Page 22 of The Summer Swap

She could have been a doctor. She could have made her parents proud.

They’d believed she could have had a good life. Been a success.

One day she was going to figure out exactly what really defined success. She wasn’t sure, but she knew it wasn’t hating every minute of what you were doing. She knew it wasn’t waking in the morning dreading the day.

Tired of overthinking, she lay on top of the bed in her sleeping bag, listening to the sound of the waves. She left the blinds open so she could still see the stars through the skylights.

She pushed aside guilt about her parents and instead thought of Hannah. Did Hannah think about her? Presumably not, because she hadn’t sent a message and it had been months now. Too many months.

She missed Hannah so much.

And now Hannah was going to have Amelie as a sister-in-law.

Amelie would be a member of the family. She’d be there for Thanksgiving and Christmas. For the rest of his life Todd would be smiling at Amelie. Kissing Amelie. Amelie, who had made her life a misery. Amelie, who hid the less wholesome side of her nature behind a dazzling smile that blinded most people to her more narcissistic tendencies. Maybe it was wrong of her to think it, but Amelie didn’t deserve anything as good as Todd to happen in her life.

Which just went to prove that you didn’t get what you deserved.

With a groan of frustration, Lily pushed her face into the pillow. She had to stop thinking about Amelie. She had to stop thinking about Todd. But how?

She loved him with every aching bone in her body. She needed to find a way to stop loving him, but she was still working on that. And in the meantime she had more immediate problems to deal with—like the fact that she was now a college dropout with no future.

She needed a new life, a different life, but it wasn’t as if you could order that online.

Her parents knew about her career crisis, but they didn’t know about Todd, and she had no intention of telling them. They’d tell her that she was still young, that there were plenty of fish in the sea (hadn’t they heard of overfishing?) and that she’d meet someone else eventually. She’d tried that. She’d dated a couple of guys in college, and one when she was in med school. They’d all fizzled to nothing. One was a good guy and maybe, just maybe, if she hadn’t known Todd existed, it might have turned into something. But she did know Todd existed. And that was the problem.

Lily didn’t want to meet anyone else. She didn’t want to fall in love with anyone else. She didn’t want to fall in love ever again. It was too painful. As far as she was concerned, love was like malaria or yellow fever. It was to be avoided. There had to be a vaccine. There had to be something, because surely someone must have invented something to make sure human beings never had to feel this bad. And she couldn’t even blame Todd, because he’d done nothing. There had been that one kiss (the single best moment of her life by a long way) but he’d never mentioned it, so she assumed that he either wished it hadn’t happened or didn’t remember it. The one good thing was that he had no idea she felt the way she did, which was a relief, because if he had known she would have had to move to another country.

Hating herself for not having more willpower, she checked Amelie’s social media and saw a photograph of her and Todd, followed by a stream of hashtags: #soulmate #manofmydreams #truelove.

Lily wanted to add a few hashtags of her own, but she used all her willpower and put her phone down instead.

She closed her eyes, not anticipating that she’d sleep but she must have done because she was woken by a loud noise coming from somewhere beneath her.

She lay without moving, and then flinched as she heard breaking glass and a voice.

Heart pounding, she sprang out of bed. Home invasion. Burglars. Always a risk for empty properties, especially those on the Cape. And it was obvious from the noise they were making that they thought the cottage was empty. It was isolated, so they’d assumed that their presence would go undetected. They’d do what they wanted to do, take what they wanted to take and then leave. They hadn’t factored in a witness.

She’d seen enough movies and read enough thrillers to know what happened to witnesses, and it was never good.

Fear swamped her. She forced her mind to scan the options.

Call the police, obviously.

She reached for her phone and then stopped. If she reported an intruder, they’d ask her what she was doing there, how she knew, and technically she was an intruder, too, so she couldn’t do that. Also, if the intruders found her before the police arrived, it wouldn’t end well.

She sat back on the bed, legs too shaky to support her, heart thundering in her chest, immobilized by indecision.

She should leave. Get out of here while she could. Then she would report it. She’d say she saw lights or heard voices. She could figure that part out later. But now she needed to get out before they decided to check the whole cottage for valuables and found her instead.

She imagined them dressed in black, with masks covering their faces. Did they have weapons?

Would her shaky legs allow her to escape? Maybe she should just hide under the bed. She thought about all the movies she’d seen where the first thing the bad guys did was look under the bed, so she dismissed that. No hiding. And no screaming, because there were no immediate neighbors so no one would hear her and, anyway, they’d be back to the thorny issue of what she was doing here in the first place.

No, as far as she could see there was only one option.

If she could make it to the second bedroom, she could drop from the balcony onto the sand dunes below and be gone before anyone was aware of her existence.

As silently as possible she pulled on her jeans and a T-shirt and stuffed everything into her backpack. She rolled up her sleeping bag and stuffed that inside, too.

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