‘What on earth is going on?’ Ellen, Marvin’s mother, asks angrily when I wander out on to the patio outside the dining room.
The sun is coming up over the horizon and its heat on my skin is like a warm bath after a long trip to the Arctic. I have spent the night holding Nia while she sobbed. She couldn’t speak, just cry. I hushed her, hugged her, tried to think of a way to make it right.
Now she is asleep and I need to move my body, to feel the sun on my skin to feel alive again. Part of the patio has a large corrugated roof, and part of it is exposed to the sun. Jake sits at the end that is exposed, staring at the sea and taking sips from a bottle of beer.
‘I have just spent the whole night sitting with my sobbing son,’ Ellen says, the anger still soaking her voice. I would be as angry as her if my child was in the state he was in, and I had no idea why. ‘Marvin couldn’t speak for crying, and every time I tried to leave him he started wailing. Actually wailing. I had to tuck him up in my bed and he’s only just cried himself to sleep.
‘On top of all that, I have no idea where Andrew is. Your staff refuse to answer any questions and keep offering me cups of tea. And your husband hasn’t said a word in the half an hour I’ve been out here. What is going on?’
I drop into a chair facing the ocean, and throw my head back, trying to stretch my poor aching neck muscles.
‘Has everyone around here taken leave of their senses?’ Ellen asks.
‘We need to find Drew,’ I say. ‘Once we do, we can sit down and talk about what to do next.’
‘What to do next?’ Ellen comes to stand in front of me. ‘Has something happened with your daughter and my son?’
‘We need to find Drew,’ I repeat quietly. ‘Then we can all talk.’
‘Why do you say Andrew’s name like that?’ Ellen asks.
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’ve known him from before today. Nobody shortens his name – he doesn’t like it. But you do it as if you’ve been given permission.’
I frown at her. Maybe she has blanked it out of her head. Twenty-four years is a long time. Maybe she has truly forgotten how she helped Drew leave here, how she had this place robbed. I suppose she had to have forgotten all about that to be able to come back here and act normally. ‘When we find Drew, we can all sit down and talk,’ I repeat.
‘I’m right here,’ he says from the doorway that leads into the dining room.
My stomach flips at his voice, at his arrival. Drew used to frighten me. I can admit that, now I know he is alive. I seemed to have forgotten that over the years of missing him. Over the years when he was dead to me, I tended to focus on remembering the good things about him. Every time something bad about his behaviour came up in my memory, I would shy away from it, bury it, pretend it wasn’t as horrible as it was.
Yes, he was nice most of the time, and I loved him no matter what. But when it was bad, it was horrific. And it would have got worse. I can admit that now, too. I had put all those worries about his treatment of me to one side, especially when I found out I was pregnant and in the run-up to the wedding, because I didn’t want to let anyone down. I wanted to believe that he would change once we were married and he’d become a dad. But he probably wouldn’t have. Actually, he probably would have become more terrifying, once marriage and a baby had made it harder for me to leave him.
‘Stay well away from me,’ Jake warns from his place at the end of the patio, without looking around. ‘Well away.’
‘Where have you been?’ Ellen asks Drew.
‘Trying to clear my head,’ he says to her. He definitely talks differently to her. He doesn’t seem to be as confident and sure of himself with her. I can’t imagine him ever screaming at her that he’d make her sorry if he ever caught her even looking at another man.
‘Right, now we are all here, would someone mind telling me what is going on?’ Ellen says as she takes a seat on the opposite side of the patio.
‘It’s all right, you can drop the act now,’ I tell her. ‘You can stop pretending.’
‘Stop pretending about what exactly?’ she says icily.
‘Drew told me how you paid a couple of local boys to rob this place to get his passport back all those years ago.’
‘I did what?’ she says. She turns to her husband who is still standing by the doorway to the dining room. ‘I did what?’ she repeats, raising her voice.
‘Tessa has got it mixed up,’ Drew says quickly. ‘Totally mixed up.’
‘What about the part where Jake tried to kill you? Did I get that mixed up too?’ I ask him.
‘Is that what you told her?’ Jake says, shaking his head without taking his eyes off the sea. ‘You’re creative, I’ll give you that.’
