If Rose asks what he’s put in his notebook, he’ll lie. This is Grazia’s thing. He’s here for her. Doesn’t mean he has to do anything, does it? No therapy-guru quack will make Bernard do anything he doesn’t want to.
But he thinks of Rose’s face when he was trying to book the boat for a day out.
She looked as if she knew something about him. Something very hidden.
Grazia cannot have told her, can she?
Bernard feels a ripple of fear but he knows how to handle it. Bernard is very proud of his ability to handle anything life throws at him.
Rose knows she should be celebrating a successful day on the terrace but instead, she and Adriana are sitting in Adriana’s pretty family room, listening to an anxious voice note on Adriana’s phone.
It’s from Mercedes, the wildly cool twenty-something Corfu woman who has been in charge of all the social media for Villa Artemis and Rose’s retreat.
She’s been amazing, understands algorithms and how to make Instagram posts pop.
She thinks email and Facebook are for old people, likes TikTok and is dying to see what’s coming next.
Mercedes would rather burn her new Louis Vuitton multi pochette with pink flaps than move out of Athens and back to Corfu because she says it’s full of people Adriana and Christos’ age. With this in mind, she treats Christos, Adriana and Rose like sweet but bewildered people from a different century, one without electricity.
But today, Mercedes is worried, which is why Rose is not sitting on the private bamboo-surrounded terrace, drinking an iced tea and congratulating herself on how well the first day is going.
Mercedes sounds uncharacteristically unsure of herself: ‘I saw the message on Instagram a few minutes ago. I don’t want to bother you with every weirdo or random hate-watcher but …’ Mercedes pauses. ‘This messageisabit weird. I’ve sent you the screenshot. It’s oddly personal, Rose: as if the poster is saying Rose is not your real name. I know, insane, right? I thought I should warn you, thought maybe you had people in America who could make sure there’s no problem. I don’t know if you had a stalker or whatevs but we can just block this person.’
Rose closes her eyes and tries to calm herself with breathing.
She has no people in the US any more. Her agent’s the only one who ever occasionally contacts her to see how she is. Rose feels guilty when this happens. She can’t go back there, despite all the work her agent could line up in a moment.
Her special private-banking expert at her US bank has no interest in her any more now that pretty much all her money has gone into renovating and setting up Villa Artemis. Thankfully, she has never had a stalker.
‘Let’s look at the screenshot,’ she says to Adriana.
Adriana shows her the picture of the message sent by Mercedes.
I know all about you, bitch. All your pretending. You might think you got away with it but you didn’t. I have never forgotten, ‘Rose’. I was waiting for someone to out you but you must have paid them off. But I know who you really are and where you’re from and I’m going to do it. Payback time.
Rose feels a combination of anger and fear ripple through her.
Adriana’s face is bleached white.
Rose holds out her arms and Adriana falls into them. They stay, hugging, for a few silent moments.
‘We need to know who it is for certain,’ Rose says finally. ‘I won’t have someone come and blackmail us like this …’
‘It could be like Mercedes said,’ Adriana says hopefully. ‘Just a weirdo?’
‘Or it could be someone with the power to mess up everything we’ve spent years trying to hide,’ says Rose, sighing.
Why can’t the past ever go away?
The day, which was going so well, feels darker now.
‘Perhaps it’s better to have it all out in the open?’ Adriana suggests hesitantly.
‘No!’ Rose is adamant. ‘Nobody is going to bully us, not after all we’ve been through. No way.’
She thinks carefully, flipping on the analytic part of her brain. Who could help?
Then it comes to her: ‘I know a guy who used to do a lot of online investigating; he might not even be in the business any more.’ She shrugs. ‘Five years is a long time and internet security is probably totally different now, but if it’s possible to find out who this person is, he’ll work it out. I’ll message him. Give him all the details. I’ll use the office computer.’
