“Hi! Excuse me! Hold on a minute.” He turns, his smile white in his tanned face, and I plant a hand on his dinghy.

“Could you tell me, do they still hire out boats here? Is this a hire boat?”

“Yes.” He nods. “But you have to get in early. They’re all gone. You could try tomorrow? The list is at the hostel.”

“I see.” I pause, then add plaintively, “The trouble is, we’re here only today. My husband and I. It’s our honeymoon. And we really did want a boat.”

I’m silently willing him to be gallant and offer us his boat. But he doesn’t. He just keeps pushing it out into the water and says pleasantly, “That’s tough.”

“The thing is, this is very special to us,” I explain, splashing after him. “We really, really wanted to go sailing. We wanted to visit this tiny secret cove we used to know.”

“The little cove that way?” He gestures round the headland.

“Yes!” I say. “Do you know it?”

“You don’t need to sail there.” He looks surprised. “You can get to it via the walkway.”

“The walkway?”

“It’s farther inland.” He points. “A big wooden walkway. They built it a few years ago. Opened up the whole area.”

I stare at him in horror. They built a walkway to the secret cove? This is desecration. It’s a travesty. I’m going to write a furious letter to … someone. It was our secret. It was supposed to stay secret. How are we supposed to have sex there now?

“Everyone goes there?”

“Oh yeah. It’s quite popular.” He grins. “Between you and me, it’s where people go to skin up.”

Skin up? I stare at him in even greater horror. Our perfect, romantic, idyllic cove is now Drug Central?

I rub my face, trying to adjust to this new, grim picture.

“So … there’ll be people there now?”

“Oh yeah. There was a party there last night. They’ll all be asleep now, though. See you.” He pushes off and unfurls his sail.

That’s it, then. Our whole plan, ruined. I paddle back through the shallows to where Ben is standing.

“It was so perfect,” I say in despair. “And now they’ve ruined it. I can’t bear it. I mean, look.” I gesture wildly. “It’s hideous! It’s a hellhole!”

“For God’s sake, Lottie!” says Ben, a little impatiently. “You’re overreacting. We used to party on the beach, remember? We used to leave rubbish around. Arthur was always complaining.”

“Not used condoms.”

“We probably did.” He shrugs.

“No, we didn’t!” I retort indignantly. “I was on the pill!”

“Oh.” He shrugs again. “I forgot.”

He forgot? How could you forget whether you used condoms or not with the love of your life?

I want to say, If you really loved me, you’d remember we didn’t use condoms, but I bite my tongue. An argument about condom use is not what you want on your honeymoon. Instead, I hunch my shoulders and stare mournfully out to sea.

I’m so disappointed, I want to cry. This is so absolutely not what I imagined. I suppose, to be honest, I didn’t imagine anyone on the beach at all. I imagined that we’d have it totally to ourselves. We would run over the deserted sand and leap through the foamy surf, landing in a perfect embrace while violins played. So maybe that was a tad unrealistic. But this is the opposite extreme.

“Well, what shall we do?” I say at last.

“We can still enjoy ourselves.” Ben pulls me close and gives me a kiss. “It’s good to be back, anyway, isn’t it? Still the same sand. Still the same sea.”

“Yes.” I gratefully sink into his kiss.

“Still the same Lottie. Same sexy shorts.” His hands cup my bum, and I feel a sudden urge to reclaim at least some of my fantasy.

“Remember this?” I give him my bag to hold. I take a deep breath, preparing myself, then give a light hop and a skip and launch into what is supposed to be a flawless series of cartwheels down the beach.

Ow. Oof.

Argh. Shit. My head.

I don’t know what happened, except my arms buckled beneath my weight, and there were a few shouts of alarm around me, and I landed hard on my head. Now I’m sprawled in an ungainly position on the sand, my breath coming short in shock.

My arm is throbbing in pain and my mind is throbbing in humiliation. I can’t do cartwheels anymore? When did that happen?

“Sweets.” Ben approaches, looking embarrassed. “Don’t do yourself an injury.” His gaze shifts to my shorts. “Slight accident, I think?”

I follow his gaze and feel a fresh jolt of dismay. There’s a rip in my tie-dye shorts. I’ve split them, in the worst possible place. I want to die.

Ben hauls me to my feet, and I rub my arm, wincing. I must have twisted it or something.

“You OK?” says a nearby girl in denim shorts and a bikini top, who looks about fifteen. “You need to take off with a bit more spring. Like this.” She throws herself lightly over and performs a perfect cartwheel, followed by a roundoff.

