Even now Jo struggles to refer to it, deals in euphemisms instead: after Liam’s “accident” she wanted Hana to quickly be “better.” You could pin a million different woolly words on it, but they all amounted to the same thing: “Get over it.”
The boat pulls away from the jetty with a sudden jerk as it accelerates, and Jo laughs as she’s jolted into Hana, all smiles.
The switch flicked again.
Hana stares at her sister with an intense loathing.
She shouldn’t have come. This was a bad idea.
5
Not far now.” Edd raises his voice above the sound of the engine. “Few minutes, max.”
Hana glances at her watch, the face lightly speckled with sea spray. They’ve been going for more than twenty minutes. She looks back at the beach; the wooden spine of the jetty is barely visible. Already, the hustle and bustle of the mainland seems far away.
Pulling out her phone, Jo gestures with her hand for Hana and Maya to bunch together. “You two, turn to face out to sea.” They oblige, heads gently knocking together as the RIB bounces across the water.
“We’re going to hit the back of the island first,” the driver calls. “Never been anything built on this side. The forest’s too thick.”
Caleb lets out a low whistle. Hana narrows her eyes, feeling a little jolt of anxiety as she takes in the dense wall of foliage. She can tell how dark it would be in there—sunlight watered down to almost nothing where the tree branches curved over one another like laced fingers, obscuring the sky.
“It’s been too long.” Maya turns to Hana. “We’ve been shit at keeping in touch, haven’t we?”
“I know.” Hana observes her cousin. Her face, close up, suddenly unfamiliar. She hadn’t remembered how beautiful Maya is—the wild, curly hair and tan skin, inherited from her Italian mother. Maya looks young still, but perhaps it’s just Hana’s perception—she’ll probably always struggle to see Maya as grown up. Six years younger, for ages Maya was a child, someone Hana looked after. It wasn’t just her personality; there was something uncertain about Maya, as if she wasn’t yet sure about her place in the world. Maya seemed to drift, traveling light, place to place, person to person.
“I shouldn’t say we,” Maya continues. “I’ve been crap at replying.”
“It’s fine,” Hana says, but the words sound flinty, and she makes an effort to soften her tone. “I didn’t expect everyone to keep up the hand-holding.”
Because that’s what Maya did, for months after Liam’s death. The accident had drawn them back together, albeit temporarily. Maya was her rock—quiet, unwaveringly reliable when everyone else returned to their own lives. Even now, Hana’s not sure if the rest of the family got bored or simply forgot, the minutiae of life taking over. It’s been one of the hardest things after his death itself—that feeling of being alone at the time she needed people the most.
“How are you feeling about it all now?” Maya meets her gaze. “Liam . . .”
“I just miss him. I didn’t know it would feel like this, so . . . physical.” She can’t put the bodily sensations into words; the horrible catch in her throat when she sees his side of the bed, the hollow in her chest when she thinks about the future they’ll never have.
Everything they’d lost. Because that’s what grief is: loss.
Hana’s lost it all: Liam’s perpetual five-o’clock shadow, the way he made things come alive, talking about the world so viscerally it was like he was spreading out a map in her head. For Liam, life was one big adventure. Rivers to be kayaked, hills to be biked down. He made the world full of color, and without him it is now dark. She is dark and she doesn’t know how to get back from that.
The driver interrupts her train of thought. “On your left, you’ll see the villas.”
He’s right: nestled in the trees are glimpses of buildings—a right angle of powder-pink against the blue of the sky, a large square of window, sunlight bouncing off the surface.
The retreat is perched high above the beach, a winding set of steps snaking their way up the cliff from the cove beneath. Several large, low-slung buildings are painted in other vivid tones—blues, peach. Just below on the right, slightly offset, is a glass-bottomed pool jutting out over the rocks.
“So what do you reckon?” Seth nudges Caleb. “Bea’s missing out, isn’t she?”
“She is.” Caleb shrugs. “We’ll have to come another time.”