The retreat, p.3
The Retreat, page 3
“National award, it’ll put the firm on the map.”
Not only that, Elin thinks. It’s the creative recognition—a verification of his vision to turn around people’s perception of the island. “Congrats, and you don’t have to play it down for my benefit. My stuff, it shouldn’t put a dampener on you. I’ve got to learn to deal with it.”
“Easier said than done, I know.” He smiles. “Fancy a quick coffee? I’ve got time in between calls.”
“Yes, let me write down my times—only got the first half, but . . .” Elin reaches for her notebook on the coffee table. Her watch records her stats, but she still likes putting it down on paper. The one area of her life where she’s making tangible progress.
Elin looks up, feeling Will’s gaze on her. She finds pity in his eyes.
He looks to the floor—found out, embarrassed.
4
Hana watches the RIB slow as it approaches the dock, a ragged line of white foam kicked out in its wake. The words she’s just read are on repeat in her head.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
She was right: this trip wasn’t just a way of bringing the family back together. Jo’s organized it for a reason and Hana’s pretty sure it’s linked to the note that fell from her bag.
“Jo Leger?” The driver scrambles out of the boat, sending it rocking against the jetty.
As he ties it up, he greets them from behind polarized lenses, with a practiced, enthusiastic smile. He’s young, late twenties maybe, clad in a starchy white polo shirt, shorts.
“That’s me.” Jo steps forward, smiling. She’s relieved, Hana can tell, that the forced, awkward greetings are done—Jo’s overenthusiastic bear hugs with Caleb a sharp contrast to Hana’s muted half embrace.
“I’m Edd.” The driver walks toward them.
Seth steps forward, smiling, vigorous shake of the hand and broad chest stuck out. This is typical Seth. A jock, but a beautiful one, she thinks, taking in the thick line of muscle in his arm.
Hana remembers the first time they met, at a coffee shop near their house. Seth had introduced himself—all faux humbleness—and then proceeded to semiflirt with her mother and sisters in turn, holding their gaze a bit too long, throwing out compliments. He’d clearly expected people to find him attractive, and while he is—tall, bearded, muscular—and she did, the expectation was off-putting. The entitlement.
She catches Caleb’s eye as the handshake finally comes to an end and they share a smile.
It’s the first time she’s looked at him properly. His safari-style shorts paired with a faded Pac-Man T-shirt display the deliberate, don’t-give-a-shit nonchalance of a Silicon Valley tech nerd. It fits somehow; Caleb’s an academic, older than them all but still clinging to the student vibe.
Physically, he’s the polar opposite of Seth—lean, sharp-featured, with the kind of nondescript mousy hair that makes him blend into a crowd. Hana still remembers her mother’s surprise when Bea introduced them last year. Her prior boyfriends had been, to use her mother’s cringy expression, “hale and hearty.”
Her mother’s analysis a few days later was undecided: There’s something self-righteous about him. Over dinner that night, they had glimpses of it: comments about politics and education that slipped under the radar because of the booze. It didn’t bother Hana. She admired his confidence in saying the things she also felt but had never voiced. She’d always cared too much about what people thought of her.
When they met again—just the sisters and Caleb this time—she liked him even more. He had a keen intelligence, a dry humor, and the kind of quiet confidence that’s often overlooked beside the chest-beating of someone like Seth. Caleb was able to match Bea intellectually and wasn’t afraid to challenge her. Most people were. Bea’s ferocious brain intimidated almost everyone—rendered them either mute or defensive.
“So how many are we waiting on?” the driver asks.
“Only one.” Jo laughs. “In fact, there she is now.”
Maya’s coming toward them, a half run, half walk down the jetty, one battered canvas sneaker trailing a lace behind it. She’s in typical Maya attire: a thin gray dress hanging loose over her tanned, sinewy frame. A hot pink scarf dotted with a white pineapple print is loosely knotted around her head, only just taming her mass of curly black hair.
“Nearly went without you.” Jo’s face splits into a grin. “I—”
She isn’t able to finish her sentence before Maya barrels into them, pulling Jo in and then Hana for a three-way hug, but they clash, elbows bumping. There’s an awkwardness to the embrace; the action rusty somehow, underused. As Maya steps back, her bag drops from her shoulder—a battered black holdall that looks suspiciously light and small.
Jo narrows her eyes. “Sure you’ve got everything?”
Hana suppresses a smile. Jo had sent them an exhaustive list of supplies for the trip. Rash guard. Cap. Water shoes. Sunscreen. It went on.
“Of course. I followed the list to the last letter.” Maya winks, catching Hana’s eye.
“All right, let’s go.” The driver is already striding toward the boat.
As Hana climbs aboard, there’s a loud noise. She jumps. Several feet away, teenage boys are plunging into the sea from the wall by the restaurant, shorts billowing up as they plummet. The sharp crack as they smash into the water goes right through her.
“You okay?” Jo takes a seat next to her, tipping her head so it’s close to Hana’s. There’s sympathy in her tone, but it’s touched with something. Annoyance? Frustration?
“Of course. Those kids startled me, that’s all.”
“Are you sure you’re not still—”
“Still what?” Hana asks sharply.
