Page 112 of The Heir Apparent
When I switched my phone back on, there was a message from James:How was the flight?
Good, I wrote back.One leg down, two to go.
I’ll be there to pick you up when you get home.
Once I landed in Hobart, James would take me to his farm so I could lie low for a couple of weeks. Then I would need to find myself a flat so I could resume my residency in the new year. Ben, terse but efficient over email, had quietly settled things with the hospital so that I could return. I couldn’t wait to wear scrubs, my hair frizzy and tied in a knot at the crown of my head, my well-trained hands finally occupied again.
I wandered the terminal for a while. When I passed a food court, I was surprised to find that I was famished. For months I’d been so nauseous and panicked that I couldn’t bear the thoughtof eating, but the scent of dumplings and barbecued pork was so dizzying that I immediately walked up to a stall and ordered a wonton soup, an egg tart and a milk tea.
I sat and ate my meal while people rushed around me. Not since I woke up on the boat all those years ago had I felt quite so alone. But this time, I was unafraid.
I wondered what would happen if I called Jack. I had considered making contact over the last few weeks as things fell apart. I had typed out, and then deleted, countless apologies for everything I had done—the lies I had told, the truths I had withheld, the way I’d concealed my heart for fear he might refuse it. But it had been five months since we last spoke and, if he’d moved on, I knew the most loving thing I could do was to leave him alone.
As I finished my soup and pushed back the bowl, my phone rang, and it was Mary. Only a handful of people had my new number, and she was one of them.
“Did you get in okay?” she asked.
“All fine. Any updates at your end?”
She hesitated. “Yes. I’m afraid so. Richard’s been calling journalists again,” Mary said. “I’m not sure if you remember Posey Habsburg-Mollard from thePost? She was a favourite of your father’s.”
“How could I forget?”
“Yes, well, she called me this morning to say she’d received the most bizarre tip about you,” Mary said. “It sounds like Richard called her very late last night, sounding worse for wear, and told her she should be digging into the death of Princess Isla. He gave her Davide Rossi’s name and said he holds the key to everything.”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “Oh, Richard.”
“Yes,” Mary said. “You did warn him. But men like him simply must have the last word, I suppose.”
I looked around the terminal at the weary travellers. Some were staring into their steaming bowls of soup, others weregazing out the windows while a plane trundled down the runway.
“So we go with plan B then?” I said quietly.
Mary and I had spoken in code as we plotted my escape. Plan A would see me divulge my own secrets as I excised myself from the line. Plan B was something else altogether.
“Yes.” Mary paused again. “Are you scared?”
I thought for a while. “I was. But I don’t think I am anymore.”
After I visited Annabelle, I had determined that the only way I could fix my life was to go back to the moment when everything broke. Davide Rossi’s voice had haunted me for more than a decade, so I called him up from my bed in Scotland, gripping the witch marks to my chest with trembling fingers.
He had seemed utterly unsurprised to hear from me, chatting as if we were old friends. He told me there were too many tourists in Rapallo now, so he had moved further south, where he planned to spend the rest of his days fishing in the Gulf of Poets and watching his grandchildren grow up.
“Do you ever think about that night?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “I see you in the magazines, and I remember when I found you on that boat, looking at me with your big eyes—so young, so afraid, just a girl who lost her mama.”
Tears had blurred my vision as I remembered how it felt to be caught in the bright white beam of his navigation lights.
“The agreement you signed with my father is still binding, you know. If you speak, the lawyers for his estate could sue you.”
“I see,” he said in a way that suggested he saw but didn’t particularly care. He knew he’d caught a big fish, and now he had me wriggling and gasping in the belly of his boat. Richard would pay him to speak, or I would pay him to stay quiet. Either way, he stood to benefit.
“Aren’t you worried that everyone will be angry with you if they find out?” I asked. “They’ll blame me and my father, butthey’ll blame you too. They’ll reopen investigations. Journalists will follow you and your family everywhere. You’ll have money, yes, but you’ll have a lot of troubles as well.”
I heard the flinty scrape of a cigarette lighter before he sighed. “I don’t look forward to losing my quiet life. But it seems to me,carina, that no one knows what you did and yet you still have many troubles, don’t you?”
I needed a couple of days to decide what to do, so I had promised to call him back. All it would take was a cash donation from Vikki and a fresh non-disclosure agreement in my name, and then Davide Rossi could recede to the dark edges of my subconscious forever. But on the night of my reception at the palace, I had finally understood that my secrets would always find a way of resurfacing. It would be a matter of months or years, and then I would be gripped by panic again, engaging lawyers and writing cheques, desperately trying to push everything back down. When Amira and I returned to Cumberland 1 that night, we had crawled into my bed and whispered in the dark about what we should do with our lives.
