Page 64 of Oyster

I pressed my lips to her warm nape again. “I’m only this strong because I have you. But I think you’re right, Zoë will be fine. Max worries me a bit more.”

Éti nodded. “He’s so quiet, isn’t he? Is it because of me?”

“No, I don’t think so.” I frowned, trying to come up with the right words to describe my complicated brother. “He’s always been that way. Always quiet. As a toddler, he hardly spoke. Then, when he was around ten, he stopped speaking altogether for a few months. Mum and Dad found out he was being bullied at school. When that ended, bit by bit, he began chattering again. Once Mum became ill, he quieted, not totally like before, but yeah, still pretty bad. He’s still almost silent around strangers. Stress makes it worse.”

“There’s a name for it, isn’t there?”

“When he was a kid, they called it selective mutism. An anxiety thing, apparently. He’ll be much more communicative when he gets to know you.”

“Have you asked him how he’s feeling?”

“My dad does regularly. Max says he’s fine.”

To say my dad had embraced counselling was like saying the sea was wet. His alcohol consumption had halved, his interest in his children doubled, and this week, he’d begun telling me stories about my mum with fondness, not tears.

“He even persuaded Max to come along to one of his counselling sessions, but it was like drawing blood from a stone. Max was embarrassed by the whole thing. He’s quite shy. And he’s not a child anymore. We can’t drag him along if he doesn’t want to go.”

“Perhaps he needs time.”

“Time is in great abundance on this island.” My gaze travelled along the beach towards the lighthouse, taking in a crop of jagged rocks and a tumbledown old stone rampart which, to my shame, I’d once graffitied. A view no different from a hundred years ago.

“I hope I made an okay impression on your dad.”

“You made a great impression, my sweet. Meeting you did him good. I didn’t think I’d ever hear him joke or laugh again.”

“He’s lost his forever. We can’t imagine how that feels.”

“No, we can’t.”

Some evenings, our stretch of ocean grumbled grey and angry, ready to fling a man into its briny waves at the slightest provocation. On others, like tonight, with the sun’s reflection dancing across the surface so brightly I had to squint, I believed anything was possible. That unimaginable treasures, like mermaids, hid just under the surface.

“On days like today, I feel like she’s still with us.”

“I hope your dad feels like that, too.” Éti tilted her face up to the day’s last hurrah of sunshine. “Are we going to be forever, Nico?”

“Is that what you want?”

She let out a long breath, savouring it. “It’severythingI want.”

Foreverwith Éti. My heart swelled. That sounded like an awfully big adventure. I was more than ready.

“I know you’ll never follow me to Paris, Nico. And I’ll never ask you to. I don’t want you there. You belong here.”

With those few reassuring words, the only dust mote of doubt lingering over our love was swept away. “Thenforeversounds marvellous to me.”

She twisted so our mouths could meet. Like our very first kiss, she tasted of joy and sunshine, and everything good in between. I didn’t think it was possible to love anyone more than I loved her then.

“It does, doesn’t it? And this island will be my permanent home too, one day, when I retire. I’d already decided that before I ever met you.”

We traded another kiss. “It’s strange talking about retiring when neither of us are even thirty.”

“I’ve become used to it.” She gave a rueful laugh. “People think being a high-ranking professional footballer is so cool and exciting. Travelling the world, visiting exotic destinations, and meeting more famous people. In reality, we train endlessly, watch video after video of other teams playing less well than us, and then sit around a dressing room smelling of stinky socks and discussing who has the best financial advisor and where to invest our ill-gotten gains. Or Ruiz’s next tattoo. But I’m not planning on retiring yet. I’m in my footballing prime; there are still things I want to achieve.”

Mon dieu, she’d achieved everything. “We can make driving up and down the A10 work for a few years.”

“We can. And we will.”

Even the boy and his dad left the beach now, taking their buckets of shellfish treasure with them. Éti wiggled her toes inthe fine sand, unable to resist the temptation to flick a couple of tiny pebbles up into the air.

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