Jo shrugs, but Hana knows what she’s thinking. You’re not still anxious?
Her behavior this past year, her inability to dust herself off and go back to normal, has, in Jo’s eyes, rendered her flawed, broken. And Jo believes that this is in some way her decision, as if by now Hana should have snapped out of it.
It’s what she remembers most about last year, after Liam’s accident. Jo looking at her, not empathizing, but examining, as if she were trying to find a chink in Hana’s grief, some kind of signal that this would only be temporary.
Even now Jo struggles to refer to it, deals in euphemisms instead: after Liam’s “accident” she wanted Hana to quickly be “better.” You could pin a million different woolly words on it, but they all amounted to the same thing: “Get over it.”
The boat pulls away from the jetty with a sudden jerk as it accelerates, and Jo laughs as she’s jolted into Hana, all smiles.
The switch flicked again.
Hana stares at her sister with an intense loathing.
She shouldn’t have come. This was a bad idea.
5
Not far now.” Edd raises his voice above the sound of the engine. “Few minutes, max.”
Hana glances at her watch, the face lightly speckled with sea spray. They’ve been going for more than twenty minutes. She looks back at the beach; the wooden spine of the jetty is barely visible. Already, the hustle and bustle of the mainland seems far away.
Pulling out her phone, Jo gestures with her hand for Hana and Maya to bunch together. “You two, turn to face out to sea.” They oblige, heads gently knocking together as the RIB bounces across the water.
“We’re going to hit the back of the island first,” the driver calls. “Never been anything built on this side. The forest’s too thick.”
Caleb lets out a low whistle. Hana narrows her eyes, feeling a little jolt of anxiety as she takes in the dense wall of foliage. She can tell how dark it would be in there—sunlight watered down to almost nothing where the tree branches curved over one another like laced fingers, obscuring the sky.
“It’s been too long.” Maya turns to Hana. “We’ve been shit at keeping in touch, haven’t we?”
“I know.” Hana observes her cousin. Her face, close up, suddenly unfamiliar. She hadn’t remembered how beautiful Maya is—the wild, curly hair and tan skin, inherited from her Italian mother. Maya looks young still, but perhaps it’s just Hana’s perception—she’ll probably always struggle to see Maya as grown up. Six years younger, for ages Maya was a child, someone Hana looked after. It wasn’t just her personality; there was something uncertain about Maya, as if she wasn’t yet sure about her place in the world. Maya seemed to drift, traveling light, place to place, person to person.
“I shouldn’t say we,” Maya continues. “I’ve been crap at replying.”
“It’s fine,” Hana says, but the words sound flinty, and she makes an effort to soften her tone. “I didn’t expect everyone to keep up the hand-holding.”
Because that’s what Maya did, for months after Liam’s death. The accident had drawn them back together, albeit temporarily. Maya was her rock—quiet, unwaveringly reliable when everyone else returned to their own lives. Even now, Hana’s not sure if the rest of the family got bored or simply forgot, the minutiae of life taking over. It’s been one of the hardest things after his death itself—that feeling of being alone at the time she needed people the most.
“How are you feeling about it all now?” Maya meets her gaze. “Liam . . .”
“I just miss him. I didn’t know it would feel like this, so . . . physical.” She can’t put the bodily sensations into words; the horrible catch in her throat when she sees his side of the bed, the hollow in her chest when she thinks about the future they’ll never have.
Everything they’d lost. Because that’s what grief is: loss.
Hana’s lost it all: Liam’s perpetual five-o’clock shadow, the way he made things come alive, talking about the world so viscerally it was like he was spreading out a map in her head. For Liam, life was one big adventure. Rivers to be kayaked, hills to be biked down. He made the world full of color, and without him it is now dark. She is dark and she doesn’t know how to get back from that.
The driver interrupts her train of thought. “On your left, you’ll see the villas.”
He’s right: nestled in the trees are glimpses of buildings—a right angle of powder-pink against the blue of the sky, a large square of window, sunlight bouncing off the surface.
The retreat is perched high above the beach, a winding set of steps snaking their way up the cliff from the cove beneath. Several large, low-slung buildings are painted in other vivid tones—blues, peach. Just below on the right, slightly offset, is a glass-bottomed pool jutting out over the rocks.
“So what do you reckon?” Seth nudges Caleb. “Bea’s missing out, isn’t she?”
“She is.” Caleb shrugs. “We’ll have to come another time.”
Hana notices Seth’s response to the muted reply: how he’s subtly examining Caleb. He’s clearly discomforted by Caleb’s body language, or rather the lack of it—the fact that he isn’t trying to be matey.
Maya leans in, lowering her voice. “So what do you make of that? When Bea canceled, I thought he would too.”
“You knew she wasn’t coming?” Hana picks up on Maya’s use of the past tense.
“Yes. Jo messaged a few weeks ago.”
Hana nods and it dawns on her that it wasn’t an oversight—Jo not telling her—she withheld the information deliberately so that Hana wouldn’t cancel too. She’s not sure she would have come if she’d known Bea wasn’t—they’d always needed all three of the sisters to balance one another.
