“I mean it, Mum. Martyn isn’t the man you think he is.”
“Do you want to know what I thought when you introduced me to Martyn?”
Skye steeled herself.
“I thought, thank goodness. She’s found a man who has his lifein order, a man who will provide for her, who has the means and the maturity by which to do so. An adult, essentially.”
“But he—” Skye began.
“No, let me finish. Fact is, I fell for your dad because he was a dreamer. And that, well, that turned out to bemybiggest mistake. You have no idea what it was like being married to a man like Cosmo. I know he could do no wrong in your eyes. But let me tell you, he did.”
Skye strode right past her mother without a word. Her body trembled, adrenaline radiating as she braced for the next blow.
“You need to hear this,” her mother said, her hand on Skye’s arm. “The truth is hard to hear sometimes, but you can’t keep on living in this pattern of denial and avoidance.”
The air caught in Skye’s throat, her mouth falling open.
“Nothing Dad did was ever good enough for you, was it? I was there, Mum. I saw it every day, saw the way you found fault with everything, correcting his grammar when he spoke, talking down to him as if he were a child. For God’s sake. He was miserable—you made him miserable.”
Cassandra’s eyes went wide, her nostrils flaring.
“I don’t know why we’re discussing Dad anyway,” Skye said, snatching the cushion off the floor. The blood from Martyn’s head wound had stained right through the cover, and with a muttered curse, she threw it in the direction of the kitchen. “He has nothing to do with me and Martyn. Dad never even knew him, more’s the pity. If he had, I bet he’d have seen straight through him.”
“Straight through what?” her mother asked. She folded her arms, crushing the straw hat in the process. “For Christ’s sake—what has been going on with you two?”
Skye’s shoulders sank.
“I don’t know where to start,” she said wearily.
“Start with why you ran away, why you entered a lottery to win a house on a remote Greek island?”
“I needed to get away.”
“From what, Martyn? Because of his job? Were you lonely, is that it? I assumed he must have been unfaithful, but he’s assured me that isn’t the case.”
“And you take his word as gospel, do you?” Skye said.
Her mother bristled.
“His word was the only word I had. You had done a flit.”
Skye rubbed her temples. Only Cassandra MacKinnon could reduce what had been a desperate escape into something as whimsical as “a flit.”
“OK,” she said, drawing in a breath. “I entered the lottery because I wanted a place to run away to, somewhere Martyn wouldn’t know to look. I had to leave because…because…”
Why was it so hard to say the words?
“I was lonely,” she said finally. “But not in the way you think.”
Skye walked across to the built-in seating area and lowered herself down against the cushions. After a few moments, her mother followed.
When had they last done this? Sat together side by side? Never as adults. Skye had always gone to her dad. It was he who’d lend a sympathetic ear, ruffle her hair, pull her close for a bear hug. Her mum had been there sometimes, but only ever on the periphery.
“I’m listening,” she said now with such unexpected tenderness that Skye felt a lump rise in her throat.
“It’s hard,” she began. “Talking about it, about him.”
Her mother nodded slowly.
