‘It’s not so bad,’ Keera says. ‘It’s freeing to talk about all the crap you never talk about normally. Nobody falls over in shock, people listen and, here anyway, they don’t judge.’
‘Dianne does,’ mutters India.
‘That’s just for the men,’ Keera points out. ‘Some guy broke her heart, for sure. She’s nice to the women. She hates the men.’
‘Not my problem,’ says India.
‘If you get it over first thing tomorrow, then you can relax and learn how to fix all the things you do wrong,’ Keera says.
‘In her book, Rose never says we do things wrong,’ India explains. ‘It’s more that we learned survival techniques and we keep using them. But that’s not my problem.’
Rose’s flowing shirt swirls out behind her as she hurries to the private part of the hotel and finds Adriana in the small white living room with the air-con on.
Adriana’s sitting at a small desk with a big notebook.
‘How’s it going?’ she asks Rose.
Adriana looks so Greek now, Rose thinks suddenly. Adriana’s hair has been a rich chocolate colour since she was a little girl, but now her pale skin is tanned to a glowing caramel. In her blue flower-print cotton dress, with the necklace made in the village from fake coral and tiny orange glass beads, Adriana looks like a beautiful Greek woman from a fashion magazine. She now speaks Greek fluently, far better than Rose, who has been learning, but then Adriana has lived here for much longer. Rose could not have dreamed up a happier life for her baby sister.
‘Well,’ Rose says, sitting down on one of the big couches and putting her feet up on a footstool. ‘Bernard marched off at the end after glaring at me like he wished he could say “you’re fired!”’
‘Ouch,’ says Adriana.
‘Ouch indeed. Is he very wealthy?’ Rose asks. She doesn’t want to tell her sister the details of the therapy – the guests are owed privacy.
‘Filthy rich,’ Adriana replies. ‘Company listed on the UK stock market.’
‘His adult kids are worried about their inheritance,’ Rose says carefully.
‘That’s going to be some inheritance.’
‘How people react to money is an interesting weather vane,’ Rose says, shrugging. ‘I saw it all the time in LA. Some people get rich and then there simply isn’t enough money in the world for them. They become obsessed, think they’ll never have enough and they don’t care whose lives they ruin in the pursuit of it.’
‘Not our problem,’ jokes Adriana.
Rose grins.
‘You were always brilliant at spending money,’ Rose teases. ‘Lipsticks, nail varnish, that expensive thing with your hair to straighten it.’
Adriana laughs the way only a sister can laugh.
‘I was dreadful, wasn’t I?’ she says. ‘I wanted to be grown-up and glamorous like you. But I never could catch up.’
Adriana gets up and goes to sit beside her big sister on the couch.
‘I think this is working brilliantly.’
‘I know,’ Rose agrees. ‘Bar Bernard, I think the guests are enjoying it. Well …’ She rephrases it. ‘Maybe not enjoying it but appreciating it. Keera and India are happy and so, amazingly, is Dan. He seems more relaxed today. Obviously he’s never talked about himself to anyone ever before.’
‘I know I’m not a therapist and you can’t really talk about that side of things with me,’ says Adriana. ‘You did with Theo, didn’t you—?’
‘Stop with the Theo stuff,’ begs Rose. ‘He’s in the past. Sure, we talked about work but it’s perfectly possible to run a retreat with one therapist. If this works out, we might think of having another person with me—’
Adriana interrupts her.
‘I know you said yesterday that’s all in the past butyou’ve never tried to get in touch with Theo, have you? When the show blew up, you just ran and he’s had no idea where you’ve been for the past five years. I bet you he was looking for you, Rose, but you’ve changed everything – from phone number to email address. There was no way to track you down.’
‘He wouldn’t have wanted to find me,’ Rose says firmly, ‘and I’m OK with that.’
