Page 48 of The Island Villa

When was she going to learn that real life wasn’t like fiction? You could never predict how people were going to react.

If this were a scene in her book, she would have deleted it (always a painful experience, but occasionally necessary. Once, she’d deleted thirty thousand words and had to lie down for an entire day to recover). She would have hacked out those words and started again because the whole thing wasn’t working the way it should.

She stared at the pool. The air was oppressively warm and scented sweet from the flowers that tumbled from terracotta pots around the terrace. Apart from the rhythmic call of cicadas and the sound of the sea, everything around her was still and quiet. Inside, her emotions churned like the ocean in the middle of a storm.

Andrew was fast asleep in their bedroom (it was one of the many injustices of life that whatever the crisis, men always seemed able to sleep) but Catherine’s mind had been as active as an elite athlete in a training session. She knew from experience that the chances of sleep were zero, so she’d chosen to get up.

Why her brain always chose to be active at night she had no idea, but the moment she closed her eyes, her mind raced into overdrive. Dark thoughts nudged at her brain, refusing to allow her rest. During the day, she managed to keep reality at a distance, but at night it descended, ugly and undisguised, pressing itself into her consciousness. Avoid me if you must, but that doesn’t mean I’m not here.

The evening had not gone as planned, which shouldn’t have surprised her because since when did life ever go according to plan? But this time, she couldn’t blame fate. The blame, if that was the right word, lay entirely with her. Her weakness had always been her tendency to reshape reality into something she found palatable. She’d had a clear image of how the evening would go and only now could she see how naive she’d been. She’d gone straight for the happy ending and tried to skip all the conflict and tough stuff that came before.

Adeline had said that to her once. Your whole life is fiction! And maybe that was true. When she didn’t like what was happening, her brain imagined a different reality. She saw things the way she wanted them to be, rather than the way they were. It was the reason she was about to embark on her fourth marriage, and the reason her daughters weren’t currently laughing together and enjoying their second or third glass of champagne while they celebrated the happy news.

Instead of considering the possibility that her daughter would be upset by the revelation that her parents were planning to remarry, she’d pictured Adeline’s delight. She’d thought, optimistically, that her eldest daughter would be thrilled. Adeline and her father were close. She’d hoped that Adeline’s unconditional love for her father might spill over and land on her, drawing them together. She’d imagined Adeline thinking, If my father forgives her, then I forgive her.

That wasn’t what had happened.

Adeline’s voice rang in her head. I can’t believe you’d put yourself through this a second time. She cheated on you! She had an affair. She got pregnant and had a baby.

Catherine winced as she remembered those words. They were all true, and when you distilled it down to a few bare facts, it sounded awful. But life was always more than a few bare facts just as a human body was more than a skeleton. Flesh, blood, mistakes. Those were the things that made someone human. She’d made more mistakes than most.

It was embarrassing to admit that she wasn’t good at relation9ships, given that she made her living writing about them, but writing about them gave you the chance to delete scenes and change the past. That wasn’t an option in real life.

Three, soon to be four, marriages and two daughters, neither of whom were currently speaking to her. Even her brain couldn’t reshape that into a scenario where she was a blameless victim.

In hindsight, perhaps it had been too optimistic of her to assume Adeline would be delighted. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that it hadn’t turned out that way.

Still, she wished her daughter had chosen her words more carefully.

Cassie had obviously been hurt badly by her sister’s thoughtless outburst or she wouldn’t have gone running off. Catherine had wanted to go after her, but she’d had Adeline to deal with, and when Adeline had also stormed off, Andrew had insisted on giving both girls time to settle down and digest the news before having further conversation.

It had almost killed Catherine thinking of Cassie alone with her distress, but she knew that given time Cassie would accept the situation. Cassie was always fine with everything. She’d been the easiest child and seemed to find happiness and hope in every situation.

Adeline was more difficult.

Catherine felt a pang of guilt because she knew that the reason for her daughter’s strong reaction could be traced right back to childhood.

She was responsible for the upheaval Adeline had experienced at a young age. But for how long was she going to punish herself for doing what she’d had to do? She’d had no choice, at least none that she’d been able to see. And that one decision had affected both her life and her daughter’s.

Because of her, Adeline was wary of relationships. Her own and, it turned out, her mother’s.

Adeline didn’t understand of course, and neither did Cassie. Not only did children rarely see their parents as people with their own complicated lives and flaws (in her case, so many flaws) but it was human nature to form judgments based on the facts available, and she hadn’t given them all the facts and she didn’t intend to. And the ones she had given them, didn’t begin to hint at the whole picture.

Fortunately, most people didn’t bother looking for more. They didn’t ask themselves, What else could be going on here? It was something she thought about all the time when she was writing, the fact that a person’s actions were almost always motivated by something bigger than the moment. That behind every action was a chain of events that could stretch back into the far distance. There was always something more. When a woman snapped at a colleague, they might dismiss her as short-tempered, but maybe the truth was that things were terrible at home, her teenager wasn’t speaking to her, she was caring for elderly parents, she was so oppressed by the pressures of her life that there were days when she could barely breathe. And then she arrived at the office stressed by her life, emotionally stretched to the point of snapping, unable to handle one more thing, and a colleague asked her when she would finish a piece of work because the deadline was yesterday, and that was it. Snap. It wasn’t about the deadline or the colleague. It was all the things that had gone before.

But the people she worked with didn’t know that. They didn’t see how hard she was working to keep her family safe and together. All they saw was a missed deadline and a short-tempered colleague.

And when the world looked at her, Catherine Swift, they saw a wealthy, successful woman remarrying a man she’d divorced two decades before. They had no idea of the events that had brought her to this point.

Catherine took a sip of her drink and let her mind travel back to the day she’d first met Andrew Swift.

She’d been eighteen and working in a coffee shop. Unlike her school friends, she’d had no wish to go to university. All she wanted to do was tell stories. She wanted to write. Her first book had been accepted by a publisher (and she was only eighteen! With the optimism of youth, she’d truly believed she had this sorted). She’d assumed it was the start of a brilliant future.

She’d been woefully ignorant.

The publisher had paid her a small advance, but it would be another eighteen months before they published her book. She’d had no idea it would take that long. The idea of being paid to do what she loved was exciting, until she’d figured out that her advance would only cover her rent and food for two months. After that, she’d have to find another way to make money because writing wasn’t going to feed her.

She needed to get a “proper” job. But she wasn’t qualified for anything. And how was she going to write if she had a job? Where would she find the time?

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