Bitch.

“Thanks,” I mutter. “I’ll bear that in mind.” I take my bag back from Ben and there’s an awkward silence. “So … what shall we do?” I say at last. “Check out the cove?”

“I need some coffee,” says Ben firmly. “And I want to see the guest house, don’t you?”

“Of course!” I feel a last flicker of hope. Even if the beach is ruined, the guest house may not be. “Only, you go first up the steps,” I add.

If my shorts are split, I’m not having him behind me.

I don’t know if it’s the cartwheel fiasco or maybe my heart monitor at the gym has been lying to me, but I’m not as fit as I thought I was. And 113 steps is a lot of steps. I find myself grabbing on to the handrail and using it to haul myself upward, and I’m glad Ben can’t see me. I’m hot in the face, and my hair has escaped from its elastic, and I’m puffing in a deeply non-sexy way. The sun is starting to glare down, so I’m avoiding looking upward, but as we near the top I glance up and blink in surprise. There’s a figure silhouetted against the top of the cliff. A girl.

“Hello there!” she calls down in an English accent. “Are you guests?”

She’s a stunning girl, I realize as I get higher. With quite an extraordinary chest. All the clichés are springing to my mind. Her boobs look like two brown moons straining against her strappy white tank top. No, two brown lively puppies. Even I’m so fascinated I want to touch them. She’s leaning over to greet us as we stumble upward, and I can see right into the cavernous depths of her cleavage.

Which means Ben can too.

“Well done!” she laughs as we eventually reach the top. I’m panting so hard I can’t speak. Nor can Ben, but he looks as if he’s trying to convey something to me—or is it to the extraordinarily shaped girl?

It’s to the extraordinarily shaped girl.

“Fucking hell!” he manages at last—and he sounds absolutely stunned. “Sarah!”


22

LOTTIE

My mind is a whirl. I don’t know what to focus on. I don’t know where to start.

First of all, there’s the guest house. How can it be so different from the way I remember? Everything is smaller and shabbier and kind of less iconic. We’re sitting on the veranda, which is far less impressive than I remember and has been painted in a quite revolting beige color that’s peeling away in strips. The olive grove is just a scrubby patch of ground with a few sparse trees. The view is good, but no different from any other Greek island view.

And Arthur. How could I have been impressed by him? How could I have sat at his feet, lapping up his pearls of wisdom? He’s not wise. He’s not a sage. He’s a seventy-something alcoholic lech.

He’s tried to grope me twice already.

“Don’t come back,” he’s saying, waving his roll-up in the air. “I tell all you young people. Don’t revisit. Youth is still where you left it, and that’s where it should stay. What are you returning for? Anything that was worth taking on life’s journey, you’ll already have taken with you.”

“Dad.” Sarah rolls her eyes. “Enough already. They did come back. And I’m glad they did.” She twinkles at Ben. “You were just in time. We’ve sold up. We’re leaving next month. More coffee?”

As she leans over to pour the coffee, I can’t help staring. Up close, she isn’t any less extraordinarily shaped. Everything about her is sheeny and silky, and her breasts are straining against her tank top as though they’re in breast-yoga class and are showing off in front of everybody.

And this is the other reason that my mind is in a whirl. Several reasons, in fact. Number one: she’s gorgeous. Number two: it’s quite clear that she and Ben had some whole history here at the guest house before I even arrived. They keep alluding to it and laughing and changing the subject. Number three: there’s a spark between them still. If I can see it, surely they can see it? Surely they can feel it? What does it mean?

What does any of it mean?

I take my coffee from Sarah with trembling hands. I thought coming back here to the guest house would be the glorious finale to our honeymoon, where all the threads would come together in a big satisfying knot. Instead, it feels as though all sorts of bright new threads have appeared and nothing is tied up at all. Especially Ben. He feels like he’s unraveling away from me. He won’t meet my eye, and when I put my arm around him, he shrugged it off. I know Sarah saw, because she tactfully turned away.

“We get old.” Arthur is still on his rant. “Life gets in the way of dreams. Dreams get in the way of life. That’s the way it’s always been. Anyone want a Scotch?” He brightens suddenly. “Sun’s over the yardarm, Greek time.”

“I’ll have a Scotch,” replies Ben, to my dismay. What’s he doing? It’s eleven in the morning. I don’t want him to start sinking into glasses of Scotch. I shoot him a Is that really a good idea, darling? look, and he sends me back a glare, which I have a horrible feeling means, Butt out and stop trying to run my life.