Page 27 of The Path to the Last House Before the Sea

Alyssa crossed her fingers, just in case, and watched seagulls – tiny white dots – swooping over cottage roofs, and a child’s lost red balloon floating into the sky. The village looked like a spider’s web from up here, with paths going in all directions and the church in the centre.

It reminded her of something. Alyssa thought for a moment and then reached for her phone. She brought up the photos she’d just taken at Driftwood House and stared at the spidery markings on the yellowed paper. If the cross denoted the church, that curved mark there could be a rough outline of the cove, and those faint lines were roads.

Could it really be an old map? She held her phone at arm’s length, turning it this way and that until – bingo! – the lines on the photo mirrored the view.

‘Good grief! It is a map,’ she breathed, wondering if the shaded boxes could be buildings.

She traced her finger along the roads that led from the church. One of the boxes might arguably be the Smugglers Haunt, and another, the castle. And there was one in what looked like Weavers Lane – the lane that housed Stan’s shop, along with a dozen old cottages.

Alyssa glanced around, desperate to share her excitement, but there was no one in sight. So she went back to studying the map and frowned because there was something strange going on.

The clearest two lines on the paper didn’t appear to match any of the streets that were laid out before her. She stared again at the bustling village far below and shook her head. These two lines crossed streets and linked buildings until they merged into one line that led to the cove, almost as if they were drawing energy towards the beach. Or, said a little voice in Alyssa’s brain, taking goods from it.

Her mind raced ahead. This was a smuggling map, revealing the tunnels that had once criss-crossed deep beneath Heaven’s Cove. It had to show the hidden paths that smugglers had trodden with contraband from the Continent almost three centuries earlier. Or… Alyssa took a deep, steadying breath. Or was she merely seeing what she wanted to see?

Alyssa clicked off the photo and stuffed the phone back into her bag. She needed to think about this before sharing what was probably a hare-brained idea with anyone else. But her mind was filled with thoughts of the past as she started walking once more towards Heaven’s Cove.

FOURTEEN

MAGDA

‘I was going to bring grapes but that’s like coals to Newcastle, seeing as you sell them here. So I brought you this instead.’

Magda stopped talking. Her voice was too loud, her speech too fast, but Stan didn’t seem to have noticed. He was sitting in his favourite chair, in his first-floor sitting room that had a view of the sea in the distance.

He studied his hands in his lap and hardly looked up as Magda pulled foil off the bowl she’d carried from home.

She’d left the pub all fired up to tell Stan the truth. But she’d stopped off on the way for three scoops of ice cream. It seemed important to bring him a gift – a way of saying ‘I love you’ in frozen cream and sugar, before saying it for real.

Was she really going to say it after all this time?

Magda swallowed and pushed the bowl into Stan’s lap.

‘Your favourites – Salted Caramel, obviously, Vanilla Cream and Blueberry Crush.’ She paused. ‘That’s not against doctors’ orders, is it?’

He looked up at that and smiled. ‘Definitely not.’

Magda fetched him a spoon and he tried the Salted Caramel first, as she’d known he would. She watched him eat, savouring every mouthful as if it was the first ice cream he’d ever tasted.

And as she watched, she paced the room – past the TV and the sofa and the glass cabinet filled with Penny’s treasures. She glanced at her best friend’s photo on the mantelpiece and her resolve to be truthful began to falter.

Here, in Penny’s home, it felt as if the woman she’d known for decades had never left.

Magda shivered. She wasn’t sure she believed in an afterlife. But what if Penny was watching her, reading her mind and judging her?

How disappointed would she be in her best friend? How surprised by her decades-long duplicity? Magda had never acted on her feelings for Stan, but she’d had them, nonetheless.

‘You’re going to wear a groove in that carpet,’ said Stan, placing his half-eaten ice cream on the table next to his chair. ‘Are you going to sit down?’

‘Yes.’ Magda sat in the chair opposite Stan and immediately got back to her feet. ‘No.’ She swallowed again. ‘I came round because I have something to tell you. And I really need to say it.’

She could feel her heart hammering in her chest, and Alyssa’s words sounding in her head: I let my fear win… and I’ve regretted it ever since.

‘I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while but it was never the right time. But now—’

‘I have something to tell you too,’ interrupted Stan, gazing out of the window. ‘Can I go first?’

‘I’d rather say—’

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