Chapter One
Fourteen months ago
Aria Philips walked out of her office to find her dad chatting to one of the guests over the reception desk. They were exchanging anecdotes about their golf games and laughing about how bad they were. Her dad had been playing golf as far back as she could remember and he had never seemingly got any better. It never stopped him trekking over to the golf course on the mainland every week to play a round though.
She waited patiently for them to finish talking, although she knew she could be waiting a while. Her dad had all the time in the world for the hotel guests, and most of his day was spent chatting to them. It was no wonder that all those little jobs that needed doing for the smooth running of the hotel never seemed to get done.
The hotel was quiet today. They’d had several guests stay the weekend before for Valentine’s Day, but most of them had gone now. Katy, one of the receptionists, was reading a book. There wasn’t a lot to do, at least for her. Aria had a list a mile long of things to do; maybe she should delegate some of it.
She glanced around the lobby area, which was filled with battered leather sofas. There was a young couple sitting on one and giggling over some photos on their phones. Mrs O’Hare, an elderly guest of theirs who had first come a few months before and seemingly spent a lot of time in her room watching porn, was on another sofa. When she wasn’t watching porn, Mrs O’Hare swept around the island in a purple cloak and a bright yellow fedora hat with a peacock feather sticking out from the rim. To say she was eccentric was an understatement.
Aria’s eyes rested on Noah Campbell tapping away on his laptop and her heart leapt in her chest, which was ridiculous because he was a guest, he’d stay for a few nights, two or three times a year, and then he’d leave. She’d learned many years ago not to get attached to guests. As a kid she’d made friends with the children who stayed in the hotel, playing with them in the gardens and on the beach, and then they would leave at the end of their holiday and she’d never see them again. When she had been in her late teens, early twenties, she’d dated a few men who stayed there, but of course it always had come to an end before even getting started. So she’d learned to be professional, be polite, even be friendly, but to remain detached.
But Noah was different, at least it had started to feel that way. He had got under Aria’s skin and made her feel things she’d promised herself she would never feel about a guest. As if he felt her watching him, he glanced up and a beautiful smile crossed his face.
The guest her dad was talking to finally moved away and her dad turned to her, a huge smile on his face.
‘How’s my beautiful girl this morning?’ He opened up his arms. She smiled and stepped up as he enveloped her in a big bear hug. There really was nothing professional about Thomas Philips. He didn’t care that there were hotel guests nearby, if he wanted to hug his daughter then he would.
‘What are you doing here?’ Aria said, smiling against his chest. ‘You’re supposed to be retired, enjoying more golf, relaxing.’
Her father had asked her to take over as hotel manager the week before, although she’d been doing the job unofficially for years. He’d said he was going to enjoy himself, paint, take up pottery, maybe travel a bit, but it seemed he was having trouble stepping back completely and had been here every day ever since. Thomas still lived upstairs in the same apartment he’d shared with her mum; the same place Aria had grown up in with her twin sisters. Her sisters had left the island many years before and she herself now lived in one of the hotel’s cottages out in the grounds. She had talked about swapping with her dad so she could be closer to the hotel if anything happened, and so he could enjoy the peace and quiet a bit more, but her dad didn’t really do change.
‘Oh you know, just catching up on a bit of paperwork before I leave on my world cruise.’
There was no world cruise, they didn’t have any money for that kind of thing, but her father liked to talk about it nonetheless. She imagined him on a cruise, flirting with all the women, doing ballroom dancing, seeing the sights. He would fit right in. Maybe next year they would have enough money to send him on a small cruise, something in Europe perhaps. It certainly wasn’t going to happen this year. She’d seen the finances and they weren’t good. The hotel wasn’t in great shape and that had started to show in the number of guests. Things needed to change and, now she was in charge, she was going to be the one to do it.
Aria stepped back. ‘While you’re here, I was thinking of doing a bit of redecorating…’
He was already shaking his head. ‘When I’m dead and buried you can make as many changes as you want, but this place…’ he looked around wistfully. ‘Your mum and I had so much fun decorating this place when we first bought it. We would argue over colours and wallpaper patterns and she always won. We had no guests here, no staff, just us for six months, and we made use of that privacy in every room, believe me.’
Aria cringed at that image. When her mum had been alive she and Thomas had never been able to keep their hands off each other. They were always hugging and kissing or holding hands. She had never seen a couple as in love as her parents were. When her mum died about fourteen years before, when Aria had been sixteen and the twins were ten, her dad had been utterly heartbroken. He hadn’t painted or changed anything in the hotel since, as if clinging onto the old paint and wallpaper was holding onto her memory. Aria had so many ideas of things she wanted to change around here but Thomas wouldn’t budge and they’d had the same argument many times before. Maybe now he had tentatively retired she could get things done, at least in the guest bedrooms where he wouldn’t notice them.
She wanted to push it but her dad sat down with a heavy sigh and she noticed how tired he looked. He had been looking quite pale lately, though when she’d asked him about it he’d simply dismissed it as getting over a cold – or man flu as he liked to call it. He’d had several appointments at the hospital but he’d told her that it was because they were trialling some new things for his diabetes. She hoped it wasn’t something more. Maybe she should go with him next time.
‘I can’t wait to see Clover and Skye tomorrow,’ her dad said, grabbing a piece of paper and folding it into a perfect paper plane.
‘It’s been too long since they were both here,’ Aria said.
She loved her sisters, and she knew they loved her, but there was this disconnect between them. Clover and Skye shared this twinnie bond that she wasn’t a part of. When they’d been growing up, the twins had been completely inseparable and, even though life had taken them in different directions since then, Aria knew they spoke to each other on the phone every single day. The three of them had a WhatsApp group where they chatted to each other but she knew that Clover and Skye also had a separate chat just for the two of them. Maybe it was the fact that Aria was six years older, or maybe it was that she hadn’t shared a womb with them, but whatever it was she wasn’t as close to them as she would like.
She ignored the tiny seed of doubt in her mind that said it was because she was adopted and not their real sister, because she knew that was more about her own issues than anything they had ever said or done.