‘Tell me the truth. She didn’t want me to know, did she?’
‘And what good would that have done?’
‘It’s about the truth, Dad! Not about always manipulating every single fucking situation to suit your own narrative!’
‘I said, that’s enough!’ Emil suddenly bursts into tears, giant hoarse sobs, and it’s the first time Storm has ever heard his father cry. Most of the time, he’s unreadable at best. ‘She saved me, Storm,’ he whispers down the line when he regains some composure.
Storm clutches the phone to his ear but doesn’t continue.
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he says, when Emil’s sobs finally subside.
‘I’m sorry, too, Storm. I should have told you these things years ago. I just didn’t know how. The truth is that I fell in love with her, and she fell in love with me. I believed it was what Mia would have wanted, for someone she knew and loved to raise you like her own.’
Storm nods. He’s too tired to fight. He’s old enough to understand that more than one truth can exist. He also knows that while Bianka is the adult in the relationship, he’s made it difficult for her over the years and she’s only human. Listening to his father, Storm realizes that he must have been very lonely and fragile after his mother’s death, and Bianka brought him some happiness. Can he really begrudge him that?
‘I know,’ Storm says. ‘I’m sorry. I guess it’s been overwhelming to, uh, find out more stuff about my mum.’
‘I know. I figured. And that was the main reason Bianka and I wanted to wait until you were older before dwelling too much on what happened. We felt it was important to properly anchor you in the present. But we might not have gotten it quite right, Storm. It’s not like we have all the answers.’
‘Yeah. I get that.’
‘I just couldn’t think straight back then. I was in a daze for years, if I’m honest. And it was Bianka who cared for you then, I want you to know that. And very gently. She was the one who pieced you back together. You were so traumatized when your mother died, and it was both bittersweet and beautiful to watch her help you find your feet again.’
It’s past 2 a.m. when Storm is getting ready to sleep. He has the strange sensation of touching upon something long-forgotten, not unlike trying to remember a fading dream.
He gets into bed and thinks about the strange sensation of coming almost within grasp of a memory, though not quite. He knows there must be a whole vault locked up inside him and he’s not sure he’d want to unlock them even if he could. And yet, deep down, Storm knows that while he doesn’t retain conscious memories of his mother, she’s very much there underneath, remembered in his body, his subconscious, his heart. And the voice inside, when he needs it the most, is hers.
Twenty-Five
Charlotte
I watch Bianka cover Maxime Dubois-Joseph with a tarpaulin we’ve found behind the finca. She moves fast around the open-plan living space, cleaning up the worst patches of pooling blood with some old beach towels stored in Ximena’s bathroom, but there is just so much of it, seeping in between the cracks in the oak floorboards and gathering in sickening, sticky puddles. I feel dazed and violently nauseated, and my mind is entirely blank, as though my brain is shutting down to protect me from the unfolding scene and this new reality.
‘Charlotte. Are you ready?’ Bianka’s voice cuts through my thoughts and I glance around, surprised to find myself in my mother’s farmhouse, now a murder scene. The sickly metallic smell of blood lingers on the air. I nod, then shake my head. I’m confused and dazed; my head hurts badly. How will I get through dinner?
‘Yeah. Are we doing it now?’
‘Doing what?’
‘Getting rid of him.’
‘No. Charlotte, what do you mean? We’ve just made a plan, haven’t we? I’m worried that you might have concussion.’
‘I remember now. Tonight. When the others are asleep. After dinner.’
‘Yes. No one will find him here in the meantime – I’ve dragged him further into the corner beneath the window and covered him pretty well with that tarpaulin.’ I nod. ‘I found his phone,’ continues Bianka, holding an iPhone with a gaudy jade marble case pinched between her index finger and thumb. ‘I unlocked it with his fingerprint and got rid of the videos. He wasn’t bluffing. He had three, and one was over four minutes in length. One of them was especially bad, of you snorting coke off of me… Thankfully it doesn’t look like he’d passed them on to anyone, I checked his socials. The guy has over twenty thousand followers on Instagram, though – people will definitely notice his absence sooner rather than later.’
‘Oh, my God,’ I whisper. As much as I don’t want to, I think back to the night at Sa Capricciosa, and can’t remember ever noticing him recording us. I suppose there are very discreet ways around that kind of thing, though, and we should just be glad we discovered it before it was too late. I can’t even bear to contemplate the consequences if Maxime had actually sent something to Andreas. Or put it on the internet.
‘Okay, let’s head back up to the house. One more thing, though. Change of clothes. We’re both literally drenched in blood. Is there something here we can use?’
