Page 42 of The Island Villa

She sniffed and scrubbed her hand over her face. She needed him.

Some people preferred to be alone when their world fell apart, but she wasn’t one of those. She was a people person. She needed friends like she needed air.

She could call Felicia, but although she was a good friend, she wasn’t Oliver. Friendship, she’d discovered, was a complicated thing. She had a tendency to idealize friendship and to expect too much from people (she tried hard to be a brilliant friend herself, always ready for fun or comfort, whichever was required). Over time she’d learned to moderate her expectations. She reminded herself constantly that a friend couldn’t be everything. There was the fun friend who was brilliant for a night out and any of the “light” stuff, but never showed up in a crisis. There was the friend who arrived armed with tissues and a bottle of wine when something went wrong, but never seemed to be around for the good times. There were yoga friends, and book friends, and friends who were brilliant shopping companions.

Felicia was the type of no-nonsense friend who told you the truth and always tried to “fix” things. She’d tell Cassie what she would do in her position (which wasn’t at all what Cassie would do), and right now Cassie didn’t need that. Felicia wouldn’t understand how she was feeling. The only person who would understand was Oliver. Oliver was fun, caring, good in a crisis, loved books and wasn’t completely awful as a shopping companion. It was rare to find everything you needed in one person, but Oliver was that person. Oliver was everything.

Her eyes filled. She was being pathetic and needy. It was a good thing for all their sakes that Oliver wasn’t picking up his phone.

Why couldn’t she be more like her sister? Aloof. Self-contained. Confident.

On days like today, she wanted to apply for a personality transplant. She’d always had high expectations, and the problem with high expectations was that there was a long way to fall. You bruised less if you didn’t expect much from life.

She blinked away tears and checked her phone. Still nothing.

Where are you Oliver?

She’d never felt more alone in her life.

The other person she might have talked to in a crisis was her mother, but how could she do that when her mother was the cause of this crisis?

And that was upsetting too. How could her mother not have warned her? They talked about everything. Her mother always said that they were more like friends than mother and daughter and until now Cassie might have agreed. But this had clearly been going on for ages, and her mother hadn’t said a word to her. They chatted most days, and not once had she said, By the way, guess who is staying with me?

It could have been a scene straight out of one of her mother’s novels, one where she put the heroine through hell. Except in this case, the character wasn’t fictional, and things weren’t going to get fixed in the end. She should probably grab a pen and scribble down the way she was feeling right now so that she could use it in a story sometime, but she was just too raw.

“Cassie?”

Cassie heard Adeline’s voice coming from near the cottage. She shrank, hoping to blend into the darkness, but blending hadn’t been in her thoughts when she’d been dressing for the evening. There was no chance of making herself invisible, which was a pity. She didn’t want to talk to Adeline who, for all her training and professional skills, was about as emotionally supportive to Cassie as wet lettuce.

She sat still and said nothing, hoping Adeline wouldn’t come looking for her (she wouldn’t try that hard, surely?), but the world evidently hated her because she heard footsteps on the path and then the sound of her name again. The only way to avoid her sister was to run into the sea, but then she’d ruin her dress. It was ironic, she thought, that she’d spent years longing to have a proper conversation with her sister, but now all she wanted to do was avoid her.

“Cassie? There you are.” Adeline’s voice came from the shadows at the edge of the beach. At one time, the “path” had been nothing but a steep, dusty track winding through wild vegetation. Reaching the beach had involved nerve, stumbles and scratches, but now the path was paved and studded with tiny lights.

Adeline stood in those lights, uncertain, paused at the point where the path met the sand. “I was looking for you.”

Why? To make her feel worse than she did already?

Cassie wrapped her arms around her knees and pulled them into her chest. “Actually, I’d rather be on my own if that’s all right with you.” Words she’d never spoken before in her life. Oliver would have been concerned if he’d heard her because if there was one thing she hated, it was being on her own when she was upset. She was the sort of person who thought a problem shared was a problem halved, but not right now. She particularly didn’t want to share it with someone who gave nothing back and didn’t seem to experience normal human emotions, so she’d hold this problem by herself and hope it wasn’t going to crush her.

Instead of turning back, Adeline stepped onto the sand and picked her way across the small beach. She was still wearing her wedge sandals. Anyone else would have tugged them off the moment their feet hit the sand, but not Adeline. And she still managed to look balanced and elegant.

“I don’t blame you for feeling that way,” she said. “I need to apologize. I’m sorry for what I said. Really sorry. It was thoughtless.”

“It’s okay. You were simply stating facts.”

“No, I was upset and thinking about my parents and myself, not you. It was unforgiveable.” Adeline hesitated and then sat down on the sand next to her.

Cassie shifted away a little, instinctively wary.

“The sand is damp. You’ll ruin your dress. I bet it’s dry clean only.”

“It’s just a dress.” Adeline settled herself, smoothing the dress down over her thighs so that even here, on this tiny curve of beach, she was her usual elegant self. “How are you feeling?”

She felt terrible.

Her emotions were so close to the surface she almost let them spill, but then she remembered that this was Adeline and that they didn’t do confidences.

“I’m fine.” Presumably, that would be enough of an answer. When people said how are you? they were usually being polite. They didn’t want to hear how you really were.

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