Page 72 of A Summer Scandal

Vi leaned in and kissed his cheek, saddened beyond words. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’

She got up and walked away, feeling like a cow because she was just as desolate and heartbroken, but over a different man.

Back in Swallow Beach, Lucy and Beau walked barefoot along the damp sand at the water’s edge. They’d had a leisurely lunch at The Swallow, an unofficial date because Beau sensed Lucy pull back every time he moved too close. He was okay with that; he was happy to take it as slow as she needed to, because she was the most interesting woman he’d ever met and he just wanted to be close to her on whatever terms she’d let him in.

Vi made it back to Swallow Beach just after two in the afternoon, her heart both soaring and dipping at the sight of the pier jutting out over the sea. She parked by the promenade and sat for a few minutes in the Traveller, just looking.

She’d gained many things since she’d come here, but she’d lost things too, precious things, parts of herself, and every day the scales seemed to tip further against her. She’d lain awake most of the night, tossing and turning in her childhood bedroom, trying to make sense of everything, to decide what she wanted to do. Stay in Swallow Beach because she had as much right as anyone, and she’d be damned if she’d let herself feel hounded out by the likes of Gladys and Ursula Dearheart? Or sell up and find a new corner of the country that was just hers, some place without ghosts of the past and mermaids on the walls and a man she loved but couldn’t have?

She knew that a wise woman would take option B. She couldn’t go back and live with her parents, but the money from the sale of the apartment would be enough to start again someplace new. Her work was portable. It was just her heart that seemed doggedly rooted here in Swallow Beach. It was wrapped around the black fretwork spindles of the pier, and painted into the intricate scales of the mermaids’ tails, and caught on Cal’s coat sleeves. She wouldn’t run. This place was as much hers as it was anyone else’s. She was going to face up to them all – Gladys, Ursula, Barty, Cal. And first thing on Monday morning she was heading back down to the undertakers armed with both her grandmother’s death certificate and her own birth certificate. She was Violet Spencer, granddaughter of Monica Spencer, and she was damn well going to give her grandmother the funeral she deserved.

‘Hey you.’

Vi was half in the car and half out, reaching across the seats for the handles of her overnight bag. Straightening, she slammed the door and looked at Cal, her eyes scanning the seafront for Ursula.

‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, his dark eyes moving over her face.

‘You look well,’ she said. He did; the Portuguese sun had clearly agreed with him. ‘Good holiday?’

‘It wasn’t a holiday,’ he said.

Vi couldn’t have this conversation. In fact, she found she couldn’t talk to him at all, it was too raw.

‘I need to go,’ she said, locking the Traveller and avoiding his eye. ‘I’ll see you at work.’

‘Wait, Violet,’ he said as she walked away. ‘Please.’

She sighed and swung back around. ‘Wait for what, Cal? For you? What do you want from me?’

He looked as if she’d slapped him. ‘I thought we were friends,’ he said.

‘Fine,’ she sighed, short with him because she couldn’t be anything else without making a fool of herself. ‘We’re friends. There. Happy now? I’ll buy you a pint if I bump into you in the pub, you can help me carry my shopping upstairs. Friends.’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it,’ he said, stepping forward and catching hold of her hand.

She closed her eyes for a second, trying not to feel the warmth and the strength of him, then opened her eyes and looked out to sea.

‘Things have changed for both of us,’ she said, and he stroked his thumb over her knuckles.

‘Look at me, mermaid girl,’ he said, low and intimate, and her treacherous heart twisted in her chest. ‘Things haven’t changed for me.’

‘Really? Because from where I’m standing you’re fresh off a second honeymoon with your wife,’ she said, pulling her hand from his, hot anger stabbing through her veins.

He stared at her. ‘Is that really what you think?’

‘It’s what everyone in Swallow Beach thinks,’ she said, shrill, half laughing so she didn’t cry. ‘Cal and Ursula. You’re practically Romeo and fucking Juliet.’

He flinched, and she turned on her heel and left him standing there on the seafront, marching across the road to the Lido without looking back.

Lucy let herself in through the front door just after five o’clock, sand in her shoes and the taste of Beau’s kiss on her lips.

‘Only me,’ she called upstairs, getting no answer as usual. Heading into the kitchen, she stopped dead at the unexpected sight of a huge bunch of yellow roses on the kitchen table, instantly nauseous.

And then she started to run for the stairs, yelling out for Charlie, her legs not seeming to carry her to his room fast enough. He looked up when she hurtled through his door, pulling his EarPods out and grinning at her.

‘You’re back then,’ he said. ‘How was your not-a-date date?’

Lucy stared at him, barely able to form words because of the sheer relief that he was okay.

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