“I can’t…” Berty paused. “She should be the one to tell you.”
Rosie looked almost frantic as she turned to Oliver, who was reading a message on his phone.
“Where is she?” Rosie said, letting go of Marly to reach for Oliver’s arm. “You have to tell me where she is.”
“OK, well, she says it’s fine to tell you all, so…I’m very, very sorry about this,” Oliver said, eyes flicking to the furious-looking Marly. He looked wretched. “But Charlie came to the island kind of spontaneously and there was nowhere available for her to stay, and she suggested…She thought maybe she could…”
“Jones—Oliver—whatever your name is,” Marly said bluntly, “spit it out, would you?”
Oliver swallowed. “The real Charlie Jones is currently in your spare room.”
Shocked silence. Then, all of a sudden, Rosie doubled over and began to laugh.
The whole group exchanged glances over her back.
“She’s in my spare room! She’s in my spare room!”
“She just needed a safe place to stay for the night and I wanted to find, well—you, before you met her…” Oliver said, directing this to me.
We had a brief moment of fleeting, precious eye contact before Marly began to hoot with laughter, too.
“All this fucking time! All the investigating!” she said, doubling over beside Rosie and putting her arm around her wife’s shoulders. “And now she’s just turned up and made herself at home in the spare room!”
“What’s going on?” Berty said.
“What’s going on,” Rosie said, straightening up and wiping her eyes, “is that I have kept a room empty at the B&B ever since my parents died, and I discovered in their will that they had another child. My sibling was put up for adoption ten years before I was born. I’ve searched for them every single day since I found out. I’ve always said that when they come home, there will be a room ready for them at the family farmhouse.”
“Oh my God,” Oliver said under his breath.
“The only thing I know about this person is the name they entered when they signed up for an ancestry app—one of the billions I downloaded and gave my DNA to. We matched six years ago. Full siblings. They deleted their profile, and it barely said anything anyway, but I got the notification, and I’ve known since then that my sibling, whoever they are, is called Charlie Jones.”
I thought of how long Rosie had spent scrolling through my phone on the Night of the Pig, when she asked to borrow it to ring Marly. My heart plummeted. She’d hoped I was her sister, and she was looking for that app on my phone to prove it. Presumably she’d tried to search Jones’s phone, too, or Marly had. And that list of people called Charlie Jones, tucked away in a book about Ormer history…
“And then someone named Charlie Jones applied for a job on the farm. Finally, after all these years, I knew they were ready to meet me. The letter I got with their application wasn’t explicit, but…‘I think Bramblebay Farm could be my home,’ they said.”
“Shit,” Oliver said. “Charlie asked me to write her emails and tell her everything that I did here. Every single detail. She said she thought it would be good for me to keep myself accountable, and I figured she was probably interested because she’s always been obsessed with this island, but…I guess you said where you were based in your profile on that ancestry app?”
“I said absolutely everything I could,” Rosie said, smiling, her eyes full of tears. “I was desperate for them to find me. And then, after all these years of searching, in among all those job applications, there was that name.”
“Sothat’swhy you let both the Charlies stay on!” Galoshes said to Rosie, with satisfaction. “I knew we didn’t need two bloody farm shop managers.”
“When the two of you turned up, I didn’t have a clue what to do,” Rosie said. “Two Charlies! I didn’t understand it at all, but I wasn’t about to turn away a Charlie Jones. What if I sent away the person who was my only living family? Only one of you could have written that letter, of course, but the other one had still chosen to come here, and that in itself seemed like it had to mean something. I just couldn’t work it out. One of you had to be an imposter, but it could just as easily have been the person who wrote the application, so that wouldn’t help me. I had to get to know you both, and try to figure it out. It’s been so hard, spending time with you, hoping against hope but also knowing that you might be a fraud, with any number of possible motives for pretending to be a relation of mine…”
“I’m so, so sorry, Rosie,” I said. “I had no idea the lie would cause you so much pain.”
Rosie gave me a small smile. “I suppose you couldn’t have known. But I wish you’d told me the truth. I was hoping…I hoped it was you.”
Soawfulto know that while we’ve been becoming friends, she’sbeen hoping I’m family. Can hardly bear to write all this down. Am just so ashamed of myself.
“Everything we shared,” I told her, “it was all real. It was all me. I hope you can forgive me, Rosie.”
Rosie wiped her eyes. “I’ll try, of course, I just…This has all been so intense, the hope, the wondering.”
“Come on,” Marly said, tugging Rosie’s arm. “Let’s go home. Let’s meet your Charlie Jones.”
Guildford, yesterday
Charlie Jones had spent most of her life waiting to be ready.
