“I was angry with Bobby, too,” Joy said. She’d been sitting so quietly that Skye had almost forgotten she was in the room. “So damn angry that he’d gone and done something as bloody stupid as getting himself killed. Coming out here was part of me addressing that anger, you know?”
Skye’s body ached with the weight of her sympathy—for Joy, for Andreas, and for herself. They had all experienced the sudden loss of a loved one, though unlike her, the other two had not allowed their grief to muddle them into making a terrible decision.Her gaze trailed toward Andreas. He had tipped his head back and was staring unblinkingly at the ceiling.
“The rage that you both describe,” he said. “I felt it also, after Sotiris. But when it comes to death, you have to find a way to make a sort of peace with it.” Andreas lowered his chin, and their eyes met. “If you do not, it will eat you alive.”
Skye went still as an image of Martyn surfaced, his jaw tight, a muscle twitching with tension. She’d forgiven his rage-fueled outbursts more times than she could count, telling herself that he only lost control because of his own grief.
“I do not speak about Sotiris to many people,” Andreas said, looking between the two women. “Only to friends, and we are friends, I think?”
“Of course we are,” Joy said.
They both turned to Skye.
“We are,” she agreed.
“The thing that is causing you to be afraid,” he said, “you can tell us.”
“You can,” Joy agreed, nodding along, but Skye’s throat had gone dry. Logic told her that she could trust Andreas, though that same voice of reason had led her toward Martyn.
“No,” she said, the word hoarse. “I can’t, I—”
Two deep grooves appeared between Andreas’s brows. He was hurt. She was hurting him. All at once, Skye felt suffused by anger. It crashed over her in a great wave that brought her arms up, her fingers into her hair.
Joy got to her feet.
“Do you want us to leave you alone?” she asked.
Skye shook her head.
“Not you,” she said, her tone flat, defeated. “You can stay.”
An uncomfortable silence was broken only by the low hum ofthe wind. Skye did not want to look at Andreas. She turned to the window, clouds blurring past like thoughts she couldn’t hold on to, waiting until she heard the creak of bed springs, the sigh of surrender, the soft click as he closed the bedroom door behind him.
“His name is Martyn,” she said, without moving.
“OK.” Joy’s voice was honey. “Who is he?”
Skye half turned, forcing herself to breathe steadily.
“He’s someone I was close to, someone I—”
Why was it so difficult to say the word?
“Your boyfriend?” Joy asked, though she sounded uncertain, almost as if she wanted Skye to contradict her.
If only it were that simple.
“No,” she said, “not a boyfriend. Martyn is my husband.”
Thirty-one
A whirlwind.
That was the word people used, and it fit. Skye’s romance with Martyn had torn through her life, upending everything she’d carefully built until it was changed beyond all recognition, untilshehad changed beyond all recognition.
“Find someone who loves you more than you love yourself” was what her dad had always said, and in the beginning, Skye believed she’d found that in Martyn. Nothing ever seemed to be too much trouble for him where she was concerned. He was thoughtful and attentive, stocking his bathroom with the moisturizer and shampoo she used, swapping his washing capsules to the sensitive-skin kind so the bedsheets wouldn’t irritate her, and generally making sure that she was comfortable, considered, and coddled in a way she hadn’t been before. Nobody, she reasoned, would go to so much trouble for someone they didn’t love, and although things moved quickly, the acceleration of their relationship didn’t ring alarm bells. The one time she’d joked about “playing it cool,” Martyn had merely pulled a face. He had alreadytold her about his sister—the skiing accident four years previously that had claimed her life—so when he said, “When you know, you know. What’s the sense in wasting time?” it had made a strange kind of sense.
Three months to the day after their first official London date, Martyn asked her to move in with him. His house in Epsom was bigger and more conveniently located for both their respective places of work—plus, he said, it was only a temporary solution. Eventually they’d buy a far larger place together. Skye was reluctant to sell her little flat, with its artwork and trinkets and memories of her dad, but he wore her down with promises; love was a currency that he doled out as readily as pennies into a fountain. The day she parked her rented moving van in his driveway, Martyn got down on one knee and presented her with a diamond ring.
