Page 34 of The Island Villa

Just thinking of it gave her a thrill. At this stage in her life, after all that had happened, everything that lay behind her, it felt like a miracle. And maybe she was greedy, because now she wanted a second miracle. She wanted to heal her relationship with her daughter. And if only this part of her life would work out the way she wanted it to, she’d never complain about anything again.

Beside her on the tiled floor, his loyalty unwavering, was Ajax. He stretched himself out in a patch of sunlight, enjoying the warmth. She reached down and stroked him, earning herself a deep appreciative purr.

Pleasing the cats was delightfully uncomplicated. If only relationships with humans were as straightforward.

She knew she should have gone to greet Adeline the moment she’d arrived, but she’d stayed glued to her chair, telling herself that she had work to do even though that work hadn’t stopped her taking an early morning swim and spending a satisfying hour in her garden. She was a coward when it came to emotional conflict. She had no problem putting her characters through emotional trauma, but when it came to her own life, she did everything she could to avoid it. She was doing what she always did when she was anxious or afraid, and that was to take refuge inside a fictional world. A world where she was in charge and could control the outcome. A world where she felt safe.

It was ridiculous to feel anxious about meeting her own daughter, but so much lay between them that sometimes it was difficult to see past it.

Adeline was always so composed, so mature, so distant. She wasn’t rude, she wasn’t angry or even resentful—she showed no emotion at all. She behaved toward her mother the way she would toward a stranger she was meeting for the first time.

She’d shut Catherine out of her life. She didn’t treat her like a mother and that, Catherine thought, was the most painful blow of all. But it was something she understood, because she’d done the same thing herself. From the day her mother had dropped her off at boarding school, she’d found a way to exist and survive without maternal support. She’d told herself that she didn’t need her mother, and she worked hard to make that goal a reality. If she didn’t need her, if she didn’t care, then she couldn’t be hurt. Her family network had fallen so far short of her expectations and dreams that she’d invented better versions in her head and vowed that if and when she became a mother herself, she’d do better.

She hadn’t done better.

Regret swamped her. It had taken her so long to understand that relationships were so much more complicated than she’d once thought. She’d lost the chance to mend fences with her own mother who had died a decade before, but she was determined to patch things up with her daughter.

And while it was true that Adeline was thirty and it could be argued that she was long past the age of needing her mother, Catherine still hoped that this wedding would help them forge a new relationship.

Despite the emotional upset of her childhood (Catherine couldn’t bear to think of her role in that because the guilt would be unbearable), Adeline had built a good life for herself. She was a respected professional. On her more optimistic days, Catherine liked to convince herself that Adeline had chosen that path precisely because of her own experiences, in which case she could possibly assume that some good had come from bad.

Catherine closed her laptop. She hadn’t managed to do any work since the car arrived. Distracted, she’d made the cardinal mistake of wasting time scrolling through social media, and checking some of the reviews of her latest book. She made a point never to read her reviews, but it was as if right now she couldn’t help punishing herself. There had been plenty of reviews with five stars—I read everything Catherine Swift writes, Catherine Swift at her best, the woman is a genius—but also plenty of three stars (three was not her favorite number right now)—not her best, read as if she wrote it in a hurry, does the woman even have an editor? (most readers didn’t think about the role of an editor, so she assumed that one had been left by a writer), and a fair smattering of one and two stars—rubbish, she’s lost her touch, this was written by a computer (on a computer, Catherine thought, but not by a computer), there’s a typo on page 49. She ignored the reviews that complained that the cover was torn (How was that her fault? She tended to take the blame for everything, but even she refused to take the blame for a torn cover or late delivery).

She told herself to toughen up and gave herself the same advice she would have given to less seasoned writers, namely that not every reader could enjoy every book no matter how much she might want them to. All she could do was write the best book she could, and after that it was out of her hands.

She needed to put the whole thing behind her. The book, the sales, the reviews. Number three. That part of her career was finished now. Catherine Swift the romance novelist was history. She was moving on.

After her early morning swim, she’d spent her time polishing her crime novel and had loved every moment. She’d felt energized and excited. She’d wanted to write, and wanting to write was an excellent feeling. It had been a while since she’d felt that way. People didn’t understand that the “dream job” became just that after a while—a job. The “dream” part vanished once it became a reality. Thinking about something was much less work than actually doing it, which was why so many people said they wanted to be a writer but never actually managed to pin themselves to the keyboard for the length of time it took to produce a book. You could live the dream but Catherine was pretty sure that once you were living it, it was no longer the dream.

Catherine could no longer stare out the window and wait for inspiration to strike her; she had deadlines and people depending on her.

There were expectations, and nothing induced fear quite like expectations. There were days when the pressure of them threatened to crush her. When the dream almost became a nightmare. She felt unending sympathy for writers less successful than her, who labored over their work only to see it vanish from the shelves (if it even made it to the shelves) within weeks of release. They must have felt like Sisyphus, pushing the rock uphill.

The stress so easily eclipsed the joy, but lately she’d found the joy again. It took her back to the beginning, when she’d written for the sheer addictive thrill of creating, when the only pressure had come from within herself, from the stories unfolding in her brain. She took it as a sign that she was doing the right thing by making this change.

It wasn’t that she had to do this. She wanted to do this.

She stood up and stretched to shake off the stiffness. She’d positioned her desk facing the garden, a decision that she found both uplifting and a distraction. Two walls of her office were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, home to one copy of everything she’d written, along with translations. She gazed at them now, all those spines, all those words. All that work. Her life’s work. Her purpose. She kept them there not to feed her ego, but to squash the self-doubt that never left her, no matter how many books bore her name. Sixty romances, and she knew now that she’d written her last. Her love affair with romance was over.

She closed the door of her office and headed to her bedroom to change.

Her phone pinged and there was a message from Cassie.

Can’t wait to meet my soon-to-be stepdad! See you in half an hour xx

She felt a rush of warmth and gratitude (dearest Cassie, so easy, so loving, so accepting) followed by a flicker of nerves. Tonight was important. The most important night she’d had in a long time. She was glad Cassie was going to be there. She was always supportive of everything Catherine did.

She messaged back.

Just changing. See you on the terrace.

She changed out of her comfortable writing clothes into the outfit she’d chosen for the occasion, a wrap dress in the palest of blues, understated and elegant. She applied a minimum of makeup and was selecting a pair of oversized earrings to add a touch of drama when Andrew walked into the room.

“Sorry I’m late. Took longer than expected.” He leaned down and kissed her on the neck, his lips lingering. “Mm, you smell good. Are they here?”

“Yes, but I haven’t seen them yet. I’m about to join them on the terrace.”

“Right.” He straightened. “I’ll take a shower and be ready in fifteen minutes.”

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