‘You might wonder what made me want to become Holly Day? I suppose it could just have been to give myself a great name as someone who spends their time telling the world about the freedom and joy of van life, but it wasn’t that. Sixteen years ago, I did something really stupid and it blew my world apart. I thought I was saving my sister from making the worst mistake possible and marrying a complete idiot, by showing her who he really was, but instead I hurt her in an unforgiveable way and made her hate me. I haven’t seen her since and that breaks my heart every single day.’
The comments were pinging up fast and furiously now, but she couldn’t bring herself to read them, even if the tears blurring her eyes had allowed it. She couldn’t bear to read even one negative message, and she knew there would be a lot of them. There’d be supportive ones too, but the internet opened the door to everyone: the good, bad and the downright crazy. The realisation was hitting her that she had invited the opinion of all those people on the deepest, darkest part of her life. She had to delete the live video and hope that it hadn’t been seen by too many people. It had been crazy to tell complete strangers the thing she was most ashamed of and that she regretted more than anything else she’d ever done. Briony didn’t say anything before she ended the video, her fingers fumbling as she tried desperately to delete the incriminating evidence. Once she’d finally done it, she threw the phone away from her like a hand grenade and it landed on the bed.
‘Oh God, Merlin. What the hell have I done?’ He looked up ather with big soulful eyes, and she tried to steady her breathing. Getting up, she retrieved her phone and googled what percentage of her followers were likely to have seen the story, and the answer suggested it was as low as 2 percent. That was good, it was a tiny proportion, and she released a slow breath. This would all blow over. Maybe she could even pretend it was some kind of prank, but she was hardly known for that sort of thing. She’d been too closed off for that, even as a kid.
‘It’s okay, Merls.’ She nuzzled her face against the dog’s head and allowed her breathing to slow. It really was all going to be okay. Yes, she’d done something stupid and spur of the moment, but she’d limited the damage and she’d come up with something to post in the morning, explaining it all away somehow.
‘It’s okay, boy.’ Merlin gave a very uncharacteristic howl as someone hammered on the door of the van. Surely none of her followers had tracked her down. It had happened before, but that was why she hadn’t posted any of her Cornish content yet. She’d been careful never to reveal where she was until after she’d already left. But then an even more terrifying thought crossed her mind. What if it was Bex? It had been a stupid idea to come here and risk her sister discovering who she was, but she’d been careful to keep her distance and disguise her appearance as much as she could.
‘Holly, open up, I know you’re in there.’ She recognised Tristan’s voice immediately, her shoulders slumping with relief. ‘Or should I say Briony.’
‘Shit.’ She shook her head. This couldn’t be happening. Tristan couldn’t have seen the live, except she knew he had. He’d got in touch with her in the first place after seeing her online. Why the hell hadn’t it crossed her mind that he would see her live? That would have been enough to stop her, except she’d just blundered on, and now here she was, standing behind the door ofthe van, not knowing whether to open it or try to pretend she wasn’t there. She’d have done it if there was an option to drive off in the morning and never see him again, but she had to go to her mother’s appointment on Monday. So she couldn’t run. Not this time.
‘You can either let me in, or we can have this conversation through the door.’ Tristan’s voice was icy cold and she didn’t need to open the door to know that he was angry, but as soon as she did the expression on his face made his feelings even more obvious.
‘I’m guessing you saw the Instagram Live?’
‘Are you Bex’s sister?’ There was a muscle going in his cheek and his eyes never left her face, as he waited for her to answer.
‘It’s not what it?—’
‘Just tell me the truth. Are you Bex’s sister?’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t tell you.’
‘Why not?’ This time he did wait for an answer, but she still couldn’t give him one. So he filled in the blanks for himself, standing outside the still-open door of her van. ‘Because you knew I would never have gone behind her back and invited you to stay here, knowing what you put her through?’
‘You don’t know the full story.’ She wanted to say so much more, but she was scared that if she did, she might start to cry.
‘Maybe not, but what I do know is that you made me complicit in deceiving someone I love. If Bex knew you were here and that I’d given you any influence over what happens with the campsite, she’d be devastated.’
‘Do you really think I’d do anything to jeopardise this for her?’ She hated how little he clearly thought of her, but what he said next left her in no doubt as to why.
‘You slept with her fiancé, so I would imagine you’re capableof pretty much anything.’ If he’d slapped her around the face, it couldn’t have hurt any more than it already did.
‘I didn’t sleep with him, it wasn’t like that, I… Please, Tristan, come in for a minute and let me explain.’
‘There’s nothing to say and I don’t want to listen to any excuses you come out with.’ He was already turning on his heel and walking away from her into the darkness of the night; just one more person who’d discovered who she was and had decided he didn’t like anything about her. She’d mapped out her entire destiny when she’d decided to make a move on Liam and no one cared why she’d done it, because Tristan was right, there was no reason that would ever excuse what she’d done, and she’d realised all of that far too late.
11
Bex was going to be sick, she was almost sure of it. Her stomach was churning in a way she hadn’t experienced since she and Matt had gone on a break to the Channel Islands for their tenth anniversary, getting the ferry from Poole and getting caught in a storm. She’d spent the entire three-hour journey not daring to venture more than ten feet from a bathroom because the nausea had been overwhelming. She felt the exact same way now, except that her feet were on the solid ground of the corridor in St Piran’s Hospital as she walked towards where her mother’s appointment was scheduled, in the oncology unit. Previously they’d seen Dr Chan, but today they were due to see the consultant to discuss chemotherapy and how that might impact on her mother’s rheumatoid arthritis. This was their last chance to persuade Donna to consider the transplant, if the cancer hadn’t grown and it wasn’t already too late for that. That would have been enough to make Bex feel sick, even without the knowledge that Briony would be coming to the hospital too.
