So I didn’t reply with a socially conventional but meaningless ‘likewise’. But nor did I react to Nick’s use of my full name with my usual roll of the eyes, because at thirty thousand feet above Egypt I’d come up with a simple yet mature strategy for this meeting.
One, ignore the past and focus on the present.
Two, keep things professional at all times.
And finally, perhaps most importantly, stay calm and resist the temptation to respond to Nick’s dislike of me by instinctively exhibiting the silliness and superficiality he expected, in a sort of sticking two fingers up at him kind of a way.
Instead, I breathed in through my mouth and out through my nose, deeply and slowly and repeatedly, until the sulky teen in me had flounced off and I was channelling Zen-like serenity.
‘Thank you,’ I said smoothly, accepting the hand he held out and stepping off the boat and onto the pontoon.
He let me go abruptly and frowned down at the huge suitcase James was struggling to lift up and out. ‘How long are you planning on staying?’
‘Not long,’ I said, surreptitiously rubbing my hand against my skirt in an attempt to dispel the strange tingling sensation that lingered while Nick relieved James of his burden as if it weighed no more than a feather.
‘It feels like you’ve packed for weeks.’
‘Just a fortnight.’
He shot me a look, a flicker of alarm breaking through the ice-cool reserve, which meant he had to be seriously rattled by the idea. ‘A fortnight?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him as he tossed the rope back to James. ‘I don’t intend to spend it here.’
Perish the thought. I knew when I wasn’t wanted. And it was fine. I was well used to being on my own, and actually, I preferred things like that. Experience had taught me relationships weren’t to be trusted. I’d learnt the hard way how fickle other people could be, when those I’d considered my friends, including my then boyfriend, had ghosted me at a time I’d needed them most.
I couldn’t even rely on family, I’d eventually come to realise. My father, whom I’d adored, had emotionally distanced himself the minute he’d discovered my mother was having an affair with her personal trainer and had decided to redirect all his efforts into winning her back. Thanks to my role in the breakdown of their marriage in the first place, my mother and I had a tricky relationship at the best of times, and my brother, the only person I might have been able to count on, lived five thousand miles and eight time zones away so was therefore more often out of reach than he was in it.
But none of that was anything new. I’d accepted it and adapted to it years ago. And if the self-reliance and the tough outer shell I’d developed meant that I allowed no one to get close, that I had no one to talk to about my hopes and fears, or anyone with whom to share my tumultuous and conflicted feelings about my lottery win, well, the occasional pang of loneliness was a small price to pay for self-preservation. True friendship, love of the romantic kind, marriage in particular, required a level of trust I simply couldn’t see myself ever embracing. Emotional involvement in anything only led to confusion, pain and heartbreak. It was far easier, farsafer, for me and for others, if I steered well clear of all of it.
‘I wasn’t aware I’d invited you to,’ said Nick, his tersely made point snapping me out of my ruminations and obliterating the twinges of regret I nevertheless felt at the way things had turned out.
No, well, quite, I thought, determinedly pulling myself together. And thank goodness for it. Days of stilted conversation and keeping out of each other’s way? The tension and awkwardness would be unbearable and very muchnotmy idea of a good time. ‘I’ve booked myself a room at a hotel on Zanzibar.’
At thebesthotel on Zanzibar, in actual fact. Where, according to its website, Scandi minimalism met hints of the Middle East amidst twenty hectares of lush tropical gardens. Where, for my first holiday abroad in eight years, two weeks of pampering and indulgence awaited me, along with a waterfall bar, two infinity pools and a villa that came with a dedicated butler. Instead of schlepping to and from the office where I worked as a manager in the dark November mizzle, I’d be sliding on my sunglasses and trotting to my sun lounger with a book. There’d be long, blissful naps and lazy, luxurious massages. Yoga for breakfast and lobster for dinner, and, with any luck, a tan.
Just like old times.
Well, notquitelike old times, perhaps. Old times would have also involved diving with my dad, the two of us gliding among the fish and the coral in the silky silence thirty feet beneath the surface of warm turquoise water, the connection and trust between us stronger than steel. Or so I’d always imagined, until amidst the wreckage of our misfortune I’d discovered that he wasn’t the hero I’d believed him to be, that the unique bond I’d thought we shared was nothing more than an illusion, that I didn’t actually know him at all...
But still.
I could hardly wait.
‘The helicopter’s coming to pick me up in an hour,’ I told Nick, shaking off the conflicting emotions of grief and loss, pain and betrayal that could still blindside me, even now, seven years, six months and twenty-one days after my father’s fatal heart attack, and dragging myself back to the present.
‘Good,’ he said flatly. ‘The quicker we sort out what you want from me and you go on your way, the better.’
He turned to stride back up the pontoon, my suitcase in his hand, while I stood there waving James off, his words ringing in my ears, suddenly feeling a little dazed, a little winded, and thinking that perhaps, on reflection, brutal honesty wasn’t quite all it was cracked up to be.
CHAPTER TWO
ITWASAfive-minute walk along a sandy path that cut through dense verdant vegetation to reach Nick’s house, which gave me ample opportunity to reflect upon my bizarre response to the feel of his hand around mine and the quick tightening of my chest at his parting shot.
The former was easy enough to explain. Despite having known each other for eighteen years, Nick and I had never actually touched. Not once. Which was odd when I’d always been the touchy-feely sort. But as a surly teenager, he’d radiated back-off vibes, and in the years following my sixteenth birthday pool party at which I’d irretrievably shattered all possibility of a friendly sort of relationship, any contact would have resulted in frostbite.
These days, whenever we met—mostly on the occasions my brother was over from the States and arranged a get-together—we tended to give each other a cool sort of nod and a very wide berth. So it was little wonder that actual frostbite-free physical contact, however fleeting, would come as a shock so intense I could still feel it zinging through me.
The sense of being thumped in the solar plexus at the implication that he couldn’t wait for me to leave was harder to fathom. It suggested that I cared about what he thought of me, but that wasn’t the case. I truly didn’t. His continued brooding yet unspoken disapproval of my superficiality—once undoubtedly justified—was unwarranted these days, and if he couldn’t move on and accept that I was no longer an over-indulged, self-absorbed teenager then that was his problem, not mine.