So she made the decision.
She’d never be able to tell them.
She lied coolly to Theo about her family, about her dead parents, how she rarely spoke to any of her other relatives.
Foster kids were experts at lying. She’d seen many of them in her private practice before she got her TV show. Plenty of them afterwards too.
When Rose was eighteen, she’d tried to adopt Adriana but her application was refused.
So she stayed very close and finally, when Adriana was eleven and Aunt Patsy decided to retire, Rose took her little sister and ran.
It was easy to run with a foster kid.
So many of them slipped through the cracks of an overstretched system into trafficking or drugs.
One missing eleven-year-old girl didn’t actually cause that much of a fuss.
Rose knew how to work the system, how not to leave a trail.
She wanted to escape their childhood files: abandonment, foster homes, the attempted abuse of four-year-old Adriana, Alys’s defence of the small girl that ended up with a teenage sexual predator in detention.
Nobody needed to know that Rose was a foster kid, that another foster home inhabitant had tried to sexually abuse Adriana.
They’d earned their privacy.
When Rose had moved to Los Angeles, Adriana had been beginning hotel management training.
Rose never spoke of a sister in interviews because she told Adriana that if Rose’s past was revealed, at least Adriana would not be connected with it.
Now, it seems that the past might be catching up with her. Someone knows that she and Alys Flint are the same person.
Keera’s sitting on the edge of the infinity pool, dangling her feet in its glorious cool.
She can see Bernard still at the other side of the infinity pool, baking himself in the sun. His skin must be like leather, she thinks.
She’s wearing a hat and a soft linen shirt that covers her body over her one-piece swimsuit.
The sun beating down relentlessly makes her slip the shirt off and slide into the pool.
The cool water surrounds her like a balm.
She thinks about what she’s got to do before she leaves this haven.
She has to finish up her notebook. Journaling has helped her so much already. She wouldn’t have been brave enough to enter rehab if she hadn’t been journaling thanks to Rose’s self-help book.
But what next? Keera can’t leave without facing up to what she needs to say to her mother.
After their time on the acropolis, Bobbi stomped back to the bar.
Keera knows Bobbi can’t see her from here.
Keera floats in the pool, staring up at the cloudless blue sky.
Singing and touring means there is no stability in her life, none of the things she now realises she wants.
‘A dog, pets, having close friends, sleepovers, dinner parties…’ She’d told Rose and the group that she’d never experienced these things.
Simple ordinary pleasures.
