Aunt Gayle hesitated but then reminded them she had work. ‘Another time, I promise. Now I need you two to promisemesomething… I need you to come to the Sweet Life Café in one hour, so I know that you’re both okay.’
‘Yes, Aunt Gayle,’ Addie chimed.
‘We will,’ said Susanna, looking at the ground beneath her feet. ‘Thank you for my bike.’
She looked up to see an expression on her aunt’s face that she had never forgotten.
In the weeks and months to come, when she found herself wondering what it might have been like for Gayle to come out with them on bikes that day or any day after, she squashed the thought or perhaps the hope right down. Good job, because Aunt Gayle never did come on a bike ride with them, and Addie eventually gave up asking. Aunt Gayle had the Sweet Life Café and her life, and the girls had each other. It was the Rafferty girls against the world. Just the two of them. And if they stuck together, they would be just fine.
Gayle came back into the kitchen, snapping Susanna out of her reverie. ‘Just a bit of junk mail and a couple of bills,’ she said, placing the pile of post on the bench near the sink.
Susanna attempted a smile. Her aunt had been trying to get a conversation going about the seaside before she was rescued by the sound of the post landing on the mat, and now Susanna was reminded of the look on her aunt’s face the day she’d thanked her for the shiny new bike. It wasn’t the look as such, but the fact that in that moment fourteen-year-old Susanna had realised that it was an incredibly tough time for Gayle as well as them. She’d tried to remember that over the years, she thought she’d managed to be a lot more pleasant, and there were moments when she felt happier. But then Aunt Gayle had interfered in her relationship with Mateo, and any bond that had begun to form between aunt and niece had been broken once more.
‘You asked if I saw the sea,’ said Susanna, just about managing to lift her gaze. She and Addie had to sort through their dad’s things, and they had to decide if they were staying for the living funeral despite the deception, but she could be polite to make things easier all round.
‘Yes.’ The hope on Aunt Gayle’s face was almost too much to bear and conjured up all sorts of emotions for Susanna.
Matter-of-factly she told her aunt, ‘I like to visit the coast in Norfolk. Me and Alex love it there. It’s where we met.’ She checked herself as if she’d said too much and took a sip of tea. That was the way it had been as a teenager here – sometimes she’d let herself relax, smile, feel at home, and other times she’d remember that this wasn’t what she wanted, it wasn’t her life, and the emotional barriers came up.
‘How did you and Alex get together?’ Gayle asked.
‘I got into trouble in the water and he saved me. He was a summer lifeguard.’
‘Well I never. That’s some meet-cute.’ But her upbeat tone fizzled out when she saw that Susanna wasn’t smiling back. ‘Where do we go from here, Susanna?’
Susanna toyed with the sleeve of her hoodie. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘I really am very sorry that I inadvertently tricked you and Addie.’
‘What’s done is done.’ She knocked back the rest of her tea. ‘I have to go.’ She set the cup in the sink and went upstairs to retrieve her trainers.
‘Will you stay?’ Gayle’s voice was small but loud enough to follow Susanna. ‘For my living funeral, I mean.’
Outside the kitchen, she replied, ‘I don’t know.’ But then she turned round and went back to where Aunt Gayle was sitting. ‘I meant to ask about the young woman who was here when we arrived.’ It had been puzzling her in the night.
‘Louisa? Oh, she’s my tourist.’
‘Your tourist?’
‘She’s renting the garden room out back. I put it on that Airbnb site people use nowadays.’
‘Right.’ She turned to leave again but Aunt Gayle’s voice stopped her.
‘I needed to generate some more income,’ she said. ‘The business suffered during the pandemic.’ She continued to ramble as if she wanted to delay Susanna’s departure for as long as possible. ‘I got the idea from someone else who’d done the same. Accommodation is in high demand here on the island. I decided I’d get an outside room installed with a small bathroom and kitchenette to make it liveable, and I’d give it a go. I decided if I didn’t like it then I’d have a lovely place to do my paperwork or sit when it rains.’
Gayle looked down at the mug in her hands. ‘Susanna… I’d really like it if you stayed for the living funeral. I know I’m in no position to make demands, but it would mean a lot. If not, then I respect your decision. Yours and Addie’s.’
‘I’m just not sure,’ said Susanna before she walked away. The thought of staying here for another ten days and having to face a party, which after all was what the event really was, was almost impossible to imagine. It felt like such a farce given the state of their relationship.
But then she remembered how she’d felt when she opened the invite back at her house in Cambridge. She hadn’t been filled with satisfaction that her aunt had gone, and she hadn’t blithely thrown the invite away; she’d been upset that they had never worked things out between them.
Aunt Gayle had destroyed her confidence when it came to men, and it had taken a long time to recover from that. Could she really forgive Gayle when she’d been head over heels with Mateo, planning a future with him?
13
ADDIE
Being back on Anchor Island was weird enough, but waking up in the cottage this morning had been a whole new level of odd. She’d slept better than she’d thought she would, wiped out from the emotions of the last forty-eight hours since finding out Aunt Gayle was dead, organising for Isaac to stay with his grandparents for a while longer, packing and making the journey here, feeling all over the place without her son for an extended period of time, and then finding out her aunt was actually alive.