‘You, shush,’ Ellen says to Jake. ‘We are talking about me.’ She looks at her husband again. ‘I did what?’
Morning heat is my favourite type of warmth. It feels like someone is turning on the sun like they would an oven, getting it ready to do everything it needs to that day. I close my eyes, heavy and gritty as they are, lift my face to the sun, and wait for Drew to speak.
Of course he doesn’t. Coward that he is.
‘I need someone to start at the beginning and tell me exactly what is going on,’ Ellen eventually says. ‘I will not be held responsible if someone doesn’t start talking.’
‘Twenty-four years ago,’ I say, ‘I was meant to get married on the beach here. During the wedding, a little boy was washed out to sea and my husband-to-be, his best man and a couple of members of staff ran into the water to rescue him. The boy was saved, but my husband-to-be was killed.’
‘Oh my, that is awful. I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘But what has this got to do with anything, particularly why I have been up all night with my crying son?’
‘I was meant to be marrying Drew. Sorry, Andrew.’
Ellen’s eyes widen in shock. ‘How can that be? I met him twenty-four years ago,’ she says. ‘First of all at that quaint little village market, and then he came to visit me at my hotel. A couple of days after that, he moved hotels and checked in at the same place where I was staying. He said he couldn’t stand to be away from me.’
‘And you were the most beautiful woman he had ever met – your destiny was shaped by the stars?’ I ask.
‘He said all those things to you too?’ Ellen replies.
I nod.
‘You’re making it sound calculated,’ Drew says. ‘It wasn’t like that. Not at all. I loved you.’ He looks at me when he says this. ‘I love you.’ He looks at Ellen when he says that. ‘Those words are the only way I can express myself.’
‘Are we supposed to forget that you faked your own death to get out of marrying Tessa?’ Jake adds. ‘Or that, apparently, I tried to kill you?’
‘And I don’t understand about me paying someone to break into this place?’ Ellen adds. ‘The first time I heard of Bussu Bay was when Marvin said he was getting married here. I told him and Nia that I had been to Ghana once. That I’d met Andrew there. But I’d never heard of this place. I was surprised how close it was to that hotel I stayed in.’
‘You mean, when Drew managed to survive Jake’s murder attempt at sea, you didn’t take him in at your hotel and let him hide out in your room? And you didn’t then plot to get his passport back by paying a couple of local boys to turn over the place?’ I say. I knew it was nonsense, but Drew always had a way of planting that little seed of doubt in my mind.
‘I wouldn’t even know where to start with something like that!’ Ellen replies. ‘I was here on a modelling assignment. I met Andrew the one morning I ventured out to the market. The rest of the time I spent at the hotel. So shoot me, I like being near a pool, I like my drinks served cold and I like reclining on a sun lounger.
‘Drew joined me at the hotel after a couple of days. Although, thinking about it now, I do remember him saying he’d left his passport behind so he had to go back to his original hotel. I did think it odd that he had a bonfire on the beach a couple of nights later. And he borrowed money to change his plane ticket, so he could get the same flight home as me.’
Oh my God. ‘You broke in here, didn’t you?’ I say to Drew. ‘You stole all our ID and you burned it. You trapped us here. You made our nightmare worse, just so you could get close to Ellen.’
‘It took weeks to sort that mess out,’ Jake says. ‘New passports and tickets and cancelling cards. You did that to us? Just so you could go off with another woman.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ Drew insists. ‘I felt trapped. It was all happening so fast. I was so young and I was being forced to get married.’
‘Drew, I didn’t want to get married. It was all you talked about, right from when we met. You gave me that terrible choice – either we got married and had a baby, or you would leave me. I was so in love with you back then that I went along with it. I didn’t want any of it.’
‘He told me that you were threatening to dump him if he didn’t marry you,’ Jake states. ‘That was why I stepped aside – you wanted to marry him.’
‘He told me that he’d never wanted to marry anyone before,’ Ellen tells us. ‘We married within two months of getting home.’
‘Because I love you,’ Drew protests.
‘I seriously doubt that,’ Jake says. ‘I’m guessing Ellen’s family are rich? Like you thought Tessa’s family were rich because they’d built a hotel?’
