“I can’t tell them that forever. When they’re older, they’ll find out everything. If people don’t tell them, they’ll find out themselves online. Even now, kids will be taunting Willow over what they see on TV about me.”
“We’ll go away. Start again somewhere else. Somewhere where they have little, cheap beach houses near the ocean. I know you’d like that.”
Tears stung my eyes before the wind whipped them dry again. “Really? But your job . . .?”
“Job’s gone. I’ll explain later. We’ll head to a small town and raise the kids doing the things you and Ben did on your family holidays.”
“We can’t do it. There’s no work in those places. And . . . it’d be better for you and the girls if I wasn’t even in the picture. I haven’t done a good job of being a wife and mother. I’m not built for it. There’s something wrong with me. What I did . . .”
A silence stretched between us as my voice fell away.
Gray exhaled a long, soft breath. “Willow and Lilly are desperate to have you back. Lilly’s been sick. She was in the hospital for a while—”
“In hospital? Why? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. It’s just . . . Lilly. She’s okay, but she has a condition. She’s always had it.”
“Gray, tell me. What is it?”
“I don’t understand everything about it myself yet. When we get back, we’ll talk to the doctors again, and we’ll find out together.”
He held me then as I cried.
Stroking my hair, he pressed his cheek to mine. “I’m desperate to have you home again, too. That’s why I’m here.”
Unable to answer, I shook my head. Turning, I looked out to sea.
“You almost died,” I said after a moment. “I have to live with myself knowing that. I half think I’m still there, trapped in that cellar, and I’ve gone crazy. Imagining you and everything that happened afterwards.”
The island became a speck, then it slipped from view, a thing only in nightmares.
Gray’s heartbeat was a tattoo against my back—or at least, I imagined I could feel it.
The sun glinting on the ocean and the breeze whipping past me couldn’t erase the images of the cellar or take away the incessant echo of the metronomes.
My head hurt. Pounding. A thick, disorienting cloud hazing my brain.
I let my eyes close.
In shock, I felt myself pulled straight back to the cellar. The heavy weight of the chains. The stone wall against my back. Whispers and whimpers and choked pleas in my ears. The foul, coppery odours of death.
Gasping, I struggled to find the breath in my lungs that wasn’t there.
Open your eyes, Evie.
Open your eyes.
Epilogue
ONE MONTH LATER
TWO LITTLE GIRLS STOOD ON THE shore, hand in hand. Silhouetted before the deep pink and orange sunset, waving goodbye to the sun.
They’d call the sun back again in the morning, racing down to the sand with buckets and spades. Everything certain and forever in their world.
If I looked past them, I could almost see my brother bodysurfing in the curling waves, making the most of the fading light, never wanting to come in. And Dad walking along the shore with his fishing rod, coming back to make us dinner with what he’d caught. Only, it was winter now, and that picture was all wrong.
Gray sat beside me on the edge of the deck. “No wonder your parents kept coming back here. Perfect spot.” He handed me a hot coffee.
“Thanks.” I leaned against his shoulder, watching Willow and Lilly chase each other across the sand.
It really was a great spot. I’d been amazed that this holiday house was still here, the furniture and pictures on the walls the same as I remembered. My mother had rented it for us this time, insisting that Gray and I come and stay here. She was somehow different, but in another way exactly the same. If I wanted Willow and Lilly to have a relationship with her, I was going to have to bite the bullet and just accept that she was always going to have a prickly personality. Maybe. I was undecided and all I could do was to take it one day at a time with her.
Gray and I had only been back in Sydney for two days before we’d come here. We’d stepped from the hot summer in Greece to the cold Sydney winter. I was glad to be away from my street and from people who knew us. We’d been kept overseas for almost a month while the authorities untangled the story of the monastery. Finally, they let us go.
James Lundquist had come close to dying on the coast guard boat that had brought us all back to the mainland of Greece. But he’d hung on, probably using the same tenacity that he’d used to lead his flock of Saviours. He’d protested his innocence until too much evidence was stacked against him. Then he’d fallen into a cold, terrifying silence and he’d been locked away.