Page 24 of The Island Villa

Andrew wiped his brow. “I got that message.”

“It’s always a frightened woman trapped in the basement, never a man, so I thought...”

“I read what you thought. That part where he starts screaming and she...” He shuddered, let out a breath and stared out to sea. “I need sunlight and real life for five minutes to bring me back to reality. Talk about something boring and normal, I beg you. What we’re eating for dinner. The weather.”

She was delighted by his reaction. “The book unsettled you.”

“Unsettled?” He gave a hollow laugh. “It creeped me out, Catherine. I’m afraid to ever be alone in a room with you again.”

She felt a rush of triumph, but her creative mind immediately smacked that down. Flattering though it was that he’d enjoyed it, his opinion wasn’t the one that mattered. And would he tell her the truth anyway? Men said things they didn’t mean all the time. And women, women like her, believed them. Andrew was about to marry her. He wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings. “You would never tell me if you hated it.”

His gaze met hers. He knew what she was thinking. “I would tell you. Honesty, remember? That’s what we agreed. And it’s brilliant. Brutal, but brilliant.” He reached for the coffee she’d poured him and then hesitated. “But it’s not a Catherine Swift.”

“I know.”

Catherine Swift was about uplifting fiction and happy endings. Maybe Catherine Swift the writer was dead. Except that she couldn’t be dead, because Catherine Swift was her real name.

She wished now that she’d used a pseudonym at the start of her career. It would have made it so much easier to reinvent herself. It also would have avoided awkward moments when she handed over her credit card in stores and people asked if she was the Catherine Swift. Occasionally she said, No, I’m the other one, and left while they were still figuring that out.

“Have you shown it to Daphne?”

“Not yet.” She had no idea what her agent would say. She’d spent decades building a dedicated following of readers who loved her books. Her readers weren’t going to love this book. They rushed to bookstores to pick up the latest Catherine Swift because they knew she would give them what they wanted, and she’d never let them down. Her books were guaranteed to deliver a strong heroine, a strong message and a happy ending. They could bite their nails at the emotional tension, laugh and cry with the heroine, safe in the knowledge that when they finally closed the book, they would be leaving the heroine in a good place. They would be uplifted and maybe a little inspired.

This book had a strong heroine, and a strong message—when a man manipulates and controls you, consider murder as an option—but there was no laughter, and definitely no happy ending, although the heroine was alive at the end, which was more than could be said for most crime fiction. She considered that a nod to her former writing self.

“How long have you been working on this? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know that I could do it.” People died in her books, of course. But her characters didn’t cause each other’s death. When they picked up a kitchen knife they were likely to chop an onion, not contemplate murder. Her characters had issues, but they weren’t psychopaths. This was a departure for her.

“I’m amazed that you found time. You already have a full schedule delivering the books contracted to your publisher.”

“I was inspired. But I’ve never written anything like this before. I’ve never killed anyone.” She didn’t meet his eyes, afraid that he might see something she didn’t want him to see. “It was easier than I thought.”

“Now you’re really scaring me.” But this time he was smiling as he reached across and took her hand. “You’re magnificent. I’m in awe of your talent. I firmly believe that there is nothing you can’t do, Catherine Swift.”

It wasn’t true—she couldn’t sing, she’d never been able to run fast, she couldn’t catch a ball—but the fact that he believed in her meant a great deal because, despite everything, she’d never been able to believe in herself.

“You don’t think I’m foolish?”

“To write something different? No, of course not.”

“I can’t write both. I don’t have time.” She paused. “And I wouldn’t want to. I think I’m done with romance.”

“So what you’re saying is that you intend to move to a life of crime.” He grinned. “That could be fun. As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I know that it upset you not hitting number one.”

She wasn’t going to deny it. And she wasn’t going to pretend she’d moved on and reached a point of acceptance. It stung. She still woke up at night and thought about it. Number three. The insecurity inside her was a monster. She tried to lock it away. Tried to ignore it. But it lurked there, always ready to pounce.

“The problem with always being number one,” she said, “is that there is only ever one direction you can go.”

“And I know it matters to you, but I wish you could separate it from who you are. You’re not your book sales, Catherine. You are not your acceptances or your rejections. You are not your reviews, or your awards. Those are all just things going on around you. You are not your writing.”

It wasn’t true. Not the part about sales, acceptances, rejections and reviews. That was all true (although he made it sound as if those were easy to dismiss and they certainly weren’t). But her writing? She was her writing, or rather her writing was part of her. As much a part of her as her hair, or her nose. Writing was her way of interpreting the world, of making sense of things.

But she hadn’t been drawn to crime because of her dwindling sales; she’d been drawn for a different reason. Lately, she’d questioned her plots. Yes, she gave her characters challenges, but was she shortchanging women? Was she giving the impression that everything would always be all right in the end? Because that wasn’t the case. Or maybe it was sometimes, but usually life was far messier. Life was unfair, and often it stayed unfair. She’d decided that the quality a person really needed was the ability to live comfortably alongside uncertainty, because life was full of uncertainty. To celebrate the good even in the presence of the bad. To find comfort in small things when they were overwhelmed by the big stuff.

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