‘But this will be her first time since …’ she pauses.
‘Yeah,’ agrees her husband. ‘She’s so confident, so ready. She can do this.’
Adriana murmurs a quiet prayer. She’s not exactly religious but, sometimes, she finds comfort in the quiet of a cool church or the ritual of a prayer.
‘Let this be the right thing,’ she says.
‘It will be.’ Christos sounds convinced. ‘I’ve got some photos of the terrace for when we launch the next therapy week. I was thinking November?’
‘This one needs to work first,’ says Adriana.
Christos shrugs. He does good shrugs – huge shoulders raising, large arms that like to hold his beloved wife splaying out. ‘What can go wrong?’ he says cheerfully.
Chapter Six
Keera steps onto the terrace, an expanse of beautiful stone with a wooden pergola and a long wooden table under it, set with cushioned chairs.
The scent of pink bougainvillea drifts lazily in the air and, when she walks to the edge of the terrace, Keera can see down to a different level where there’s a gleaming infinity pool that looks almost too perfect to be true.
In the distance is Xanthe, a village of blue-roofed houses, whitewashed terraces and abundant greenery. Below is the sea: a blue so shimmering it seems unreal in its perfection, only a few small dots of boats sprinkled on the horizon.
Keera can understand why Rose Talisman is having a retreat here.
Even Keera, whose personal natural setting is a low-level hum of anxiety, is feeling a little calmer in this blissfully peaceful place.
She picks a chair with fat cushions embroidered with traditional Greek whitework and puts her stuff on the table.
A buffet breakfast of juices, coffee, fruit, rolls, yogurt and honey is laid out to one side but Keera’s too nervous to eat.
Please let this not be as hard as rehab, she thinks.
Rehab was hell – she’d thought she’d be OK coming off all the stuff she took because it wasn’t as if she was on opioids.
Boy, had she been wrong.
Shivering at the memory of detoxing off the pills, cocaine, uppers, downers and tequila she’d been happily consuming all her life, she gazes around at the stunning view of turquoise sea below the hotel.
Despite the calmness of Xanthe and the beauty surrounding her, she feels nervous at what the morning will bring.
All this ripping into your inner self is incredibly hard.
Four months ago, when Keera came out of Haven Clinic, she felt as shaky as a newborn foal.
‘The good news is that you’ve got your feelings back,’ Lexi, one of the counsellors and a one-time heroin addict, had reminded Keera in her final session before she left. ‘The bad news is that you’ve got your feelings back.’
Since rehab, Keera hasn’t written a song or contacted a producer about her album. She’s out of contract with her record company and they haven’t been in touch. It’s like she’s disappeared off the face of the earth.
She’s changed her look for Greece. She doesn’t want to be recognised on the island. Hence the blonde hair.
She feels relief at disconnecting from her stressy world but it’s also scary. Who is she if she’s not a singer/actress? Who is she without the drugs blurring the world and making it liveable? What does her future look like?
A tall man walks onto the terrace.
He looks as if he runs marathons, but seems very tightly wound.
Keera’s good at figuring people out. She knows she’s an empath. She must be, right?
She can feel the mood of any room she goes in, has been able to since she was a small child. It’s her superpower but it’s a difficult one to have as it makes her nervous.
