stared at him warily. Better he thought her a martyr. ‘Some lessons take longer to learn than others.’
She shrugged off the comment and the conversation. ‘So … what did you do after we went our separate ways?’
Marc made busy with the sloshing. ‘Kept a low profile.’
Super-low. He might as well not have existed. Which was pretty much what she’d asked of him.
He’d walk through fire if you asked him to …
‘The national skills shortage hit during my summer job up north, right after graduation, and suddenly I was pulling in a small fortune for an eighteen-year-old. It set me up beautifully to buy an old charter boat the next year and refurbish it during the off-season. Now I have three.’
‘So it worked out okay, then—even though you didn’t make it to uni?’ Relief washed through her.
His smile wasn’t kind. ‘Trying to decide how high up the list you need to put me?’
Her make-good list. If she was going to finish the job she’d come for, she had to be thorough. Confession time. She found his eyes and held them, took a deep breath. ‘Top half.’
‘Sorry?’
She cleared her thick throat. ‘You asked earlier which half of my list you were in. I just wanted you to know you were in the top half.’ She clenched her hands. ‘High in the top half.’
His next words were cautious. Almost unwillingly voiced. ‘You seriously have a list?’
She nodded.
His brows dropped. ‘Why?’
Panic surged through her. What a stupid question not to have anticipated. She swallowed hard. ‘Self improvement.’
His frown looked like doubt. But he let it pass. ‘How high was I?’
Somewhere off in the dunes, a bird of prey shrieked out across the night. Her voice, when it came, was hushed. Quiet enough that he’d have to hear her heart pounding. ‘The top. Number one.’
It took a lot to shock Marc Duncannon. But she managed to pull it off. He had a few goes at answering before coherent words came out of his gaping mouth. ‘I’m the first person you’ve come to find?’
Shaking her head made thick cords of salty dark hair, still a tiny bit damp from her dunking earlier, swing around her face. It had to suffice as a screen. ‘Actually, you’re the last.’
‘But did you just say—’
‘Top of my list, yes, but the hardest. I left you till last.’
God. Would he realise what that meant? It was screamingly obvious, surely? The silence was almost material. Even the whale seemed to hold her breath. Emotion surged through his eyes like the waves battering them both. Hope, hurt, anger … Then, finally, nothing. A vacant, careful void.
‘You’ve held onto those memories all this time?’
Her stomach sank. ‘Haven’t you?’
He looked away and when his eyes returned to hers they were kindly. Too kindly. ‘No.’
No? Beth blinked.
‘Give yourself a break, Beth. We were kids.’
His unconcerned words struck like a sea snake. Bad enough to have sabotaged for nothing the only relationship of her life that meant something to her. Now she’d wasted years of angst, endured a mountain of guilt. and it had barely registered on his emotional radar.
‘Losing our friendship meant nothing?’
He sighed. ‘What do you want me to say, Beth? It cut deep at the time but everything worked out. Life goes on.’
Mortification streaked through her. She stared at his carefully neutral face. Maybe Janice had been right? Cut free of her, Marc had gone on to make a success of his life—not what he’d always told her he would do but then how many of her school mates had ever actually grown up to do what they imagined they’d do for the rest of their lives? She certainly hadn’t. While she was literally drowning in her regrets, Marc had rebounded and done a fine job of getting by without her.
Everything she’d been through. For nothing?
‘Beth?’
She shot her hand up and turned away from his indifference. She tossed her tattered whale-washer ashore and turned to wade out into the deep, dark water. The only place she could go. To let her heart weep in private. She pushed her legs angrily through the water for a few steps and let the angry ache fill her focus.
‘Beth!’
She wanted to keep walking, to show him he meant as little to her as, apparently, she did to him. But she just wasn’t that good a liar. She turned when the water was thigh high.
‘Not in the water, ‘ he urged. ‘Not at night. Go up on the beach.’
Screw you. ‘Why not?’
‘Sharks will be drawn by the dead calf. They’re more active at night. We shouldn’t go in deeper than our knees.’
She practically flew back to the shallows. Survival before dignity. Marc didn’t say anything further. It took her several minutes walking down the beach to reach a place she felt was sufficiently dark and safe. Safe from the dune snakes. Safe from the whale-eating sharks. Safe from Marc Duncannon and his awful neutrality.
She sank down onto the sand and let the tremors come.
Her life had changed direction that day behind the library and it had changed again eight years later and this man was central to both. A man who was so entirely unaffected by what had happened to them back at school.
Deep breathing helped. Plunging her bare toes into sand that was still warm from the day helped. Closing her eyes and imagining she was anywhere else but here helped.
Whatever it took to fool her body into thinking it wasn’t facing an unbearable amount of pressure. Something she wasn’t really used to having to face. As a rule, a drunk body didn’t care what was going on around it. And she’d been drunk for the better part of eight years. Even when she wasn’t.
In the early months of her marriage, she’d walked a careful line with Damien and his rapidly developing fondness for the bottle, keeping him just shy of the point where he liked to express his drunken feelings with his fists. But that line quickly got too hard to predict and so it was just easier to give in. To tumble behind him into the abyss where he was happiest and she was safest. The help she might have had evaporated. Friends. Her parents. They’d all stopped trying after her repeated assurances she was fine.
Why wouldn’t they? She was Beth. Beth didn’t make mistakes. But Beth—as it turned out—was a gifted and convincing liar.
By the time they’d realised she wasn’t fine, she was well and truly sunk. After a while, she didn’t even hate it. The abyss was a pleasantly blur-edged