‘What?’ Ellen and I ask at the same time.
‘You like money, don’t you, Drew?’ Jake says. ‘You especially like women with money or access to family money.’
‘You know nothing about me,’ Drew tells Jake.
Jake laughs. ‘What’s to know? You’re a liar. My guess is that when Nia and Marvin said where they were getting married and that her mum owned the place, you realised Nia was Tessa’s daughter. You couldn’t get out of coming to the wedding, so you came up with some story about me trying to kill you. Hoping that would convince Tessa to keep it quiet to protect you both.’
‘You know nothing about it,’ Drew spits.
‘It’s so obvious: you met Ellen and realised she was from money, and decided to get out of marrying Tessa. What was the original plan, eh, Drew? Disappear into the bush one night, never to be heard from again? You must have been over the moon when that boy ended up in the sea and it gave you a chance to disappear. I bet you didn’t even try to save him; you just went off in that direction and then headed off when we were all distracted.’
‘Shut up,’ Drew replies.
‘What I don’t get is how you thought you’d get away with it now we’re all together here?’ Jake says. ‘Did you really think you’d be able to keep us all apart? Didn’t you think we’d talk about it? This is all so Drew. You think the world will let you get away with anything and everything. And it does for a while. But not for ever. Never for ever.’
‘Just shut up,’ Drew repeats.
Ellen, who has been silent, cuts in: ‘What has any of this got to do with why my son is so upset? I mean, it’s all shocking and everything for everyone here, but the important person in all of this is my son. Why is Marvin so distraught?’
‘I was pregnant when I was meant to be getting married,’ I say to her. She can join up the dots from there.
‘So what? I was pregnant too, when I …’ Her voice trails away when the realisation hits her. ‘Nia is your daughter?’ Ellen asks Drew.
He does not reply; he simply continues to lean against the doorway.
‘Yes, Nia is his daughter. Which means …’
‘Does Marvin know this?’ Ellen demands. ‘Is this why he was so distressed?’ She stands up. ‘My poor baby. I must go to him.’
Drew points a finger at Ellen, then jabs it towards her chair. ‘Sit down. No one’s going anywhere until we work out how we’re going to manage this mess.’
‘I’m going to my son – he needs me,’ Ellen replies.
‘Ellen, so help me, I’ll—’
‘You’ll what, Andrew?’ she says, turning on him. ‘You’ll stop living off my father’s money? You’ll go out into the real world, and try to find another job where everyone around you has to keep correcting your mistakes without complaining because you’re married to the boss’s daughter? You’ll give up your nice little sports car? You’ll move out of our house and spend years fighting me in court for access to my money? What will you do exactly, Andrew?’
He says nothing now that she has shown him quite clearly how much she rules things. That is why he speaks to her differently – she is in control of their relationship. She is in control because she can take away his luxury lifestyle whenever she wants and he knows that. ‘Andrew, my son will always come before anyone on this Earth, including you.’
Drew lowers his head for a moment.
‘And, please note, I said “my” son. Have you never noticed that I always say “my son”?’
‘What does that mean?’ Drew asks.
‘I was pregnant when we met.’
Drew shakes his head. ‘No you weren’t.’
‘Yes, I was. I was in that market that day to find some ginger to help with morning sickness. One of the maids at the hotel told me it would help because I seemed to develop it from day one. I was having an affair with the photographer from the shoot. But he was married and wanted nothing to do with me. Then you showed up. You were my type, and I knew you would never be able to tell the difference. You weren’t interested in anything other than getting away from Ghana. And, after that, you weren’t interested in anything but my family’s money. Which was perfect for me, really, because I could do whatever I wanted without any interference from you.’
My heart leaps in my chest. It’s OK. Nia and Marvin aren’t related. They aren’t brother and sister.
‘It’s not true,’ Drew says.
‘Oh yes it is,’ Ellen replies. ‘Marvin is not your son. Which means he is not Nia’s brother. Which means they can get married as planned.’
‘Oh thank you!’ I cry, jumping to my feet. ‘I have to tell Nia. Thank you so much!’
‘My pleasure,’ she replies. ‘Oh, and Andrew, you had better find somewhere else to sleep. I do not want to see your face again for the next few days.’