believe that we have already established that I was hardly in a position to phone you or to send many text messages.’
The dry, slightly mocking words only added to the already strung-out way she was feeling, knocking her over from irritation into full-blown exasperation.
‘When you were captured originally, perhaps! But you got away from them. That same week, if I have it right. And after that? There are two whole years with not a word, not a message. Nothing to let me know that you were still alive.’
‘Perhaps that’s because I didn’t know that I was.’
‘What…? What do you mean? That doesn’t make sense.’
But even as she asked the questions Zarek moved at last, getting to his feet and prowling restlessly across the room to stand by the window, staring out at the now moonlit waves. And as she saw his hand come up to rub at his head, at the ugly scar that marked his temple, she felt her heart thud just once, hard and cruel, at the reminder that he had been literally just inches away from death. How long it would have taken him to recover from that she had no idea.
‘I mean that for a long time even I did not know who I was,’ Zarek said, still not looking at her so that he didn’t see the way that her hands had gone to her mouth as if she could wish her foolish words back. ‘When I hit the sea I had already blacked out. I have no idea how long I drifted. I was just lucky that I was eventually picked up by a man in his yacht. He took me back to his home in Malta.’
‘Malta!’
Penny felt she might choke on the word. Was that where Zarek had been all this time? When she had been imagining all sorts of horrors, the thought of his lifeless body tossed into the ocean with a bullet in his head, he had been on that beautiful Mediterranean island.
So near and yet so far.
And what had he been doing all that time while she had been left stranded, neither a wife nor a widow? Not knowing whether to mourn him or to wait for him.
‘Don’t they have phones in Malta? Writing paper? Envelopes? A post office?’
That brought Zarek swinging round to face her, a faintly wry smile twisting his beautiful mouth in his shadowed face. That smile twisted a knife in her insides with its memory of how he had once looked, in the early days of their marriage, when he had been smiling at something she had said.
‘I wouldn’t have known who to contact. At the start, when I was unconscious and ill from exposure, I had no identification on me, no way of anyone knowing who I was. And when I did come round, I was no help.’
‘Oh, come on…’ Penny began, but then the full impact of just what he had said hit home to her and the words faded into nothing as her mind reeled in shock. ‘Do you mean…? Are you saying…?’
‘I’m saying I had amnesia—the wound on my head—the shock—exposure—any of it could all have caused it or added to the effect—but I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I knew I was alive—I was male and…’
He threw up his hands in a gesture expressing resigned acceptance of defeat.
‘That was it. So I couldn’t help anyone by telling them who I was or who might be looking for me. I didn’t know if I was married or single. If I had any family and where they were. I spoke English—that was what my rescuer spoke to me—but not Maltese. I also spoke French, Greek, Italian—so in which of those countries did I look for any clues?’
‘Amnesia…’
Penny could only echo the word in a sense of shock and bewilderment. It was so obvious now that she knew. It explained so many things, which was a relief.
And it also took away that feeling of outraged injustice at the thought that she had been left abandoned, suffering the torment of believing him dead when all the time he had been alive and well and living in Malta.
Suddenly it was as if that sense of outrage had been all that had been holding her upright. As if the removal of the indignation had been like tugging a rug from under her feet, throwing her totally off balance. Was it possible that her own lingering anger and hurt at all that she had found out about him just before he had left for the Troy had coloured her judgement, making her see hurts where none was intended, cruelty where he had never planned any?
But all the same he had come back to the island incognito, if not in disguise. He had come in secret, concealed behind the big beard, the long hair. And he had set himself to watch her, to observe what she was doing. For how long? Just how many days—weeks—had he been there?
‘Wh-when did you start to remember things?’
‘Only slowly. I’m not sure if I fully recall everything yet. For perhaps the first year I didn’t know anything. But occasionally I would have flashes of memory or dreams—’
He broke off abruptly as an unexpected sound interrupted his words. A sound that made Penny blush and made a rare, stunningly genuine smile of real amusement cross his face.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’ It was an attempt at distraction, one that didn’t work as her empty stomach growled again, more loudly this time.
‘Are you hungry?’
It was so long—too long—since she’d seen that teasing smile on his face. And having seen it resurface, she felt she would do anything to keep it there. There had once been a time when they were happy together, even if, underneath it all, Zarek had only been pretending.
‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘No—a lot…’
It was the first time she had sounded genuine, unconstrained, since she had leapt from the bed as if all the hounds of hell were after her, Zarek reflected. The first time she had sounded at all like the woman—little more than a girl—that he had married. And she pressed her hands to her belly as if somehow she could silence the growl of hunger that sounded once again.
‘Me too, now,’ he admitted, finding he could say it to this softer, younger-looking Penny. ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’
‘Neither have I.’
She said it with a sort of astonishment that made him smile at her obvious sudden self-discovery.
‘I didn’t manage anything this morning because—the meeting was on my mind. And since then, well…’she shrugged, her expression becoming almost shame-faced ‘…things rather intervened.’
‘They did. For me too.’
It seemed ridiculous to be having this rather inane conversation about food in the darkness of the late evening in the silence of the big house. Especially in the heated atmosphere that had been boiling between them earlier. But privately Zarek found that he was admitting he was actually rather enjoying it. It was a relief to have a slight lull in the tension and abrasive aggression of the rest of the day. The constant need to keep his focus on what was being said and how it was being expressed. After his investigations of the past weeks, the sense of always looking over his shoulder had become so much a part of his life that he was glad to let it drop for a while.
And not just in the time since he had rediscovered who he was. The worst thing about
