shone through the liquid, bouncing pink crystal shimmers all around them.
‘Everything about this place is special,’ she said. ‘The villa, Ajax, the cocktails, that view … it’s all blissful.’
Winnie had recovered sufficiently to raise her glass and toast the others.
‘To forty-eight hours of secret recipe cocktails and uninterrupted bliss.’
Stella clinked her glass against Winnie’s. ‘I’ll drink to that. And to friendship.’
Frankie nodded solemnly and touched her glass to the others. ‘To us.’
Ajax watched the three women carefully from an upstairs window of the villa, observing the way they laughed together, how they toasted each other, that they were relaxed in each other’s company.
Maybe.
With enough of his secret cocktails and a fractured kaleidoscope of sun-gilded images laid out to seduce them, just maybe.
‘How the shagging hell did this happen?’
Stella looked from Winnie to Frankie clustered around the breakfast bar in her screamingly cool loft apartment. They’d barely sobered up from landing back in England a few hours ago, and reality was sinking in fast. It wasn’t just their hearts that had come home lighter from Skelidos. Their bank accounts were significantly lighter too.
Winnie’s half of the profits from the sale of her beloved house, the one she’d imagined her babies would grow up in.
Stella’s handsome redundancy from Jones & Bow, a chunk of which she’d already earmarked for a world cruise.
Frankie’s nest egg, bequeathed to her by Marcia, the childless elderly neighbour she’d cared for over the last dozen years.
‘Marcia told me that she wanted me to have an adventure,’ Frankie whispered. ‘The very last time we spoke. I didn’t realise that she was leaving the house to me until the solicitor called me in, after she’d … after she’d gone.’
Her neighbour had been more of a surrogate mum, and she’d been aware of Frankie’s deep-seated unhappiness with Gavin for many years. Her gift had been the catalyst for Frankie to finally find the courage to end the marriage her parents had pressured her into as a frightened, pregnant seventeen-year-old. She and Gavin had rubbed along as best they could and the twins had grown up happy and strong as a result, but they were seventeen themselves now and they didn’t need her to wipe their noses or hold their hands when they crossed the road any more. They’d been the reason she’d stayed, and their leaving home had been the reason she’d finally left, too; the reality of living all alone with Gavin had been too much to bear. The boys had filled the silence and the space with noise and clutter: hockey sticks in the hall, muddy football boots in the porch, music too loud in their rooms. Who knew the silence they left behind would be even more deafening? Marcia’s money had allowed Frankie to rent a tiny place all of her own while she considered her next move, somewhere to lie low and lick her wounds, somewhere to spin the globe with her eyes closed and choose an adventure grand enough to warrant Marcia’s approval.
‘Looks like adventure got tired of waiting and came looking for you,’ Winnie said quietly.
All three of them stared at the large white envelope between them on the breakfast bar, and at the bunch of keys resting on top of it. They’d flown to Skelidos in the expectation of a couple of days’ hedonistic escape, and they’d flown home again with the deeds to Villa Valentina in their weekend bag beside the duty-free.
‘God knows what he put in those cocktails,’ Stella said, frowning. ‘He was more hypnotic than Derren sodding Brown.’
Winnie stared at her. ‘You don’t think he slipped us something illegal, do you?’
‘Yes,‘ Stella huffed. ‘He slipped us pipedreams and bare bronzed chests and sand between our toes. He slipped us sunshine on our shoulders and lazy, idyllic afternoons, and he slipped us long starlit evenings drinking cocktails beneath fairy lights strung between pine trees. He slipped us the idea of a perfect life, and we reached out and grabbed it in our pale English hands because we had stressed, lonely and gullible stamped on our foreheads.’
As she spoke she pointed from herself to Frankie and then finally to Winnie. Stressed, lonely and gullible.
‘Well, that’s lovely,’ Frankie frowned, wrapping her hands around her mug of steaming coffee. ‘Anyone would be lonely going from living with my kids to the silence of an empty flat.’
‘At least you got lonely. I got gullible,’ Winnie muttered, twisting the slender wedding band she still wore even though her marriage was all over bar the decree absolute.
‘Ladies, it wasn’t an insult.’ Stella shook her head. ‘We are where we are. Of course you’re lonely, Frank, you’re recovering from years of being needed by a whole bloody cul-de-sac, and Winnie, the fact that you’re still too trusting after what Knobchops did to you is a good thing, not a bad one. And me? I didn’t even have a relationship to break. I pinned years of hopes onto Jones & Bow, and I’ve been left high, dry and stressed to the eyeballs. The truth is that we’re all lonely, and we’re all stressed, and given that we’ve just gone thirds on a bed and breakfast on a Greek island I can’t even remember the name of, we’re all gullible as hell.’
They perched on Stella’s uncomfortably high designer saddle stools and stared at the keys in silence.
‘Skelidos,’ Winnie said, eventually. ‘It’s called Skelidos.’
‘The villa is pretty gorgeous, in its own elegantly shabby way,’ Frankie said, after a while.
‘And the cocktails were world class,’ Stella acknowledged.
They lapsed into silence again.
‘What else were you planning on doing this summer, anyway?’ Winnie asked, the slow tug of a smile lifting the corners of her mouth. She’d made the horrendous decision to move temporarily back home to her parents after her house sold more speedily than anticipated, and she was already heartily sick of her old curfew being unexpectedly back in place because her father liked to lock up before bed at eleven, and of going to sleep staring into the collective soulful eyes of Westlife because her mother refused to allow her to take her old posters down. She loved her parents dearly, but if she didn’t get out of there soon she’d give up, buy a cat, take up macramé and join her mother’s Catherine Cookson Monday-afternoon reading group.
Frankie looked up from her coffee thoughtfully. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘Well, I need a job, a man and a ticket back to normality, asap,’ Stella said.
Winnie nodded slowly. ‘Will a business, a donkey and a ticket back to an island you can’t remember the name of do in the meantime?’
Stella’s expression spoke volumes. ‘A donkey?’
Winnie nodded. ‘It’s in the deeds. Seriously, I’m not even joking. The Fonz comes with the villa.’
‘Don’t