Bea and Jo were two extremes—quiet versus loud. Introvert versus extrovert. Academic versus sporty. Hana, in the middle, found that if she was with one without the other it felt wrong, like she was pulled too much to either extreme.
“I’m glad you made it,” Maya says quietly. “I keep thinking, we let the whole promise thing slide, didn’t we?”
The promise: Stick together. Never forget. Hana flinches at the naivete in the phrase. They’d made “the promise” as kids, after the fire at Maya’s house during a family sleepover, a fire that devastated not only their house, but their family too. They’d all managed to escape, except Sofia, Maya’s younger sister. Her room was empty when they searched, so her parents assumed she’d already gone out ahead of them. When they realized she hadn’t, they tried to head back in, but the fire crew stopped them. They were the ones to eventually find her, hidden, frightened, under her bed, but by the time they did her burns were so severe, they led to a devastating stroke. The resulting brain damage and care requirements had proved too much for Maya’s parents, and Sofia now lived in a residential care facility outside of Bristol.
The promise was to stick together, the three sisters and Maya, but their once unshakable bond didn’t survive late adolescence.
“We’re here!” Jo’s already gathering up her bags as the boat approaches the jetty. A member of staff is standing by, holding a tray of juice in tall glasses, the liquid inside a dramatic sunset orange. “Those look incredible—just what we need before kayaking.”
Maya looks at her quizzically. “Kayaking? We’ve only just arrived.”
“I’ve booked us a slot in”—Jo glances at her Fitbit—“half an hour.”
“What about unpacking?”
“I thought everyone would be desperate to get in the water.”
Maya nods, face impassive.
When the boat comes to a stop a few minutes later, Jo’s the first to get out.
Turning, she thrusts out a hand to Hana. “Sorry for what I said, before, asking if you were okay,” she murmurs, helping her up onto the jetty. “I just want this to go well . . .”
There’s a vulnerability in her expression as she searches Hana’s face for a reaction. Jo doesn’t usually do this—show her feelings, let alone apologize—and it makes Hana start to doubt her earlier assumption about the letter she’d found. Maybe this is all it was—an apology for not being around. Nothing more.
But as Jo loops an arm through hers, Hana can’t help but stiffen.
She should know better than to let down her guard.
6
Elin picks halfheartedly at the remaining piece of grilled chicken on her plate before pushing it aside. Although the doors to the restaurant terrace are open, there’s no breeze and the space is packed, only intensifying the heat. Three or four large groups are clustered by the bar, overspill leaking into the seating area.
Will squeezes her hand and Elin smiles. With the sweet-sour tang of wine on her tongue, it feels like their early dates—the ritual and festivity of eating out; the choosing of drinks and food, people watching.
“Hey, budgie alert.” Will points to the doors at the back of the restaurant.
Elin follows his gaze. A man in his sixties is striding up the beach in a green pair of budgie smugglers. It’s her and Will’s in-joke during summer. They’ve become connoisseurs; grading swimwear according to the cut on the butt, waist height, color, transparency.
“What do you reckon? A nine?”
“Nah . . . seven,” she replies, deadpan. “There’s coverage in key areas.”
Will laughs, but as it winds down she senses a tension in his expression. “On a more serious note, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”
She picks up her wineglass. “Sounds ominous.”
“Not really. I wanted to show you this.” Reaching for his phone, he tilts the screen to face her. “Message from Farrah. Says she can’t meet this weekend. Busy at work.”
Farrah, Will’s older sister, works at LUMEN as a manager. Fingers always in each other’s pies—it seemed slightly odd to Elin, too close for comfort, but then that was Will’s family. Constant phone calls and texts.
“And? You’ve said before it’s been hectic this season.”
“I know, but she’s been acting odd recently. Not herself. Mum and Dad said she seemed distracted when she went around there last week. I’ve asked her about it, but you know what she’s like. Never show a weakness.”
What you’re all like, Elin mentally corrects. As a family, while they make a show of their openness—family meetings, heart-to-hearts during lunch—over time she’s learned that the openness is selective. They struggle to reveal anything that puts them at a disadvantage.
“Maybe boyfriend stuff?”
“I don’t think so.” His fingers worry his battered silver ring. “There hasn’t been anyone since Tobias.” He pauses. “I sometimes wonder if she’d confide in someone outside of the family.” He hesitates again and she knows what he’s about to say. “You never did go for that drink, did you?”
She pulls her plate back toward herself slowly, a delay tactic. “Drink?”
“Didn’t Farrah mention it the last time we saw her? You and her?”
Elin nods. She knows she should make an effort but has never quite gotten around to it. It hasn’t been an easy relationship, awkward from the get-go, their first meeting a lunch together, several weeks before she met Will’s parents.
You’ll like her, Will had said, while they waited in the café, teeing her up—she’s sporty and fun like you—but all Elin remembers is Farrah’s assessing gaze, that immediate sense that she’d found something wanting. Elin knew what it was: a message. You’re not right for my brother.
Ever since then, she and Farrah have circled each other warily. They talk a good game: lots of empty promises about meeting up, but it never materializes because she suspects neither of them actually want it to.