Matt had offered to go with Bex, but he was really busy on the farm. It was coming to the end of lambing season, and he wasmoving some of the livestock so that he and Tristan could begin to prepare the fields that would be used for silage. They also had top dressing and spraying to do on the arable side of the farm, now that the warmer weather was coming. With all of that going on, the last thing he needed was to take time off to come and hold his wife’s hand because she couldn’t stand the thought of seeing her estranged sister again. Bex was not going to be that person.
She’d always loved the fact that people compared her to her mum, and said she had the same joie de vivre for life as Donna did. She hadn’t even let the break-up with Liam hold her down for long. Admittedly at first it had all been an act, a‘fake it until you make it’strategy to get through what had felt like the worst humiliation possible. She hadn’t wanted anyone to feel sorry for her, that would all just have made it more tragic, but inside it wasn’t just the embarrassment that had been killing her. What she’d quickly realised was that what had hurt far more than losing Liam, was losing her sister. She’d refused to speak to Briony from the day when it had all come out, not prepared to listen to a second of her so-called explanations. Over the coming weeks, when her mother had started pushing her to at least sit down and talk to Briony, Bex had wanted to disappear and even she hadn’t been sure whether she’d meant permanently. She’d got on a bus and then another one, and had ended up in Newquay, booking herself into the cheapest two-star hotel she could find. It had peeling paint and smelled of damp, and had felt like a metaphor for her life. It was long before the days when anyone could have tracked her using her mobile, so it was as simple as turning it off to avoid their calls.
When she’d turned her phone on again forty-eight hours later, it was clear her mum had been calling her non-stop and that’s when the guilt had rushed in. She’d spent the time crying until her eyes were red raw, and walking until she dropped withexhaustion, so that she could snatch a tiny bit of sleep, before she sat bolt upright again, having been woken up by a nightmare about her fiancé dumping her for her sister. Except it wasn’t a nightmare. Seeing the frantic text messages from her mum it had hit her how stressed Donna would be and how bad stress was for her rheumatoid arthritis, and guilt had hit her like a ten-tonne truck. She’d called her mum, who’d begged her to return and, when she’d said she couldn’t, because she couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same place as Briony, her mother had told her that Briony was already half way to Ibiza, to work out there for the summer.
Bex had no idea if Liam had gone with her and she’d been determined not to ask. Reluctantly she’d agreed to come home with the caveat that she’d only be staying in Port Agnes as long as Briony was away. But her younger sister had gone straight from a summer working in a bar in Ibiza, to a ski season working in Andorra, and in the meantime Bex had met Matt. She’d worried about what would happen at Christmas, when Briony came home, except she hadn’t.
Long before the ski season ended, Bex had already known for certain that she’d met the love of her life and a tiny part of her heart had thawed towards Briony. If her sister had come home at that point, maybe they’d eventually have been able to repair things, at least to an extent. It was never going to be the same again, that was indisputable, but maybe they could at least tolerate being in the same village as one another, maybe even the same room eventually. Except that Briony hadn’t come home and Bex had been forced to witness what it did to her mother not to have her youngest daughter around; a grief that had worsened as time had gone on, which had given her something else to resent her sister for. Even as the time passed, and Bex became happier and happier in so many ways, there was always a gap whereBriony should have been, meaning that nothing was as good as itcouldhave been if she hadn’t done what she did.
If Bex was honest with herself, she had to admit it would always have been down to her to open the door to a reconciliation. She was the one who’d slammed it shut in the wake of discovering Liam and Briony together, and had refused to even talk about what had happened. Perhaps that was what made Briony think she was doing the right thing by staying away, but she wasn’t. Not when it came to their mother’s happiness. Bex had thought about calling or emailing so many times, but what Briony had done made her doubt her own judgement so much it seemed to paralyse her. Would inviting Briony back into her life really be a good thing for their mother? What if she tried to come between Bex and Matt? The fallout from Briony’s betrayal with Liam had been catastrophic enough, but if she even so much as tried something with Matt, Bex wasn’t sure she could be held responsible for her actions. Seeing her two daughters come together again, only for things to break down in an even more spectacular way, would break Donna’s heart. Bex desperately wanted to believe that Briony wouldn’t do it again, and that not far below the surface she was still the same little sister Bex had always adored and who she’d have trusted with her life.
She wanted to believe what had happened with Liam had been a kind of madness on Briony’s part, and she’d wondered if they met up and talked, whether she’d be able to convince herself that was the case. Except before everything happened with Liam, Bex had been certain she knew Briony inside and out, and that her little sister would never do anything to hurt her, but she’d been wrong. She couldn’t risk being that wrong again, not for her sake, or Matt’s, or even her mum’s, because if Briony came home and things went wrong again, it would be even worse second time around. Bex couldn’t be the one to take that risk. Briony wouldhave to walk back into their lives andproveshe wanted to be there, and that she’d never do anything to hurt them again. Except she hadn’t come back, and the years had ticked past, each one raising the stakes higher still as Bex’s little family grew and there were even more people Briony could end up hurting. So Bex never reached out, because missing Briony and seeing how much the rift hurt Donna still felt like the lesser of two evils.
Despite the fact that Donna had eventually accepted Bex’s request not to mention Briony in front of her, it didn’t change the length of shadow her absence had cast over all of their lives and she knew that, for Donna, seeing her youngest daughter every so often could never make up for that.
