Page 12 of The Island Villa

Jane flicked through the pages. “So who is he?”

“Who is who?”

“The boy. The boy you haven’t told us about.”

Boy? It took her a moment to understand that they were talking about the character in her story. They thought it was real?

“The idea came from my head.” She said the same thing that she’d said to Miss Barrett.

Jane narrowed her eyes. “You’re saying you made the whole thing up?”

“Yes. It’s a story.” She wondered why they couldn’t understand that. They had imaginations, didn’t they?

There was silence and then Jane gave a slow smile. “Cool. So if you really made it up, then you can give us another chapter.”

“Another chapter?”

“We want to know what the hot guy does next. What do they do after they both sneak out of the house?” Jane stood up and dropped the pages onto Catherine’s narrow bunk. “Tell us a bedtime story, Catherine.”

It was an order, not a request, but for once Catherine didn’t mind.

She did exactly as they asked. Every night after lights out, she’d lie in the dark and tell another of the stories in her head. At first just a few girls listened, and then all of them. And still Catherine told the stories, ending each evening on a cliff-hanger, keeping her audience enthralled. She was like Scheherazade, spinning tales that made her listeners want more.

The bullying stopped, and Catherine allowed her hair to grow. And then the bullies became friends, and those same friends urged her to write her stories down and submit them. Someone’s mother worked in a publishing house. Catherine’s book was submitted, and rejected. But not with the harsh words that Miss Barrett had used. No one said it was trash. No one said she couldn’t write. The word worthless never entered the conversation. No one said give up now. On the contrary, the editor complimented her on her compelling narrative and believable characters. The word commercial was dropped in there somewhere, although Catherine didn’t understand what that meant. What she did understand was that the editor was telling her to persevere.

It was all the encouragement Catherine needed.

She rewrote that story three times, then decided the whole thing was a mess and ditched it and started again with something new. This time she stuck with it. She abandoned the idea that if the story stopped flowing, then it meant it wasn’t right. She wrote from her heart, and edited with her brain. If she hit a problem, she learned to retrace her steps and analyze where the story had gone wrong. She wrote and then rewrote, and then rewrote again. She didn’t write for the editor, she wrote for herself and for the girls in her dormitory who always wanted another chapter. She figured that if the book made her heart beat faster, made her smile, made her care, then it would have that effect on others.

Finally, she’d sent it back to the same editor and after a long wait—a very long wait—she got the call. We want to buy your book.

That call still ranked right up there as one of the best moments of her life. She’d been giddy, breathless, euphoric. Sometimes she looked back on it and wished she could capture that heady moment of hope. She was a writer! No matter what Miss Barrett said, she was an actual writer. Right then she’d been at the beginning of something, with everything to gain.

Now she had everything to lose.

Catherine sat in the shade on her terrace. Her feet were bare and she could feel the warmth of the tiles heating her skin. Ignoring the notepad and pen on the table in front of her, she gazed across the lush garden, through olive groves and orange trees thick with fruit, to the glistening water. Her two cats, Ajax and Achilles, were stretched out close to her, basking sleepily in a patch of sunlight. They’d been abandoned as kittens and she’d found them, days old and close to death. She’d brought them home and nursed them until they’d gone from scrawny to strong. Remembering their awful condition when she’d rescued them, it pleased her to see them looking so content.

Success had bought her a villa on Corfu, and there wasn’t a day when she didn’t appreciate her good fortune. People marveled that her books were still selling, authors envied her career and wanted to know her secret.

Catherine knew that the secret, if it could be called that, were her readers. The critics abhorred her, but readers adored her. Scathing reviews, or no reviews at all, had no impact on her sales because her readers didn’t care about such things. They read her not because they’d been advised to do so, not because she’d won literary awards (she hadn’t), but because they loved her books and had loved them for a long time. They loved her because she gave them a good story. Because she gave them good, honest emotion. She understood their lives and the problems they faced. Reading her books, they felt seen. They loved the fact that a book by Catherine Swift guaranteed them a few hours of escape when they were enduring the brutality of chemo, relationship traumas or the loneliness of bereavement, and she understood that because her characters had always provided an escape for her too. Her readers loved her for many reasons, but mostly they loved her because ultimately, no matter how bumpy the ride, she gave them a happy ending. And she took that responsibility seriously. There were people who had followed her with unwavering loyalty since the publication of her very first book. Readers who had discovered her “late” in her career, immediately gobbled up her backlist.

While other books fizzled and died, a new Catherine Swift had always been a guaranteed number one bestseller.

Until now.

She stood up and looked across the bay. A short path led steeply down from her villa to the beach below. The small crescent of sand was perfect for swimming, and a narrow jetty stretched into the sea.

Andrew had taken the boat out earlier and as yet hadn’t returned. He’d invited her, but she’d refused. She wanted to be alone when the call came. She needed to give herself time to digest the news. To compose herself. To decide what she was going to do. She had a plan, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to put it into action.

She was braced for bad news, which was why when her phone rang, she didn’t immediately reach for it as if by not answering, she could change the outcome.

The call display said Daphne.

Daphne Elliot, superagent and literary wizard. She’d been Catherine’s agent for the entirety of her career, a partnership that had proved fruitful for both of them.

Catherine pictured Daphne at her desk in Manhattan, surrounded by stacks of books taller than she was. She had a corner office that overlooked the buzz of Fifth Avenue and would probably have spent her morning racing from one meeting to another, with a break for lunch in a smart restaurant. How many glasses of champagne had they raised together over the years? How many celebratory lunches had they consumed?

But no matter how many highs and celebrations there had been, for Catherine they were eclipsed by the lows.

---