And so I find myself in Ximena’s bedroom for the very first time in all the years I’ve been coming to Can Xara. The dust is thick on the surfaces, but other than that, it looks as though she might have been here just days ago. The bed, narrow and deep and carved from mahogany, is made and above it hang several pictures in silver frames, all of me as a child and teenager. I look away and scan the room for a closet or chest of drawers. It’s quite dark – the shutters are closed and the only light I have to navigate by is what streams in through the wooden slats, projected onto the floor in lines of light. There is a large wooden armoire, painted aqua blue and peeling. I open it and inside I find some neatly folded clothes and a couple of storage boxes. I pull one out and it’s overflowing with scraps of paper, letters, and photographs. I recognize my own handwriting on many of the letters and feel a surge of grief at my mother keeping them all, perhaps rereading them occasionally, cherishing my words. I pick a random photograph from the pile – it’s of Ximena as a young woman with a man. At first glance, he bears a faint resemblance to my father, but it definitely isn’t him. They are sitting closely together at a table in a restaurant, gazing at each other, not the camera. I put it back face down. Maybe someday I’ll venture back in here and deal with it, but most definitely not today.
There are some white, plain linen tunics similar to the ones I often wear myself, and when I pick one up and draw in its scent without thinking, nothing could have prepared me for the fact that the garment would hold the lingering scent of my mother all these years later. Hers was a distinct scent I’d know anywhere – sandalwood, fleur d’oranger, sea salt. Instead of feeling devastated and unable to cope with it, it feels like a beacon of light in this exact moment. I grab the tunics – if we bump into Anette and Linda back up at the house, I don’t think they’d notice any difference from what I usually wear during the day at Can Xara, and it’s not strange that Bianka might have borrowed a cover-up after a long afternoon on the beach.
We go to the bathroom together, neither of us wanting to be left alone with the gruesome reality of the dead body in the next room. I look at myself in the mirror and realize I have a spray of blood across my forehead. My stomach turns violently and I swallow back mouthfuls of bile. I don’t know if it’s my own blood from when I fell, or his. I take a quick shower and scrub myself meticulously with a sponge while Bianka sits on the closed toilet lid, scrolling on her phone, then we swap. It’s past six when we finally close the door to the finca behind us, and I lock it for the first time I can recall with an old iron key that hangs from a string above the door, slow to turn in its lock. Bianka had the foresight to message the others hours ago to tell them we’d decided on a coastal walk. Now all we have to do is stick to the story and somehow act normal.
*
At the house, we both pad quietly upstairs, and I feel a wave of relief not to bump into the others. I send them a WhatsApp message on our chat.
The cava is ice cold in the fridge downstairs, I hope you know to help yourselves… Will be down in around an hour, I had a bit of a funny accident on the way back up from the beach so going to get a bit of rest.
Then I get straight back in the shower. I feel woozy and confused one moment and pretty normal the next, like drifting in and out of sleep and not being sure what was a dream and what was not. I catch a glimpse of myself reflected back in the mirror and my expression alone makes me burst into tears again. It’s frightening how much of a stranger the woman looking back at me appears to be. The beads of water on my face remind me of the spray of blood I washed off earlier and I feel like it’s still there on my skin, so I start to scrub myself harder and harder. The grazed skin on my cheekbone opens again and I watch in horror as blood seeps down my face and merges with the flowing water. I want to scream but the others would hear me. I want to run from the room and from the house and from the island, but where would I go? Is home even an option anymore, when I can’t ever again become the woman who belonged there? Eventually I stumble from the shower into my fluffy bathrobe and back into the bedroom, where I lie down on top of the white linen bedspread, my hair wrapped in a towel. I have a pounding headache and need to close my eyes, if only just for a moment.
*
‘Charlotte. Charlotte!’ says a voice. ‘Jesus Christ, you gave me a fright. What’s happened to your face? I thought you were kidding about having an accident! But this is, like, bad. Oh, look, you’ve bled all over that beautiful bedspread.’
I sit up. It takes me a long moment to recognize my surroundings as Can Xara and the woman speaking as Anette. My head hurts so much. Then I remember the rest. The party. Bianka and me. Maxime dead and waiting in my mother’s finca. I groan loudly.
‘Charlotte? Shit, are you okay?’
‘Yeah. Yes, sorry, I’m fine. I just needed to lie down for a bit.’
‘What the hell happened to you?’ Bianka and I have practised this, every last detail of the story.
‘I stumbled on the steps back up to the path,’ I say.
