Perfect Strangers: an unputdownable read full of gripping secrets and twists. Erin Knight
of Coast, one of the harbour’s many eateries jostling for position beneath an intense blue sky. It was almost too bright to look outside, but still she watched.
Come back refreshed, Isobel. Renewed! Uncle Keith’s job offer will still be here waiting for you. You were wasted in teaching anyway, love. Her mum had jollied this encouraging prospect around a chewed lip while they’d all pretended that proofreading orders of services at Uncle Keith’s printers wasn’t a cataclysmic sidestep from Head of English at St Jude’s secondary. The bottom line was, Uncle Keith wouldn’t ask for references.
She took a breath and cleared her thoughts. A young mottled seagull bobbed along the pavement outside the café, eyes beady and accusatory. Isobel looked out over the ocean instead.
The aroma of newly warming pastries reached through Coast. Metal kitchen equipment clanked and rattled in the background. The coming summer would be glorious here, and Isobel could stay that long if she wanted to; she had time and money to burn now. The universe’s idea of a laugh. All that effort and hard work to save for their mortgage deposit. Months of overtime and cheap food. Nathan’s motivational speeches when all Isobel wanted was a half-term in Mexico. Renting is so temporary! Turned out, so were they. Isobel scratched Nathan’s name from her head and let her lungs fill and release. Okey-doke, Isobel . . . you’re here. Now what?
She didn’t have to go through with it. Home was only two hours away. Two hours and she could be back in her parents’ semi, penning hopeless red circles around job adverts, or filling the spot left by Uncle Keith’s last tea girl.
The growl of a flashy little coupé across the promenade knocked her thoughts nicely off course. The driver confidently nipped into the last parking space beside the ocean lookouts, interrupting the view she’d been sporadically enjoying of a lonely sailboat marooned from the world. The driver hopped out, rounding the meaty nose of his sports car, and Isobel watched the thirty-something casually stride towards the sandy, bleached decking running up to the café doors. Perhaps he was older. A youthful forty-something with a nice, stress-free existence and resulting unhaggard complexion. He might’ve held her attention in her former life – Nathan shared a similar blend of chiselled features and casual corporate composure – but she’d already lost interest, her pen retracing the same letters over the notepad lying expectantly on the table in front of her.
BASE CAMP 1
Her hands felt clammy. She could do this. She would do it. She just had to take her time, decide on her next step. Just like Jenny said.
Baby steps, Isobel. One at a time. You feel you’ve a mountain to climb, let’s break that big, horrible bugger down into base camps, shall we? Now, Isobel . . . what are your goals? What’s waiting for you at Base Camp 1?
Therapists loved analogies. Isobel could’ve pulled a great lesson plan together for her Year 7s just borrowing from Jenny’s endless repertoire of similes and metaphors, only she didn’t have any Year 7s now. Baby steps. Anything was possible long term – getting back to work was absolutely realistic. Isobel hadn’t believed that any more than Jenny had.
A sharp voice shattered her thoughts. ‘Evie! Put down that mobile phone and tell me what I’ve done to this nightmarish till again, it’s spitting receipts!’
The pretty teenager hovering behind the counter had the same sunkissed curls as her mother. They both smiled a greeting as the man with the coupé made it to the welcoming display of pastries and vintage-style coffee-grinding equipment at the counter. The woman who’d served Isobel, with the wide smile and violently swinging earrings, pulled a pencil from her own piled up curls. She jabbed at the till with it as if poking a dead animal for signs of life. ‘Morning, Jon! Give us a sec, I’ve flummoxed the only thing back here I absolutely cannot manage without.’
‘Thanks a lot, Mum.’
‘Sorry, Evie, but my mental arithmetic really is hideous. This flipping till!’
Isobel tuned out their conversation. She rubbed clammy hands over her jeans and tried blowing the tension away, the way Sophie had shown her two nights ago while she’d packed her holdall and committed to climbing that mountain. Listen to me, Is, I know what I’m talking about. I delivered Ella in the back of Mum’s Nissan, I’m the master of steady breathing. If you feel panicky, blow! Sophie had finished demonstrating the Lamaze technique before reverting to chewing her nails, recapping all the reasons Isobel shouldn’t leave.
Soph hated all this, but she’d like Coast at least. Sophie was into industrial light fittings and the beach-house look. She’d tried something similar at their parents’ semi. I want Sophie to feel at home, love, their mum had argued with Dad. Let her decorate the conservatory, this is our daughter and granddaughter’s home now too. Just while she worked off the store card balances that had seen her default on enough rent payments to trigger the eviction notice. Sophie would learn one day. Impulse cost.
Isobel traced the view stretching over the endless Atlantic and back down over the intimate clusters of gallerias and boutique bistros nearly enclaving the lobstermen working away on the trawlers. So far Fallenbay was living up to its online reputation. Like Sophie, their folks would love Coast too, would love Fallenbay. They would love it, but they would never know. Not that Ella could buy a four-scooper from the beach’s ice-cream hut or that Coast felt more like a cosy lookout point than an eatery (the universe having another laugh). They would never know because when the time came for truths, there would be nothing to tempt the Hedleys to visit this place, the bay of the fallen. Which was good. Because Fallenbay wasn’t a place to make memories. It was the place to bury them.
‘Ladies! Beautiful morning, isn’t it? Americano please. Woah, flapjack’s looking good, Cleo. Can I get a slice, for Sarah and Max too?’
Cleo hoped he didn’t mistake the flush in her cheeks for schoolgirl blushing. She always blushed a little for Jonathan Hildred. It was completely involuntary, like one of those hiccupping fits she sometimes suffered, or a flickery eyelid. She definitely didn’t fancy Jon – or no more than was acceptable for your best friend’s fiancé anyway. Jon just had that Daniel Craig thing going on, and a grin that could send grown women back to their teenage selves with little more than a compliment about a flapjack. He was going to look phenomenal in his wedding suit; Cleo could see him now, adjusting his cuffs at the altar, Bond style.
‘Sarah and Max on the beach?’ she trilled. Fancy schmancy. Of course she didn’t fancy Jon. Half the time she wondered if she was more excited about Sarah marrying Jon next summer than Sarah herself.
‘Nope, meeting them in half an hour at the . . .’ Jon dramatically fanned his hands, ‘. . . Marine Dinosaur Exhibition!’
‘Where?’
‘The aquarium. Max’s running an obsession with Godzilla. Sarah’s hoping to find something green and scaly in there to float his boat.’
‘I’ll get Mr Hildred’s Americano, Mum.’ Evie’s eyes were wide and lovely, and caked in too much bloody make-up again.
‘No! Don’t move from that spot until I can ring up an order, Eves. Kids are so techno-savvy nowadays, aren’t they, Jon?’ She banged the coffee grinds from the filter and a baby startled at the noise. Sam was always telling her she was too heavy-handed. This from an ex-boxer with knuckles like knees.
Evie made something bleep. ‘There,’ she declared. ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’
‘Julius Caesar,’ nodded Jon. Cleo fought not to mirror his smile.
Evie offered her smile freely. She looked like Cleo’s little girl again when she smiled like that. Cleo felt a burst of pride then resumed mourning the daughter who’d moved aside so this tempestuous, sulky, make-up-abusing pain-in-the-bum could steal her spot at the dinner table. She gave Evie a quick shoulder squeeze. ‘Well done, trouble. Heading for a B in maths too next month, aren’t you, my brilliant girl?