Page 30 of The Island Villa

How on earth had she cleared immigration so quickly? She’d probably frightened the officials with her ruthless efficiency.

Cassie sighed, closed the windows and switched on the air-conditioning. Her sister wasn’t going to appreciate open windows and a breeze trying to tug at her perfect hair.

Please don’t let this be as bad as I think it’s going to be, she thought and leaned on her horn to attract her sister’s attention.

Adeline turned her head (even that was a graceful movement), saw Cassie and headed toward the car with long athletic strides.

Now for the truly awkward part. How should she greet her? She was a hugger, but Adeline was as cuddly as a cactus. Shake hands? No, they were sisters, not business partners. Cassie refused to stoop that low.

She was still pondering her options when the driver she was currently blocking leaned out of his window and yelled at her in Greek, leaving her no choice but to act. With a wave of apology, Cassie leaped out and grabbed her sister’s suitcase. “Hi there, we need to move quickly before the man behind us gives himself a heart attack. How was your flight? At least you’re on time, which is more than I was.” She was babbling. She needed to stop babbling.

“Thank you for coming to meet me.” Adeline was scrupulously polite, but as distant as ever. It was as if there were a wall between her and the world.

“Of course. It’s my pleasure.” She didn’t think it was going to be much of a pleasure, but she wasn’t ready to give up hope.

Adeline removed her jacket and slid into the passenger seat. If she was stressed by this encounter, then there were no visible signs of it.

Cassie felt a stab of envy. She aspired to be that calm about everything, to meet the challenges of life with serene confidence (she also aspired to being able to wear white without immediately dropping food on herself, but some ambitions were never meant to be).

She’d spent hours worrying about this meeting, mostly at two in the morning when she should have been sleeping. She’d gone over and over it again in her head, imagining different scenarios. She’d conjured whole conversations, and then become stressed by them even though they’d only happened in her head. “Writer’s brain,” Oliver called it, and maybe it was but she wished she could switch that side of herself off when she wasn’t working. She hated the way her mind could take a perfectly benign scenario and twist it into a crisis. She went from zero to disaster in less than two seconds.

And now the moment she’d been dreading was here, and yet Adeline was being perfectly civil. Maybe not warm exactly, but definitely civil.

It was her nature to be reserved. That could have been personality, or it could have been a result of her background, Cassie mused. Adeline’s sense of security had been threatened at an impressionable age. The foundations of her life shaken. The experience had probably made her wary.

Cassie had examined the possibilities in detail. She knew that to understand the way a person behaved in the present, you often had to look at their past. It was something she did all the time when she was creating characters. She asked herself why a person would make the choices they made. Why they’d behave in a certain way. What had happened to them?

Adeline folded her jacket neatly and Cassie was conscious of her creased shorts and bare legs. Her hair curled wildly thanks to the humidity, and her nose was pink because she’d been slow to apply sunscreen the day before. She’d chosen to wear shorts and a T-shirt, because she hadn’t been able to face a car ride dressed in uncomfortable clothes that would stick to her skin. She felt like a mess next to her immaculate sister.

She reminded herself that this island was all about relaxation. “I went for a swim this morning before I left for the airport. You’ll probably have time to settle in and have a swim before dinner if you fancy it.”

Adeline fasted her seat belt. “I have work to do.”

“Work? But you’re on holiday.”

Adeline settled her sunglasses on her nose. “Tomorrow is a deadline for me. And this isn’t a holiday. It’s a family wedding.”

Family wedding. She made it sound like duty, and to Adeline that was what it was.

Cassie pulled into the flow of traffic, wondering what passed as a holiday to her sister.

“You’re working on answers for your column? I liked the answer you gave to that man who didn’t know how to tell his mother he was gay.”

Adeline turned her head. “You read my column?”

“Sometimes. I mean, not always...” Remembering the letter she’d sent, Cassie floundered. Her face grew hot. Had her sister guessed it was from her? No. Of course she hadn’t. But what if she had? “Your responses are always wise.”

“Thank you.”

“How do you pick which letters to answer? I’ve always wondered.”

“I try to cover a range of topics. And if someone writes in about an issue that I know will affect a lot of people, then I might prioritize that.” She placed her hands in her lap. Her nails were neat, her choice of polish pale and discreet. “What about you? Have you decided what you want to do now you’ve graduated?”

“Not yet.” She still wasn’t ready to release her secret into the world. What if Madeleine couldn’t sell her book? It might never happen and she didn’t want to tempt fate. “I’m taking this summer to figure a few things out. At the moment I’m working in a café. People watching, and free cake. It might just be my dream job.”

It was an easy answer, but not an honest one. She was a writer, and she knew that now. She was already more than half way through her next book. The words wouldn’t stop flowing and she didn’t want them to. Nothing in her life had ever been so dizzyingly satisfying as writing. With luck she would have finished a draft before she left Corfu. She’d stayed up late the night before, scribbling a plan for her next chapter in her notebook while sprawled on one of the loungers.

She would have done the same tonight, but she was sharing the cottage with Adeline, so maybe that wasn’t going to work. Maybe she could say she was writing a diary.

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