without completing the one job he went there to do.
I’d almost forgotten about it by the time I got to the lobby. There were taxis ordered that were due to take us back to the airport. They weren’t coming until 12.30 – but I had to check out at 12, which meant thirty awkward minutes in that lobby.
Mum and Dad were by the main hotel doors, while the twins were nearby on a small sofa, playing on their iPads. Daniel and Liz were hanging around, but there was no sign of Julius.
I sat on a chair across the lobby from everyone, trying not to make eye contact. I had a magazine that I was going to read – or at least pretend to – but then Victor plopped himself down on the arm of my chair.
Victor: I was trying to be friendly. Nobody else was talking to her. I said: ‘Your holiday went about as well as mine.’
Emma: I replied: ‘Your wife dumped you and went home almost as soon as she arrived.’
Victor: ‘Exactly!’
Emma: He laughed and said that, in many ways, it meant he’d had a better time of it than me. I suppose it was hard to disagree, though I didn’t feel much like laughing. He’d had a strange sort of reinvention in those few days he’d been AWOL. Singledom and island life probably suited him more than it would most people. I guess it’s easier when you’re a forty-year-old man living off daddy’s money.
He rested a hand on my knee and said: ‘I’m here for you.’
I gave him the full ‘Really?’ treatment and he shrugged it away.
Victor: Worth a go, wasn’t it?
Emma: I told him that I wasn’t interested and then picked up my case and headed across towards the twins. There was still no sign of Julius – and if Mum or Dad wanted to tell me to leave the girls alone, then they could at least do it in front of their faces.
As it was, nobody bothered me. I put my case on the floor and sat on it in front of Amy and Chloe. I thought for a moment that they’d continue playing on their iPads. They didn’t put them down immediately, but, after a few seconds, Amy lowered hers first. She glanced across to the door and then said, very quietly: ‘Daddy says we’re not supposed to be talking to you.’
Daniel: The absolute gall of that girl – after what she’d tried to pull the night before.
Emma: Chloe had put down her iPad by that point too – and both girls were looking at me. They were dressed identically, with matching tops that said ‘Galanikos Girl’ across the front.
I told them that if I didn’t see them for a while, then it wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I explained that their dad and I had had a bit of a falling out, but that I hoped, in time, we’d make it up and I’d be able to spend time with them again.
Amy said: ‘Is that like how Mum and Dad have had a falling out?’ – but I wasn’t sure what to say. Julius and Simone were divorcing, which was a lot past a ‘falling out’. Then again, I wasn’t sure how much I would be talking to my family in future.
I probably repeated that I hoped we’d work things out, but that, if not, I wanted them to know it was nothing they’d done.
I was going to leave it at that, but, as I went to move, the two girls exchanged a glance that was so full of self-awareness that it left me stumbling a bit.
They’d done something similar on the cliff when I’d found them. Amy had started to say: ‘The other night…’ when that look had passed between them the first time and she’d stopped herself. In the end, she’d told me she’d overheard her mum saying that Julius had lost his job.
On the cliffs, I thought they were entrusting me with that secret, but, in that moment in the lobby, I realised there was something else and that the girls were asking each other’s permission to share it.
Amy whispered: ‘Go on,’ but Chloe was still staring wide-eyed at her sister.
I said: ‘What is it?’ and Amy replied: ‘It’s a secret.’
I waited and it was like they were having a long back and forth, even though neither of them spoke a word.
I said: ‘It sounds like you want to tell me…’ – and they looked to each other one more time before Chloe finally said it.
Chloe: I don’t know what I told Auntie Emma in the lobby.
Amy: I don’t know either.
Emma: Chloe said: ‘We woke up on the first night.’
And then Amy added: ‘When Granddad fell.’
There was a pause and I could picture those two little girls sitting on the secret for almost a week, desperate to tell someone. They’d almost told me on the cliffs and they probably knew this was the last opportunity.
Chloe finished the sentence – and she said: ‘Daddy wasn’t there.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
THE EVEN SMALLER THINGS
Julius: I don’t know if Emma made them say that, or if she made it up all by herself. If either of the girls did say that I was out of the room on that first night, then all I can say is that I would have been in the bathroom, or possibly on the balcony. I never left the room.
Emma: Have you ever done a Sudoku puzzle? It’s the one where there are nine boxes of nine squares – and you have to fit numbers one to nine into each row and column.
When you’re doing one, there comes a point where you’re so far into completing the puzzle that the final ten or twenty numbers almost write themselves into the grid. You’ve done all the hard work – and it’s that which makes the final bit seem so easy.
It felt like that when the twins told me that Julius was out of the room. I’d had so many little bits of information – and then this last little piece suddenly made the rest make sense.